Various - McClure\'s Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

V >> Various >> McClure\'s Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

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DEAR GEORGE: Yours received. I am surprised that you think
of coming to visit me when I live in a schoolhouse and have
no room that I can let even a boarder into.

I use the whole of my rooms and am at work in them more or
less all the time.

Besides this I have all I can meet without receiving
company. I must have quiet in my house, and it will not be
pleasant for you in Boston the Choates are doing all they
can by falsehood, and public shames, such as advertising a
college of her own within a few doors of mine when she is a
disgraceful woman and known to be. I am going to give up my
lease when this class is over, and cannot pay your board nor
give you a single dollar now. I am alone, and you never
would come to me when I called for you, and now I cannot
have you come.

I want quiet and Christian life alone with God, when I can
find intervals for a little rest. You are not what I had
hoped to find you, and I am changed. The world, the flesh
and evil I am at war with, and if any one comes to me it
must be to help me and not to hinder me in this warfare. If
you will stay away from me until I get through with my
public labor then I will send for you and hope to then have
a home to take you to.

As it now is, I have none, and you will injure me by coming
to Boston at this time more than I have room to state in a
letter. I asked you to come to me when my husband died and I
so much needed some one to help me. You refused to come then
in my great need, and I then gave up ever thinking of you in
that line. Now I have a clerk[4] who is a pure-minded
Christian, and two girls to assist me in the college. These
are all that I can have under this roof.

If you come after getting this letter I shall feel you have
no regard for my interest or feelings, which I hope not to
be obliged to feel.

Boston is the last place in the world for you or your
family. When I retire from business and into private life,
then I can receive you if you are reformed, but not
otherwise. I say this to you, not to any one else. I would
not injure you any more than myself. As ever sincerely,

M. B. G. EDDY.

After Mrs. Eddy retired to Pleasant View, neither her son nor his
family were permitted to visit her, and, when they came East, they
experienced a good deal of difficulty in seeing her at all. Mr. Glover
believed that his letters to his mother were sometimes answered by Mr.
Frye, and that some of his letters never reached his mother at all.
Mr. Glover states that he finally sent his mother a letter by express,
with instructions to the Concord agent that it was to be delivered to
her in person, and to no one else. He was notified that Mrs. Eddy
could not receive the letter except through her secretary, Calvin
Frye.

[ILLUSTRATION: MRS. EDDY'S NEW HOME AT CHESTNUT HILL

JANUARY 26, 1908. MRS. EDDY LEFT HER OLD HOME AT CONCORD AND CAME TO
HER NEW HOUSE AT NEWTON ON A SPECIAL TRAIN, WITH THREE ENGINES TO
INSURE HER SAFE CONDUCT]

January 2, 1907, Mr. Glover and his daughter, Mary Baker Glover, were
permitted a brief interview with Mrs. Eddy at Pleasant View. Mr.
Glover states that he was shocked at his mother's physical condition
and alarmed by the rambling, incoherent nature of her conversation. In
talking to him she made the old charges and the old complaints:
"people" had been stealing her "things" (as she used to say they did
in Lynn); people wanted to kill her; two carriage horses had been
presented to her which, had she driven behind them, would have run
away and injured her--they had been sent, she thought, for that
especial purpose.

After this interview Mr. Glover and his daughter went to Washington,
D. C., to ask legal advice from Ex-Senator William E. Chandler. While
there Mr. Glover received the following letter from his mother:

Pleasant View,
Concord, N. H., Jan. 11, 1907.

MY DEAR SON: The enemy to Christian Science is by the
wickedest powers of hypnotism trying to do me all the harm
possible by acting on the minds of people to make them lie
about me and my family. In view of all this I herein and
hereby ask this favor of you. I have done for you what I
could, and never to my recollection have I asked but once
before this a favor of my only child. Will you send to me by
express all the letters of mine that I have written to you?
This will be a great comfort to your mother if you do it.
Send all--ALL of them. Be sure of that. If you will do this
for me I will make you and Mary some presents of value, I
assure you. Let no one but Mary and your lawyer, Mr. Wilson,
know what I herein write to Mary and you. With love.

Mother, M. B. G. Eddy.

