Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/460

404 not of the church body; and the congregation had no more voice in the management of the church than has the audience in the management of a theatre.

The members of the Boston church were dazzled by Mrs. Eddy's lavish gift, and very few of them had followed the legerdemain by which the church had gone into Mrs. Eddy's hands a free body and had come out a close corporation. Mrs. Eddy announced her victory in a long communication to the Journal, asserting, "He giveth his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways."

In reviewing this real-estate transaction in the Journal, Mrs. Eddy said:

I had this desirable site transferred in a circuitous, novel way. . . . I knew that to God's gift, foundation and superstructure, no one could hold a wholly material title. The land and the church standing on it must be conveyed through a type representing the true nature of the gift; a type morally and spiritually inalienable, but materially questionable—even after the manner that all spiritual good comes to Christian Scientists to the end of taxing their faith in God and their adherence to the superiority of the claims of spirit over matter or merely legal titles. . . . Our title to God's acres here will be safe and sound "when we can read our titles clear" to heavenly mansions.

Mrs. Eddy now for the first time came out in the Journal and made a personal appeal for money to build her church, requesting that the contributions which Mr. Nixon and his associates had returned to the donors be doubled and forwarded to Boston. Her request had scarcely been printed when money began to pour in upon the trustees; the old contributions were doubled and in many instances were increased threefold.

The official organisation of the Mother Church was made September 23, 1892, but no mention is made in the Journal