ning any marked
personal prominence and from acquiring a personal following. In other
words, the church was to have all the vigor of spontaneous growth, but
was to grow only as Mrs. Eddy permitted and to confine itself to the
trellis she had built for it.

_Preaching Prohibited_

Naturally, the first danger lay in the pastors of her branch churches.
Mrs. Stetson and Laura Lathrop had built up strong churches in New
York; Mrs. Ewing was pastor of a flourishing church in Chicago, Mrs.
Leonard of another in Brooklyn, Mrs. Williams in Buffalo, Mrs. Steward
in Toronto, Mr. Norcross in Denver. These pastors naturally became
leaders among the Christian Scientists in their respective
communities, and came to be regarded as persons authorized to expound
"Science and Health" and the doctrines of Christian Science. Such a
state of things Mrs. Eddy considered dangerous, not only because of
the personal influence the pastor might acquire over his flock, but
because a pastor might, even without intending to do so, give a
personal color to his interpretation of her words. In his sermon he
might expand her texts and infinitely improvise upon her themes until
gradually his hearers accepted his own opinions for Mrs. Eddy's. The
church in Toronto might come to emphasize doctrines which the church
in Denver did not; here was a possible beginning of differing
denominations.

So, as Mrs. Eddy splendidly puts it, "In 1895 I ordained the Bible and
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, as the Pastor, on this
planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science Denomination."
That is what Mrs. Eddy actually did. In the _Journal_ of April, 1895,
she announced, without any previous warning to them, that her
preachers should never preach again; that there were to be no more
preachers; that each church should have instead a First and a Second
Reader, and that the Sunday sermon was to consist of extracts from
the Bible and from "Science and Health," read aloud to the
congregation. In the beginning the First Reader read from the Bible
and the Second Reader from Mrs. Eddy's book. But this she soon
changed. The First Reader now reads from "Science and Health" and the
Second reads those passages of the Bible which Mrs. Eddy says are
correlative. This service, Mrs. Eddy declares, was "authorized by
Christ."[5]

When Mrs. Eddy issued this injunction, every Christian Science
preacher stepped down from his pulpit and closed his lips. There w