Christian Science Part 23

The Scientist hastened to Concord and told Mrs. Eddy what a disastrous mistake had been made, but he found to his bewilderment that she was tranquil about it, and was not proposing to correct it. He was not able to get her to promise to make a correction. He asked her secretary if he had heard aright when the telegram was dictated to him; the secretary said he had, and took the filed copy of it and verified its authenticity by comparing it with the stenographic notes.

Mrs. Eddy did make the correction, two months later, in her official organ. It attracted no attention among the Scientists; and, naturally, none elsewhere, for that periodical's circulation was practically confined to disciples of the cult.

That is the tale as it was told to me by an ex-Scientist. Verse 53--renovated and spiritualized--had a narrow escape from a tremendous celebrity. The newspaper men would have made it as famous as the a.s.sa.s.sination of Caesar, but for their limitations.

To return to the Claim. I find myself greatly embarra.s.sed by Mrs. Eddy's remark: "I regard self-deification as blasphemous." If she is right about that, I have written a half-ream of ma.n.u.script this past week which I must not print, either in the book which I am writing, or elsewhere: for it goes into that very matter with extensive elaboration, citing, in detail, words and acts of Mrs. Eddy's which seem to me to prove that she is a faithful and untiring wors.h.i.+pper of herself, and has carried self-deification to a length which has not been before ventured in ages. If ever. There is not room enough in this chapter for that Survey, but I can epitomize a portion of it here.

With her own untaught and untrained mind, and without outside help, she has erected upon a firm and lasting foundation the most minutely perfect, and wonderful, and smoothly and exactly working, and best safe-guarded system of government that has yet been devised in the world, as I believe, and as I am sure I could prove if I had room for my doc.u.mentary evidences here.

It is a despotism (on this democratic soil); a sovereignty more absolute than the Roman Papacy, more absolute than the Russian Czars.h.i.+p; it has not a single power, not a shred of authority, legislative or executive, which is not lodged solely in the sovereign; all its dreams, its functions, its energies, have a single object, a single reason for existing, and only the one--to build to the sky the glory of the sovereign, and keep it bright to the end of time.

Mrs. Eddy is the sovereign; she devised that great place for herself, she occupies that throne.

In 1895, she wrote a little primer, a little body of autocratic laws, called the Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and put those laws in force, in permanence. Her government is all there; all in that deceptively innocent-looking little book, that cunning little devilish book, that slumbering little brown volcano, with h.e.l.l in its bowels. In that book she has planned out her system, and cla.s.sified and defined its purposes and powers.

MAIN PARTS OF THE MACHINE

A Supreme Church. At Boston. Branch Churches. All over the world One Pastor for the whole of them: to wit, her book, Science and Health. Term of the book's office--forever.

In every C.S. pulpit, two "Readers," a man and a woman. No talkers, no preachers, in any Church-readers only. Readers of the Bible and her books--no others. No commentators allowed to write or print.

A Church Service. She has framed it--for all the C.S. Churches--selected its readings, its prayers, and the hymns to be used, and has appointed the order of procedure. No changes permitted.

A Creed. She wrote it. All C.S. Churches must subscribe to it. No other permitted.

A Treasury. At Boston. She carries the key.

A C.S. Book--Publis.h.i.+ng House. For books approved by her. No others permitted.

Journals and Magazines. These are organs of hers, and are controlled by her.

A College. For teaching C.S.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE MACHINE'S POWERS AND DIGNITIES

Supreme Church. Pastor Emeritus--Mrs. Eddy. 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 members.h.i.+p.

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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 compa.s.sable by no word but one, the prodigious word, Wors.h.i.+p. And it is not as a human being that her subjects wors.h.i.+p her, but as a supernatural one, a divine one, one who has comrades.h.i.+p with G.o.d, 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.

They place her upon an Alpine solitude and supremacy of power and spectacular show not hitherto attained by any other self-seeking enslaver disguised in the Christian name, and they persuade me that, although she may regard "self-deification as blasphemous," she is as fond of it as I am of pie.

She knows about "Our Mother's Room" in the Supreme Church in Boston--above referred to--for she has been in it. In a recently published North American Review article, I quoted a lady as saying Mrs.

Eddy's portrait could be seen there in a shrine, lit by always-burning lights, and that C.S. disciples came and wors.h.i.+ped it. That remark hurt the feelings of more than one Scientist. They said it was not true, and asked me to correct it. I comply with pleasure. Whether the portrait was there four years ago or not, it is not there now, for I have inquired. The only object in the shrine now, and lit by electrics--and wors.h.i.+ped--is an oil-portrait of the horse-hair chair Mrs. Eddy used to sit in when she was writing Science and Health! It seems to me that adulation has struck bottom, here.

Mrs. Eddy knows about that. She has been there, she has seen it, she has seen the wors.h.i.+ppers. She could abolish that sarcasm with a word. She withholds the word. Once more I seem to recognize in her exactly the same appet.i.te for self-deification that I have for pie. We seem to be curiously alike; for the love of self-deification is really only the spiritual form of the material appet.i.te for pie, and nothing could be more strikingly Christian-Scientifically "harmonious."

I note this phrase:

"Christian Science eschews divine rights in human beings."

"Rights" is vague; I do not know what it means there. Mrs. Eddy is not well acquainted with the English language, and she is seldom able to say in it what she is trying to say. She has no ear for the exact word, and does not often get it. "Rights." Does it mean "honors?" "attributes?"

"Eschews." This is another umbrella where there should be a torch; it does not illumine the sentence, it only deepens the shadows. Does she mean "denies?" "refuses?" "forbids?" or something in that line? Does she mean:

"Christian Science denies divine honors to human beings?" Or:

"Christian Science refuses to recognize divine attributes in human beings?" Or:

"Christian Science forbids the wors.h.i.+p of human beings?"

The bulk of the succeeding sentence is to me a tunnel, but, when I emerge at this end of it, I seem to come into daylight. Then I seem to understand both sentences--with this result: