Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/530

470 easier and more remunerative it would be natural for teachers to multiply at the sacrifice of the healers, and Mrs. Eddy discouraged this by cutting down the teacher's fee, and limiting the number of pupils which one teacher might instruct in a year. By 1904 Mrs. Eddy had got the teacher's fee down to fifty dollars per student, and a teacher was not permitted to teach more than thirty students a year. From 1903 to 1906 all teaching was suspended under the by-law "Healing better than teaching."

In the fall of 1895 Mrs. Eddy issued her instructions to the churches in the form of a volume entitled the Church Manual of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass. The by-laws herein contained, she says, "were impelled by a power not one's own, were written at different dates, as occasion required." This book is among Mrs. Eddy's copyrighted works, and has now been through more than forty editions. Some of the by-laws in the earlier editions are perplexing.

We find that "Careless comparison or irreverent reference to Christ Jesus, is abnormal in a Christian Scientist and prohibited." It is probable that no Christian church had ever before found it necessary to make such a prohibition.

The Manual, however, is chiefly interesting as an exposition of Mrs. Eddy's method of church government and as an inventory of her personal prerogatives. Never was a title more misleadingly modest than Mrs. Eddy's title of "Pastor Emeritus" of the Mother Church.

Next to Mrs. Eddy in authority is the Board of Directors, who were chosen by Mrs. Eddy and who are subject to her in