She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.

CHAPTER XIV

The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the government will go on without a hitch.  The By-laws will bear that interpretation.  All the Mother-Church’s vast powers are concentrated in that Board.  Mrs. Eddy’s unlimited personal reservations make the Board’s ostensible supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a shadow.  But Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but herself—­they are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not usable by another individual.  When she dies her reservations die, and the Board’s shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of any important By-law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and irresponsible a sovereign as she was.

It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than the Roman Pope’s.  I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and that it will fill its own vacancies.  An elective Papacy is a safe and wise system, and a long-liver.

CHAPTER XV

We may take that up now.

It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a vertebrate.

1.  Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by “mortal” mind?

2.  If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or in manuscript?

3.  Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself?  By the Great Idea I mean, of course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ’s Disciples and their converts, and as successfully. 4.  Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?

5.  Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book and organized it?

I think No. 5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the controversy.  And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got from that organized and tremendous force.

As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript.  But their testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced.  I think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably.  Let them go.

For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.