Christian Science

I think that any one who will carefully examine the Bylaws (I have placed all of the important ones before the reader), will arrive at the conclusion that of late years the master-passion in Mrs. Eddy's heart is a hunger for power and glory; and that while her hunger for money still remains, she wants it now for the expansion and extension it can furnish to that power and glory, rather than what it can do for her towards satisfying minor and meaner ambitions.

I wish to enlarge a little upon this matter. I think it is quite clear that the reason why Mrs. Eddy has concentrated in herself all powers, all distinctions, all revenues that are within the command of the Christian Science Church Universal is that she desires and intends to devote them to the purpose just suggested -- the upbuilding of her personal glory -- hers, and no one else's; that, and the continuing of her name's glory after she shall have passed away. If she has overlooked a single power, howsoever minute, I cannot discover it. If she has found one, large or small, which she has not seized and made her own, there is no record of it, no trace of it. In her foragings and depredations she usually puts forward the Mother-Church -- a lay figure -- and hides behind it. Whereas, she is in manifest reality the Mother-Church herself. It has an impressive array of officials, and committees, and Boards of Direction, of Education, of Lectureship, and so on -- geldings, every one, shadows, specters, apparitions, wax-figures: she is supreme over them all, she can abolish them when she will; blow them out as she would a candle. She is herself the Mother-Church. Now there is one Bylaw which says that the Mother-Church:

"shall be officially controlled by no other church."

That does not surprise us -- we know by the rest of the Bylaws that that is a quite irrelevant remark. Yet we do vaguely and hazily wonder why she takes the trouble to say it; why she wastes the words; what her object can be -- seeing that that emergency has been in so many, many ways, and so effectively and drastically barred off and made impossible. Then presently the object begins to dawn upon us. That is, it does after we have read the rest of the Bylaw three or four times, wondering and admiring to see Mrs. Eddy -- Mrs. Eddy -- Mrs. Eddy, of all persons -- throwing away power! -- Making a fair exchange -- doing a fair thing for once more, an almost generous thing! Then we look it through yet once more unsatisfied, a little suspicious -- and find that it is nothing but a sly, thin make-believe, and that even the very title of it is a sarcasm and embodies a falsehood -- "self" government: