Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/434

384 distinctly democratic in its government, and no individual, and no other church shall interfere with its affairs.

On June 21, 1908, the Committee on Publication issued this notice from Mrs. Eddy:

The house of The Mother Church seats only five thousand people, and its membership includes forty-eight thousand communicants, hence the following:

The branch churches continue their Communion seasons, but there shall be no more Communion season in The Mother Church that has blossomed into spiritual beauty, Communion universal and divine. “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.” (I Cor. 2:16.)

On the same date the following letter was written which appeared in the Sentinel for June 27, 1908:

, — Take courage. God is leading you onward and upward. Relinquishing a material form of Communion advances it spiritually. The material form is a “Suffer it to be so now” and is abandoned so soon as God’s Wayshower, Christ, points the advanced step. This instructs us how to be abased and how to abound. Dropping the Communion of the Mother Church does not prevent its distant members from occasionally attending this church.

(Signed) Mary Baker Eddy.&emsp;

The above provision was embodied in the Manual under Article XVIII. It has been shown in a