Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/405

Rh keeping it hers. Since she first began to teach her "Science," the story of her public life is simply the story of how she kept her hold on it. The very way in which she had come by her discovery made her always afraid of losing it, and she was forever detecting some student in the act of making off with it. Even in Lynn, she slept, as it were, with her hand on the cradle.

Later, when a Christian Science periodical was being printed in German, Mrs. Eddy would not permit Science and Health to be translated into that language, or into any other. She was not a linguist, and, knowing that she would be unable to pass upon the text of a translation, she feared to trust her gospel to the shadings of a foreign tongue. How she has done it let him declare who can, but she has absolutely sterilised every source that might have produced Christian Science literature, and to-day a loyal Christian Scientist would be as likely to think of dynamiting the Mother Church as of writing a book upon the theory or practice of Christian Science.

Dr. Evans' school—if it is not misleading to call his patients and sympathisers by so formal a name—was a rival which caused Mrs. Eddy a good deal of alarm. It drew from her her more thoughtful students, and, though they were seldom her most loyal and tractable followers, she realised their value in giving her sect a certain standing in Boston. The Evans following had hitherto been entirely without organisation; they were simply a group of people who were interested in the metaphysical treatment of disease, each thinking in his own way and working out his own problem. Now, however, they began to meet together more systematically, to organise in groups here and there, and to publish books and periodicals,