BOARD OF TRUSTEES

There isn’t any—­now.  But with power and money piling up higher and higher every day and the Church’s dominion spreading daily wider and farther, a time could come when the envious and ambitious could start the idea that it would be wise and well to put a watch upon these assets —­a watch equipped with properly large authority.  By custom, a Board of Trustees.  Mrs. Eddy has foreseen that probability—­for she is a woman with a long, long look ahead, the longest look ahead that ever a woman had—­and she has provided for that emergency.  In Art.  I., Sec. 5, she has decreed that no Board of Trustees shall ever exist in the Mother-Church “except it be constituted by the Pastor Emeritus.”

The magnificence of it, the daring of it!  Thus far, she is: 

The Massachusetts Metaphysical College;
Pastor Emeritus;
President;
Board of Directors;
Treasurer;
Clerk;
and future Board of Trustees;

and is still moving onward, ever onward.  When I contemplate her from a commercial point of view, there are no words that can convey my admiration of her.

READERS

These are a feature of first importance in the church-machinery of Christian Science.  For they occupy the pulpit.  They hold the place that the preacher holds in the other Christian Churches.  They hold that place, but they do not preach.  Two of them are on duty at a time—­a man and a woman.  One reads a passage from the Bible, the other reads the explanation of it from Science and Health—­and so they go on alternating.  This constitutes the service—­this, with choir-music.  They utter no word of their own.  Art.  IV., Sec. 6, closes their mouths with this uncompromising gag: 

“They shall make no remarks explanatory of the Lesson-Sermon at any time during the service.”

It seems a simple little thing.  One is not startled by it at a first reading of it; nor at the second, nor the third.  One may have to read it a dozen times before the whole magnitude of it rises before the mind.  It far and away oversizes and outclasses the best business-idea yet invented for the safe-guarding and perpetuating of a religion.  If it had been thought of and put in force eighteen hundred and seventy years ago, there would be but one Christian sect in the world now, instead of ten dozens of them.

There are many varieties of men in the world, consequently there are many varieties of minds in its pulpits.  This insures many differing interpretations of important Scripture texts, and this in turn insures the splitting up of a religion into many sects.  It is what has happened; it was sure to happen.

Mrs. Eddy has noted this disastrous result of preaching, and has put up the bars.  She will have no preaching in her Church.  She has explained all essential Scriptures, and set the explanations down in her book.  In her belief her underlings cannot improve upon those explanations, and in that stern sentence “they shall make no explanatory remarks” she has barred them for all time from trying.  She will be obeyed; there is no question about that.