“It occupies a position that no other Church can fill.

“Then for a branch Church to assume such position would be disastrous to Christian Science,

“Therefore—­”

Therefore no branch Church is allowed to have branches.  There shall be no Christian Science St. Peter’s in the earth but just one—­the Mother-Church in Boston.

“No first members”

But for the thoughtful By-law thus entitled, every Science branch in the earth would imitate the Mother-Church and set up an aristocracy.  Every little group of ground-floor Smiths and Furgusons and Shadwells and Simpsons that organized a branch would assume that great title, of “First Members,” along with its vast privileges of “discussing” the weather and casting blank ballots, and soon there would be such a locust-plague of them burdening the globe that the title would lose its value and have to be abolished.

But where business and glory are concerned, Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything, and so she did not fail to take care of her Aborigines, her stately and exclusive One Hundred, her college of functionless cardinals, her Sanhedrin of Privileged Talkers (Limited).  After taking away all the liberties of the branch Churches, and in the same breath disclaiming all official control over their affairs, she smites them on the mouth with this—­the very mouth that was watering for those nobby ground-floor honors—­

“No First Members.  Branch Churches shall not organize with First Members, that special method of organization being adapted to the Mother-Church alone.”

And so, first members being prohibited, we pierce through the cloud of Mrs. Eddy’s English and perceive that they must then necessarily organize with Subsequent Members.  There is no other way.  It will occur to them by-and-by to found an aristocracy of Early Subsequent Members.  There is no By-law against it.

“The”

I uncover to that imperial word.  And to the mind, too, that conceived the idea of seizing and monopolizing it as a title.  I believe it is Mrs. Eddy’s dazzlingest invention.  For show, and style, and grandeur, and thunder and lightning and fireworks it outclasses all the previous inventions of man, and raises the limit on the Pope.  He can never put his avid hand on that word of words—­it is pre-empted.  And copyrighted, of course.  It lifts the Mother-Church away up in the sky, and fellowships it with the rare and select and exclusive little company of the THE’s of deathless glory—­persons and things whereof history and the ages could furnish only single examples, not two:  the Saviour, the Virgin, the Milky Way, the Bible, the Earth, the Equator, the Devil, the Missing Link—­and now The First Church, Scientist.  And by clamor of edict and By-law Mrs. Eddy gives personal notice to all branch Scientist Churches on this planet to leave that the alone.

She has demonstrated over it and made it sacred to the Mother-Church: