Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/372

328 delight in personal success. She says: “The apprehension of what has been, and must be, the final outcome of material organization, which wars with Love’s spiritual compact, caused me to dread the unprecedented popularity of my College. Students from all over our continent and from Europe were flooding the school. At this time there were over three hundred applications from persons desiring to enter the college, and applicants were rapidly increasing. Example had shown the dangers arising from being placed on earthly pinnacles, and Christian Science shuns whatever involves material means for the promotion of spiritual ends.”

It was the first way-mark of withdrawal. The dangers arising from personal adulation were in a thousand ways made apparent to Mrs. Eddy and the more she requested her students to look away from her and fix their eyes on truth, the more she was made to feel that danger of apotheosis which desired to set her on “earthly pinnacles.” Appealing to Cæsar seemed to be a fixed concept of a human sort among the students which required the most thorough-going denial. As the Romans would have made Nero a god, so the students seemed bent on making their spiritual leader a Cæsar of egotism, a peculiar reversal in human deduction. Mrs. Eddy was obliged to publish in the Journal the following notice:

I shall not be consulted verbally or through letters as to the following: Whose advertisement shall or shall not appear in the Journal.