se's; that, and the continuing of her
name's glory after she shall have passed away. If she has overlooked a
single power, howsoever minute, I cannot discover it. If she has found
one, large or small, which she has not seized and made her own, there is
no record of it, no trace of it. In her foragings and depredations she
usually puts forward the Mother-Church--a lay figure--and hides behind
it. Whereas, she is in manifest reality the Mother-Church herself. It
has an impressive array of officials, and committees, and Boards of
Direction, of Education, of Lectureship, and so on--geldings, every one,
shadows, spectres, apparitions, wax-figures: she is supreme over them
all, she can abolish them when she will; blow them out as she would a
candle. She is herself the Mother-Church. Now there is one By-law which
says that the Mother-Church:

"shall be officially controlled by no other church."

That does not surprise us--we know by the rest of the By-laws that that
is a quite irrelevant remark. Yet we do vaguely and hazily wonder why
she takes the trouble to say it; why she wastes the words; what her
object can be--seeing that that emergency has been in so many, many
ways, and so effectively and drastically barred off and made impossible.
Then presently the object begins to dawn upon us. That is, it does after
we have read the rest of the By-law three or four times, wondering
and admiring to see Mrs. Eddy--Mrs. Eddy--Mrs. Eddy, of all
persons--throwing away power!--making a fair exchange--doing a fair
thing for once more, an almost generous thing! Then we look it through
yet once more unsatisfied, a little suspicious--and find that it is
nothing but a sly, thin make-believe, and that even the very title of it
is a sarcasm and embodies a falsehood--"self" government:

"Local Self-Government. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in
Boston, Massachusetts, shall assume no official control of other
churches of this denomination. It shall be officially controlled by no
other church."

It has a most pious and deceptive give-and-take air of perfect fairness,
unselfishness, magnanimity--almost godliness, indeed. But it is all art.

In the By-laws, Mrs. Eddy, speaking by the mouth of her other self, the
Mother-Church, proclaims that she will assume no official control of
other churches-branch churches. We examine the other By-laws, and they
answer some important questions for us:

1. What is a branch Church? It is a body of C