When reading about the beginnings of Mrs. Eddy's teaching of Christian Science healing, I was struck by the fact that people came because scientific Christian healing presented a way of making a living. When we consider that for Mrs Eddy, healing was almost consistent with breathing, the wonder is that she was able to find a method of imparting it to others. How much she must have learned through the early days of teaching.
On pages 169 - 170, I came to this:
"In the March 1892 issue of the Journal, Mrs. Eddy wrote of church organization in the same terms she used to describe marriage. 'If our Church is organized, it is to meet the demand suffer it to be so now. The real Christian compact is love for another. This bond is wholly spiritual and inviolate.' The prosperity and progress of the organization rests on the love felt and expressed by its members for each other."
Hello, I thought! I had noted something like that a few pages back. A search of the Index helped me locate the passage on page 161. It was December 1889, the time of the disorganization of the church. The passage reads: "Mrs. Eddy requested her students in Boston to continue to conduct church services, but as a voluntary association that acted under the commandment to love one another, rather than under congregational rules." This too, was a suffer it to be so now arrangement, but it surely gives us food for thought on how to minister to a church.
On the previous page, we find that she wrote of "...dropping all material rules whereby to regulate Christ, Christianity, and adopt alone the Golden Rule for unification, progress, and a better example as The Mother Church."
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Joyce Voysey
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