Mr. Glover refused to give up his letters, and on March 1, 1907, he
began, by himself and others as next friends, an action in Mrs. Eddy's
behalf against some ten prominent Christian Scientists, among whom
were Calvin Frye, Alfred Farlow, and the officers of the Mother Church
in Boston. This action was brought in the Superior Court of New
Hampshire. Mr. Glover asked for an adjudication that Mrs. Eddy was
incompetent, through age and failing faculties, to manage her estate;
that a receiver of her property be appointed; and that the various
defendants named be required to account for alleged misuse of her
property. Six days later Mrs. Eddy met this action by declaring a
trusteeship for the control of her estate. The trustees named were
responsible men, gave bond for $500,000, and their trusteeship was to
last during Mrs. Eddy's lifetime. In August Mr. Glover withdrew his
suit.

This action brought by her son, which undoubtedly caused Mrs. Eddy a
great deal of annoyance, was but another result of those indirect
methods to which she has always clung so stubbornly. When her son
appealed to her for financial aid, she chose, instead of meeting him
with a candid refusal, to tell him that she was not allowed to use her
own money as she wished, that Mr. Frye made her account for every
penny, etc., etc. Mr. Glover made the mistake of taking his mother at
her word. He brought his suit upon the supposition that his mother was
the victim of designing persons who controlled her affairs--without
consulting her, against her wish, and to their own advantage--a
hypothesis which his attorneys entirely failed to establish.

This lawsuit disclosed one interesting fact, namely, that while in
1893 securities of Mrs. Eddy amounting to $100,000 were brought to
Concord, and in January, 1899, she had $236,200, and while in 1907 she
had about a million dollars' worth of taxable property, Mrs. Eddy in
1901 returned a signed statement to the assessors at Concord that the
value of her taxable property amounted to about nineteen thousand
dollars. This statement was sworn to year after year by Mr. Frye.

_Mrs. Eddy's Removal to Newton_

About a month after Mr. Glover's suit was withdrawn, Mrs. Eddy
purchased, through Robert Walker, a Christian Scientist real-estate
agent in Chicago, the old Lawrence mansion in Newton, a suburb of
Boston. The house was remodeled and enlarged in great haste and at a
cost which must almost have equaled the original purchase price,
$100,000. All the arrangements were conducted with the greatest
secrecy and very few Christian Scientists knew that it was Mrs. Eddy's
intention to occupy this house until she was actually there in person.

On Sunday, January 26, 1908, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs.
Eddy, attended by nearly a score of her followers, boarded a special
train at Concord. Extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent
accidents. A pilot-engine preceded the locomotive which drew Mrs.
Eddy's special train, and the train was followed by a third engine to
prevent the possibility of a rear-end collision--a precaution never
before adopted, even by the royal trains abroad. Dr. Alpheus B.
Morrill, a second cousin of Mrs. Eddy and a practising physician of
Concord, was of her party. Mrs. Eddy's face was heavily veiled when
she took the train at Concord and when she alighted at Chestnut Hill
station. Her carriage arrived at the Lawrence house late in the
afternoon, and she was lifted out and carried into the house by one of
her male attendants.

Mrs. Eddy's new residence is a fine old stone mansion which has been
enlarged without injury to its original dignity. The grounds cover an
area of about twelve acres and are well wooded. The house itself now
contains about twenty-five rooms. There is an electric elevator
adjoining Mrs. Eddy's private apartments. Two large vaults have been
built into the house--doubtless designed as repositories for Mrs.
Eddy's manuscripts. Since her arrival at Chestnut Hill, Mrs. Eddy,
upon one of her daily drives, saw for the first time the new building
which completes the Mother Church and which, like the original modest
structure, is a memorial to her.

There are many reasons why Mrs. Eddy may have decided to leave
Concord. But the extravagant haste with which her new residence was
got ready for her--a body of several hundred laborers was kept busy
upon it all day, and another shift, equally large, worked all night by
the aid of arc-lights--would seem to suggest that even if practical
considerations brought about Mrs. Eddy's change of residence, her
extreme impatience may have resulted from a more personal motive. It
is, indeed, very probable that Mrs. Eddy left Concord for the same
reason that she left Boston years ago: because she felt that malicious
animal magnetism was becoming too strong for her there. The action
brought by her son in Concord last summer she attributed entirely to
the work of mesmerists who were supposed to be in control of her son's
mind. Mrs. Eddy always believed that this strange miasma of evil had a
curious tendency to become localized: that certain streets,
mail-boxes, telegraph-offices, vehicles, could be totally suborned by
these invisible currents of hatred and ill-will that had their source
in the minds of her enemies and continually encircled her. She
believed that in this way an entire neighborhood could be made
inimical to her, and it is quite possible that, after the recent
litigation in Concord, she felt that the place had become saturated
with mesmerism and that she would never again find peace there.

