Board of Directors.
Board of Education.
Board of Finance.
College Faculty.
Various Committees.
Treasurer.
Clerk.
First Members (of the Supreme Church).
Members of the Supreme Church.
It looks fair, it looks real, but it is all a fiction.
Even the little “Pastor Emeritus” is a fiction. Instead of being merely
an honorary and ornamental official, Mrs. Eddy is the only official in
the entire body that has the slightest power. In her Manual, she has
provided a prodigality of ways and forms whereby she can rid herself of
any functionary in the government whenever she wants to. The officials
are all shadows, save herself; she is the only reality. She allows no
one to hold office more than a year– no one gets a chance to become
over-popular or over-useful, and dangerous. “Excommunication” is the
favorite penalty-it is threatened at every turn. It is evidently the pet
dread and terror of the Church’s membership.
The member who thinks, without getting his thought from Mrs. Eddy before
uttering it, is banished permanently. One or two kinds of sinners can
plead their way back into the fold, but this one, never. To think–in
the Supreme Church–is the New Unpardonable Sin.
To nearly every severe and fierce rule, Mrs. Eddy adds this rivet: “This
By-law shall not be changed without the consent of the Pastor Emeritus.”
Mrs. Eddy is the entire Supreme Church, in her own person, in the matter
of powers and authorities.
Although she has provided so many ways of getting rid of unsatisfactory
members and officials, she was still afraid she might have left a life-
preserver lying around somewhere, therefore she devised a rule to cover
that defect. By applying it, she can excommunicate (and this is
perpetual again) every functionary connected with the Supreme Church, and
every one of the twenty-five thousand members of that Church, at an
hour’s notice–and do it all by herself without anybody’s help.
By authority of this astonishing By-law, she has only to say a person
connected with that Church is secretly practicing hypnotism or mesmerism;
whereupon, immediate excommunication, without a hearing, is his portion!
She does not have to order a trial and produce evidence–her accusation
is all that is necessary.
Where is the Pope? and where the Czar? As the ballad says:
“Ask of the winds that far away
With fragments strewed the sea!”
The Branch Church’s pulpit is occupied by two “Readers.” Without them
the Branch Church is as dead as if its throat had been cut. To have
control, then, of the Readers, is to have control of the Branch Churches.
Mrs. Eddy has that control–a control wholly without limit, a control
shared with no one.
1. No Reader can be appointed to any Church in the Christian Science
world without her express approval.
2. She can summarily expel from his or her place any Reader, at home or
abroad, by a mere letter of dismissal, over her signature, and without
furnishing any reason for it, to either the congregation or the Reader.
Thus she has as absolute control over all Branch Churches as she has over
the Supreme Church. This power exceeds the Pope’s.
In simple truth, she is the only absolute sovereign in all Christendom.
The authority of the other sovereigns has limits, hers has none, none
whatever. And her yoke does not fret, does not offend. Many of the
subjects of the other monarchs feel their yoke, and are restive under it;
their loyalty is insincere. It is not so with this one’s human property;
their loyalty is genuine, earnest, sincere, enthusiastic. The sentiment
which they feel for her is one which goes out in sheer perfection to no
other occupant of a throne; for it is love, pure from doubt, envy,
exaction, fault-seeking, a love whose sun has no spot–that form of love,
strong, great, uplifting, limitless, whose vast proportions are
compassable by no word but one, the prodigious word, Worship. And it is
not as a human being that her subjects worship her, but as a supernatural
one, a divine one, one who has comradeship with God, and speaks by His
voice.
Mrs. Eddy has herself created all these personal grandeurs and
autocracies–with others which I have not (in this article) mentioned.