Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/393

Rh tuition fees amounted to eight hundred dollars. By 1887 there was such a demand for Mrs. Eddy's instruction that she could form as many classes a year as she felt able to teach, and her classes netted her from five to ten thousand dollars each. In 1883 Mrs. Eddy had founded her monthly periodical, the Christian Science Journal, of incalculable service in spreading her doctrines. In 1886 she had, with the assistance of the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, got out a new and much improved edition of Science and Health. Between 1880 and 1887 she had published four pamphlets: Christian Healing, The People's God, Defence of Christian Science, and a Historical Sketch of Metaphysical Healing. Promising church organisations were being built up in New York, Chicago, Denver, and in dozens of smaller cities.

Systematic efforts were now begun to raise money for a permanent church building in Boston. The congregation had outgrown its old quarters in Chickering Hall in Tremont Street, and was having difficulty in obtaining a place for its services, some of the larger halls refusing to rent to the Christian Scientists. In the summer of 1886 the church had purchased from Nathan Matthews a piece of land in Falmouth Street, in a tenement district of the Back Bay, which it intended to use for a building site. But the land was subject to a mortgage of $8,763.50, and it was for the purpose of paying off this mortgage that the Christian Scientists were holding fairs and