_Mrs. Eddy at Eighty_

The years since 1890 Mrs. Eddy has spent in training her church in the
way she desires it to go, in making it more and more her own, and in
issuing by-law after by-law to restrict her followers in their church
privileges and to guide them in their daily walk. Mrs. Eddy, one must
remember, was fifty years of age before she knew what she wanted to
do; sixty when she bethought herself of the most effective way to do
it,--by founding a church,--and seventy when she achieved her greatest
triumph--the reorganization and personal control of the Mother Church.
But she did not stop there. Between her seventieth and eightieth year,
and even up to the present time, she has displayed remarkable
ingenuity in disciplining her church and its leaders, and adroit
resourcefulness and unflagging energy in the prosecution of her
plans.

Mrs. Eddy's system of church government was not devised in a month or
a year, but grew, by-law on by-law, to meet new emergencies and
situations. To attain the end she desired it was necessary to keep
fifty or sixty thousand people working as if the church were the first
object in their lives; to encourage hundreds of these to adopt
church-work as their profession and make it their only chance of
worldly success; and yet to hold all this devotion and energy in
absolute subservience to Mrs. Eddy herself and to prevent any one of
these healers, or preachers, or teachers from attaining any marked
personal prominence and from acquiring a personal following. In other
words, the church was to have all the vigor of spontaneous growth, but
was to grow only as Mrs. Eddy permitted and to confine itself to the
trellis she had built for it.

_Preaching Prohibited_

Naturally, the first danger lay in the pastors of her branch churches.
Mrs. Stetson and Laura Lathrop had built up strong churches in New
York; Mrs. Ewing was pastor of a flourishing church in Chicago, Mrs.
Leonard of another in Brooklyn, Mrs. Williams in Buffalo, Mrs. Steward
in Toronto, Mr. Norcross in Denver. These pastors naturally became
leaders among the Christian Scientists in their respective
communities, and came to be regarded as persons authorized to expound
"Science and Health" and the doctrines of Christian Science. Such a
state of things Mrs. Eddy considered dangerous, not only because of
the personal influence the pastor might acquire over his flock, but
because a pastor might, even without intending to do so, give a
personal color to his interpretation of her words. In his sermon he
might expand her texts and infinitely improvise upon her themes until
gradually his hearers accepted his own opinions for Mrs. Eddy's. The
church in Toronto might come to emphasize doctrines which the church
in Denver did not; here was a possible beginning of differing
denominations.

So, as Mrs. Eddy splendidly puts it, "In 1895 I ordained the Bible and
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, as the Pastor, on this
planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science Denomination."
That is what Mrs. Eddy actually did. In the _Journal_ of April, 1895,
she announced, without any previous warning to them, that her
preachers should never preach again; that there were to be no more
preachers; that each church should have instead a First and a Second
Reader, and that the Sunday sermon was to consist of extracts from
the Bible and from "Science and Health," read aloud to the
congregation. In the beginning the First Reader read from the Bible
and the Second Reader from Mrs. Eddy's book. But this she soon
changed. The First Reader now reads from "Science and Health" and the
Second reads those passages of the Bible which Mrs. Eddy says are
correlative. This service, Mrs. Eddy declares, was "authorized by
Christ."[5]

When Mrs. Eddy issued this injunction, every Christian Science
preacher stepped down from his pulpit and closed his lips. There was
not an island of the sea in which he could lift up his voice and
sermonize; Mrs. Eddy's command covered "this" planet. Not one voice
was raised in protest. Whatever the pastors felt, they obeyed. Many of
them kissed the rod. L. P. Norcross, one of the deposed pastors, wrote
humbly in the August _Journal_:

"Did any one expect such a revelation, such a new departure
would be given? No, not in the way it came.... A former
pastor of the Mother Church once remarked that the day would
dawn when the current methods of preaching and worship would
disappear, but he could not discern how.... Such disclosures
are too high for us to perceive. _To One alone did the
message come._"

_The "Reader" Restricted_

Mrs. Eddy had no grudge against her pastors; she did not intend that
they should starve, and many of them were made Readers and were
permitted to read "Science and Health" aloud in the churches which
they had built and in which they had formerly preached.

