A marvelous woman; with a hunger for power such as has never been seen in the world before.  No thing, little or big, that contains any seed or suggestion of power escapes her avaricious eye; and when once she gets that eye on it, her remorseless grip follows.  There isn’t a Christian Scientist who isn’t ecclesiastically as much her property as if she had bought him and paid for him, and copyrighted him and got a charter.  She cannot be satisfied when she has handcuffed a member, and put a leg-chain and ball on him and plugged his ears and removed his thinker, she goes on wrapping needless chains round and round him, just as a spider would.  For she trusts no one, believes in no one’s honesty, judges every one by herself.  Although we have seen that she has absolute and irresponsible command over her spectral Boards and over every official and servant of her Church, at home and abroad, over every minute detail of her Church’s government, present and future, and can purge her membership of guilty or suspected persons by various plausible formalities and whenever she will, she is still not content, but must set her queer mind to work and invent a way by which she can take a member—­any member—­by neck and crop and fling him out without anything resembling a formality at all.

She is sole accuser and sole witness, and her testimony is final and carries uncompromising and irremediable doom with it.

The Sole-Witness Court!  It should make the Council of Ten and the Council of Three turn in their graves for shame, to see how little they knew about satanic concentrations of irresponsible power.  Here we have one Accuser, one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman—­and all four bunched together in Mrs. Eddy, the Inspired of God, His Latest Thought to His People, New Member of the Holy Family, the Equal of Jesus.

When a Member is not satisfactory to Mrs. Eddy, and yet is blameless in his life and faultless in his membership and in his Christian Science walk and conversation, shall he hold up his head and tilt his hat over one ear and imagine himself safe because of these perfections?  Why, in that very moment Mrs. Eddy will cast that spiritual X-ray of hers through his dungarees and say: 

“I see his hypnotism working, among his insides—­remove him to the block!”

What shall it profit him to know it isn’t so?  Nothing.  His testimony is of no value.  No one wants it, no one will ask for it.  He is not present to offer it (he does not know he has been accused), and if he were there to offer it, it would not be listened to.

It was out of powers approaching Mrs. Eddy’s—­though not equalling them —­that the Inquisition and the devastations of the Interdict grew.  She will transmit hers.  The man born two centuries from now will think he has arrived in hell; and all in good time he will think he knows it.  Vast concentrations of irresponsible power have never in any age been used mercifully, and there is nothing to suggest that the Christian Science Papacy is going to spend money on novelties.