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_ There is a By-law which forbids Members to practice hypnotism; the
penalty is excommunication.
1. If a member is found to be a mental practitioner--
2. Complaint is to be entered against him--
3. By the Pastor Emeritus, and by none else;
4. No member is allowed to make complaint to her in the matter;
5. Upon Mrs. Eddy's mere "complaint"--unbacked by evidence or proof, and
without giving the accused a chance to be heard--" his name shall be
dropped from this Church."
Mrs. Eddy has only to say a member is guilty--that is all. That ends it.
It is not a case of he "may" be cut off from Christian Science salvation,
it is a case of he "shall" be. Her serfs must see to it, and not say a
word.
Does the other Pope possess this prodigious and irresponsible power?
Certainly not in our day.
Some may be curious to know how Mrs. Eddy finds out that a member is
practicing hypnotism, since no one is allowed to come before her throne
and accuse him. She has explained this in Christian Science History,
first and second editions, page 16:
"I possess a spiritual sense of what the malicious mental practitioner is
mentally arguing which cannot be deceived; I can discern in the human
mind thoughts, motives, and purposes, and neither mental arguments nor
psychic power can affect this spiritual insight."
A marvelous woman; with a hunger for power such as has never been seen in
the world before. No thing, little or big, that contains any seed or
suggestion of power escapes her avaricious eye; and when once she gets
that eye on it, her remorseless grip follows. There isn't a Christian
Scientist who isn't ecclesiastically as much her property as if she had
bought him and paid for him, and copyrighted him and got a charter. She
cannot be satisfied when she has handcuffed a member, and put a leg-chain
and ball on him and plugged his ears and removed his thinker, she goes on
wrapping needless chains round and round him, just as a spider would.
For she trusts no one, believes in no one's honesty, judges every one by
herself. Although we have seen that she has absolute and irresponsible
command over her spectral Boards and over every official and servant of
her Church, at home and abroad, over every minute detail of her Church's
government, present and future, and can purge her membership of guilty or
suspected persons by various plausible formalities and whenever she will,
she is still not content, but must set her queer mind to work and invent
a way by which she can take a member--any member--by neck and crop and
fling him out without anything resembling a formality at all.
She is sole accuser and sole witness, and her testimony is final and
carries uncompromising and irremediable doom with it.
The Sole-Witness Court! It should make the Council of Ten and the
Council of Three turn in their graves for shame, to see how little they
knew about satanic concentrations of irresponsible power. Here we have
one Accuser, one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman--and all four bunched
together in Mrs. Eddy, the Inspired of God, His Latest Thought to His
People, New Member of the Holy Family, the Equal of Jesus.
When a Member is not satisfactory to Mrs. Eddy, and yet is blameless in
his life and faultless in his membership and in his Christian Science
walk and conversation, shall he hold up his head and tilt his hat over
one ear and imagine himself safe because of these perfections? Why, in
that very moment Mrs. Eddy will cast that spiritual X-ray of hers through
his dungarees and say:
"I see his hypnotism working, among his insides--remove him to the
block!"
What shall it profit him to know it isn't so? Nothing. His testimony is
of no value. No one wants it, no one will ask for it. He is not present
to offer it (he does not know he has been accused), and if he were there
to offer it, it would not be listened to.
It was out of powers approaching Mrs. Eddy's--though not equalling them
--that the Inquisition and the devastations of the Interdict grew. She
will transmit hers. The man born two centuries from now will think he
has arrived in hell; and all in good time he will think he knows it.
Vast concentrations of irresponsible power have never in any age been
used mercifully, and there is nothing to suggest that the Christian
Science Papacy is going to spend money on novelties.
Several Christian Scientists have asked me to refrain from prophecy.
There is no prophecy in our day but history. But history is a
trustworthy prophet. History is always repeating itself, because
conditions are always repeating themselves. Out of duplicated conditions
history always gets a duplicate product. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER VII - READING LETTERS AT MEETINGS--HONESTY REQUISITE--FURTHER APPLICATIONS OF THE AXE
Read previous: BOOK II: CHAPTER VII - THE NEW UNPARDONABLE SIN
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