To return to the Claim.  I find myself greatly embarrassed by Mrs. Eddy’s remark:  “I regard self-deification as blasphemous.”  If she is right about that, I have written a half-ream of manuscript this past week which I must not print, either in the book which I am writing, or elsewhere:  for it goes into that very matter with extensive elaboration, citing, in detail, words and acts of Mrs. Eddy’s which seem to me to prove that she is a faithful and untiring worshipper of herself, and has carried self-deification to a length which has not been before ventured in ages.  If ever.  There is not room enough in this chapter for that Survey, but I can epitomize a portion of it here.

With her own untaught and untrained mind, and without outside help, she has erected upon a firm and lasting foundation the most minutely perfect, and wonderful, and smoothly and exactly working, and best safe-guarded system of government that has yet been devised in the world, as I believe, and as I am sure I could prove if I had room for my documentary evidences here.

It is a despotism (on this democratic soil); a sovereignty more absolute than the Roman Papacy, more absolute than the Russian Czarship; it has not a single power, not a shred of authority, legislative or executive, which is not lodged solely in the sovereign; all its dreams, its functions, its energies, have a single object, a single reason for existing, and only the one—­to build to the sky the glory of the sovereign, and keep it bright to the end of time.

Mrs. Eddy is the sovereign; she devised that great place for herself, she occupies that throne.

In 1895, she wrote a little primer, a little body of autocratic laws, called the Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and put those laws in force, in permanence.  Her government is all there; all in that deceptively innocent-looking little book, that cunning little devilish book, that slumbering little brown volcano, with hell in its bowels.  In that book she has planned out her system, and classified and defined its purposes and powers.

MAIN PARTS OF THE MACHINE

A Supreme Church.  At Boston. 
Branch Churches.  All over the world
One Pastor for the whole of them:  to wit, her book, Science and Health. 
Term of the book’s office—­forever.

In every C.S. pulpit, two “Readers,” a man and a woman.  No talkers, no preachers, in any Church-readers only.  Readers of the Bible and her books—­no others.  No commentators allowed to write or print.

A Church Service.  She has framed it—­for all the C.S.  Churches —­selected its readings, its prayers, and the hymns to be used, and has appointed the order of procedure.  No changes permitted.

A Creed.  She wrote it.  All C.S.  Churches must subscribe to it.  No other permitted.

A Treasury.  At Boston.  She carries the key.