Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/371

Rh It was plain that the answers to questions would be in Mrs. Eddy's own spirit. She has a rapt way of talking, looking large-eyed into space, and works around a question in her own way, reaching an answer often unexpectedly after a prolonged exordium. She explained: “No present change is contemplated in the rulership. You would ask, perhaps, whether my successor will be a woman or a man. I can answer that. It will be a man.” “Can you name the man?”

“I cannot answer that now.”

Here, then, was the definite statement that Mrs. Eddy's immediate successor would, like herself, be the ruler.

“I have been called a pope, but surely I have sought no such distinction. I have simply taught as I learned while healing the sick. It was in 1866 that the light of the Science came first to me. In 1875 I wrote my book. It brought down a shower of abuse upon my head, but it won converts from the first. I followed it up, teaching and organizing, and trust in me grew. I was the mother, but of course the term pope is used figuratively.

“A position of authority,” she went on, “became necessary. Rules were necessary, and I made a code of by-laws, but each one was the fruit of experience and the result of prayer. Entrusting their enforcement to others, I found at one time that they had five churches under discipline. I intervened. Dissensions are dangerous in an infant church. I wrote to each church in tenderness, in exhortation, and in rebuke, and so brought all back to union and love again. If that is to be a pope, then you