The "Reader," it would seem, was a safe experiment, and he was so well
hedged in with by-laws that he could not well go astray. His duties
and limitations are clearly defined:

He is to read parts of "Science and Health" aloud at every service.

He cannot read from a manuscript or from a transcribed copy, but must
read from _the book itself_.

He is, Mrs. Eddy says, to be "well read and well educated," but he
shall at no time make any remarks explanatory of the passages which he
reads.

Before commencing to read from Mrs. Eddy's book "he shall distinctly
announce its full title and give the author's name."

A Reader must not be a leader in the church.

Lest, under all these restrictions, his incorrigible ambition might
still put forth its buds, there is a saving by-law which provides that
Mrs. Eddy can without explanation remove any reader at any time that
she sees fit to do so.[6]

Mrs. Eddy herself seems to have considered this a safe arrangement. In
the same number of the _Journal_ in which she dismissed her pastors
and substituted Readers, she stated, in an open letter, that her
students would find in that issue "the completion, as I now think, of
the Divine directions sent out to the churches." But it was by no
means the completion. By the summer of 1902 Septimus J. Hanna, First
Reader of the Mother Church in Boston, had become, without the liberty
to preach or to "make remarks," by the mere sound of his voice, it
would seem, so influential that Mrs. Eddy felt the necessity to limit
still further the Reader's power. Of course she could have dismissed
Mr. Hanna, but he was far too useful to be dispensed with. So Mrs.
Eddy made a new ruling that the Reader's term of office should be
limited to three years,[7] and, Mr. Hanna's term then being up, he was
put into the lecture field. Now the highest dignity that any Christian
Scientist could hope for was to be chosen to read "Science and Health"
aloud for three years at a comfortable salary.

_Why the Readers Obeyed_

Why, it has often been asked, did the more influential pastors--people
with a large personal following, like Mrs. Stetson--consent to resign
their pulpits in the first place and afterward to be stripped of
privilege after privilege? Some of them, of course, submitted because
they believed that Mrs. Eddy possessed "Divine Wisdom"; others because
they remembered what had happened to dissenters aforetime. Of all
those who had broken away from Mrs. Eddy's authority, not one had
attained to anything like her obvious success or material prosperity,
while many had followed wandering fires and had come to nothing.
Christian Science leaders had staked their fortunes upon the
hypothesis that Mrs. Eddy possessed "divine wisdom"; it was as
expounders of this wisdom that they had obtained their influence and
built up their churches. To rebel against the authority of Mrs. Eddy's
wisdom would be to discredit themselves; to discredit Mrs. Eddy's
wisdom would have been to destroy their whole foundation. To claim an
understanding and an inspiration equal to Mrs. Eddy's, would have been
to cheapen and invalidate everything that gave Christian Science an
advantage over other religions. Had they once denied the Revelation
and the Revelator upon which their church was founded, the whole
structure would have fallen in upon them. If Mrs. Eddy's intelligence
were not divine in one case, who would be able to say that it was in
another? If they could not accept Mrs. Eddy's wisdom when she said
"there shall be no pastors," how could they persuade other people to
accept it when she said "there is no matter"? It was clear, even to
those who writhed under the restrictions imposed upon them, that they
must stand or fall with Mrs. Eddy's Wisdom, and that to disobey it was
to compromise their own career. Even in the matter of getting on in
the world, it was better to be a doorkeeper in the Mother Church than
to dwell in the tents of the "mental healers."

