The Board of Directors, or Serfs, or Ciphers, elects
the President.
On these clearly worded terms: “Subject
to the approval of the Pastor Emeritus.”
Therefore She elects him.
A long term can invest a high official with influence
and power, and make him dangerous. Mrs. Eddy
reflected upon that; so she limits the President’s
term to a year. She has a capable commercial
head, an organizing head, a head for government.
There are a Treasurer and a Clerk. They are
elected by the Board of Directors. That is to
say, by Mrs. Eddy.
Their terms of office expire on the first Tuesday
in June of each year, “or upon the election
of their successors.” They must be watchfully
obedient and satisfactory to her, or she will elect
and install their successors with a suddenness that
can be unpleasant to them. It goes without saying
that the Treasurer manages the Treasury to suit Mrs.
Eddy, and is in fact merely Temporary Deputy Treasurer.
Apparently the Clerk has but two duties to perform:
to read messages from Mrs. Eddy to First Members assembled
in solemn Council, and provide lists of candidates
for Church membership. The select body entitled
First Members are the aristocracy of the Mother-Church,
the Charter Members, the Aborigines, a sort of stylish
but unsalaried little College of Cardinals, good for
show, but not indispensable. Nobody is indispensable
in Mrs. Eddy’s empire; she sees to that.
When the Pastor Emeritus sends a letter or message
to that little Sanhedrin, it is the Clerk’s
“imperative duty” to read it “at
the place and time specified.” Otherwise,
the world might come to an end. These are fine,
large frills, and remind us of the ways of emperors
and such. Such do not use the penny-post, they
send a gilded and painted special messenger, and he
strides into the Parliament, and business comes to
a sudden and solemn and awful stop; and in the impressive
hush that follows, the Chief Clerk reads the document.
It is his “imperative duty.” If
he should neglect it, his official life would end.
It is the same with this Mother-Church Clerk; “if
he fail to perform this important function of his
office,” certain majestic and unshirkable solemnities
must follow: a special meeting “shall”
be called; a member of the Church “shall”
make formal complaint; then the Clerk “shall”
be “removed from office.” Complaint
is sufficient, no trial is necessary.
There is something very sweet and juvenile and innocent
and pretty about these little tinsel vanities, these
grave apings of monarchical fuss and feathers and
ceremony, here on our ostentatiously democratic soil.
She is the same lady that we found in the Autobiography,
who was so naively vain of all that little ancestral
military riffraff that she had dug up and annexed.
A person’s nature never changes. What
it is in childhood, it remains. Under pressure,
or a change of interest, it can partially or wholly
disappear from sight, and for considerable stretches
of time, but nothing can ever permanently modify it,
nothing can ever remove it.
