No member, young or old, of a branch Christian-Scientist church can
acquire and retain membership in the Mother-Church unless he pay
“capitation tax” (of “not less than a dollar,” say the By-Laws) to the
Boston Trust every year. That means an income for the Trust, in the near
future, of–let us venture to say–millions more per year.
It is a reasonably safe guess that in America in 1920 there will be ten
million Christian Scientists, and three millions in Great Britain; that
these figures will be trebled in 1930; that in America in 1920 the
Christian Scientists will be a political force, in 1930 politically
formidable, and in 1940 the governing power in the Republic–to remain
that, permanently. And I think it a reasonable guess that the Trust
(which is already in our day pretty brusque in its ways) will then be the
most insolent and unscrupulous and tyrannical politico-religious master
that has dominated a people since the palmy days of the Inquisition. And
a stronger master than the strongest of bygone times, because this one
will have a financial strength not dreamed of by any predecessor; as
effective a concentration of irresponsible power as any predecessor has
had; in the railway, the telegraph, and the subsidized newspaper, better
facilities for watching and managing his empire than any predecessor has
had; and, after a generation or two, he will probably divide Christendom
with the Catholic Church.
The Roman Church has a perfect organization, and it has an effective
centralization of power–but not of its cash. Its multitude of Bishops
are rich, but their riches remain in large measure in their own hands.
They collect from two hundred millions of people, but they keep the bulk
of the result at home. The Boston Pope of by-and-by will draw his
dollar-a-head capitation-tax from three hundred millions of the human
race, and the Annex and the rest of his book-shop stock will fetch in as
much more; and his Metaphysical Colleges, the annual Pilgrimage to Mrs.
Eddy’s tomb, from all over the world-admission, the Christian-Science
Dollar (payable in advance)– purchases of consecrated glass beads,
candles, memorial spoons, aureoled chrome-portraits and bogus autographs
of Mrs. Eddy; cash offerings at her shrine no crutches of cured cripples
received, and no imitations of miraculously restored broken legs and
necks allowed to be hung up except when made out of the Holy Metal and
proved by fire-assay; cash for miracles worked at the tomb: these money-
sources, with a thousand to be yet invented and ambushed upon the
devotee, will bring the annual increment well up above a billion. And
nobody but the Trust will have the handling of it. In that day, the
Trust will monopolize the manufacture and sale of the Old and New
Testaments as well as the Annex, and raise their price to Annex rates,
and compel the devotee to buy (for even to-day a healer has to have the
Annex and the Scriptures or he is not allowed to work the game), and that
will bring several hundred million dollars more. In those days, the
Trust will have an income approaching five million dollars a day, and no
expenses to be taken out of it; no taxes to pay, and no charities to
support. That last detail should not be lightly passed over by the
reader; it is well entitled to attention.
No charities to support. No, nor even to contribute to. One searches in
vain the Trust’s advertisements and the utterances of its organs for any
suggestion that it spends a penny on orphans, widows, discharged
prisoners, hospitals, ragged schools, night missions, city missions,
libraries, old people’s homes, or any other object that appeals to a
human being’s purse through his heart.
I have hunted, hunted, and hunted, by correspondence and otherwise, and
have not yet got upon the track of a farthing that the Trust has spent
upon any worthy object. Nothing makes a Scientist so uncomfortable as to
ask him if he knows of a case where Christian Science has spent money on
a benevolence, either among its own adherents or elsewhere. He is
obliged to say “No” And then one discovers that the person questioned has
been asked the question many times before, and that it is getting to be a