_Mrs. Stetson and Mrs. Eddy_

Probably it was harder for Mrs. Stetson to retire from the pastorship
than for any one else; indeed, it was often whispered that the pastors
were dismissed largely because Mrs. Stetson's growing influence
suggested to Mrs. Eddy the danger of permitting such powers to her
vice-regents. Mrs. Stetson had gone to New York when Christian Science
was practically unknown there, and from poor and small beginnings had
built up a rich and powerful church. But, when the command came, she
stepped out of the pulpit she had built. She is to-day probably the
most influential person, after Mrs. Eddy, in the Christian Science
body. Rumors are ever and again started that Mrs. Stetson is not at
all times loyal to her Leader, and that she controls her faction for
her own ends rather than for Mrs. Eddy's. Whatever Mrs. Stetson's
private conversation may be, her public utterances have always been
humble enough, and she annually declares her loyalty. In 1907 the New
York _World_ published several interviews with persons who asserted
that they believed Mrs. Eddy to be controlled by a clique of Christian
Scientists who were acting for Mrs. Stetson's interests. In June Mrs.
Stetson wrote Mrs. Eddy a letter which was printed in the _Christian
Science Sentinel_ and which read in part:

"Boston, Mass., June 9, 1907.

"MY PRECIOUS LEADER:--I am glad I know that I am in the
hands of God, not of men. These reports are only the revival
of a lie which I have not heard for a long time. It is a
renewed attack upon me and my loyal students, to turn me
from following in the footsteps of Christ by making another
attempt to dishearten me and make me weary of the struggle
to demonstrate my trust in God to deliver me from the
'accuser of our brethren.' It is a diabolical attempt to
separate me from you, as my Leader and Teacher....

"Oh, Dearest, it is such a lie! No one who knows us can
believe this. It is vicarious atonement. Has the enemy no
more argument to use, that it has to go back to this? It is
exhausting its resources and I hope the end is near. You
know my love for you, beloved; and my students love you as
their Leader and Teacher; they follow your teachings and
lean on the 'sustaining infinite.' They who refuse to accept
you as God's messenger, or ignore the message which you
bring, will not get up by some other way, but will come
short of salvation....

"Dearly beloved, we are not ascending out of sense as fast
as we desire, but we are trusting in God to put off the
false and put on the Christ. This lie cannot disturb you nor
me. I love you and my students love you, and we never touch
you with such a thought as is mentioned.

"Lovingly your child,

"AUGUSTA E. STETSON."

_The Teachers Disciplined_

Her pastors having been satisfactorily dealt with, the next danger
Mrs. Eddy saw lay in her teachers and "academies." Mrs. Eddy soon
found, of course, that a great many Christian Scientists wished to
make their living out of their new religion; that possibility, indeed,
was one of the most effective advantages which Christian Science had
to offer over other religions. In the early days of the church, while
Mrs. Eddy herself was still instructing classes in Christian Science
at her "college," teaching was a much more remunerative business than
healing. Mrs. Eddy charged each student $300 for a primary course of
seven lessons, and the various Christian Science "institutes" and
"academies" about the country charged from $100 to $200 per student.
So long as Mrs. Eddy was herself teaching and never took patients, she
could not well forbid other teachers to do likewise. But after she
retired to Concord, she took the teachers in hand. Mrs. Eddy knew well
enough that Christian Science was propagated and that converts were
made, not through doctrine, but through cures. She had found that out
in the very beginning, when Richard Kennedy's cures brought her her
first success. She knew, too, that teaching Christian Science was a
much easier profession than healing by it, and that the teacher
risked no encounter with the law. Since teaching was both easier and
more remunerative, the first thing to be done in discouraging it was
to cut down the teacher's fee, and to limit the number of pupils which
one teacher might instruct in a year. By 1904 Mrs. Eddy had got the
teacher's fee down to fifty dollars per student, and a teacher was not
permitted to teach more than thirty students a year. Mrs. Eddy's
purpose is as clear as it was wise: she desired that no one should be
able to make a living by teaching alone. It was healing that carried
the movement forward, and whoever made a living by Christian Science
must heal. From 1903 to 1906 all teaching was suspended under the
by-law "Healing better than teaching."

In the fall of 1895 Mrs. Eddy issued her instructions to the churches
in the form of a volume entitled the "Church Manual of the First
Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass." The by-laws herein
contained, she says, "were impelled by a power not one's own, were
written at different dates, as occasion required." This book is among
Mrs. Eddy's copyrighted works,--a source of revenue, like the
rest,--and has now been through more than forty editions. Some of the
by-laws in the earlier editions are perplexing.

We find that "Careless comparison or irreverent reference to Christ
Jesus, is abnormal in a Christian Scientist and prohibited."[8] It is
probable that no Christian church had ever before found it necessary
to make such a prohibition.

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