as
not an island of the sea in which he could lift up his voice and
sermonize; Mrs. Eddy's command covered "this" planet. Not one voice
was raised in protest. Whatever the pastors felt, they obeyed. Many of
them kissed the rod. L. P. Norcross, one of the deposed pastors, wrote
humbly in the August _Journal_:

"Did any one expect such a revelation, such a new departure
would be given? No, not in the way it came.... A former
pastor of the Mother Church once remarked that the day would
dawn when the current methods of preaching and worship would
disappear, but he could not discern how.... Such disclosures
are too high for us to perceive. _To One alone did the
message come._"

_The "Reader" Restricted_

Mrs. Eddy had no grudge against her pastors; she did not intend that
they should starve, and many of them were made Readers and were
permitted to read "Science and Health" aloud in the churches which
they had built and in which they had formerly preached.

The "Reader," it would seem, was a safe experiment, and he was so well
hedged in with by-laws that he could not well go astray. His duties
and limitations are clearly defined:

He is to read parts of "Science and Health" aloud at every service.

He cannot read from a manuscript or from a transcribed copy, but must
read from _the book itself_.

He is, Mrs. Eddy says, to be "well read and well educated," but he
shall at no time make any remarks explanatory of the passages which he
reads.

Before commencing to read from Mrs. Eddy's book "he shall distinctly
announce its full title and give the author's name."

A Reader must not be a leader in the church.

Lest, under all these restrictions, his incorrigible ambition might
still put forth its buds, there is a saving by-law which provides that
Mrs. Eddy can without explanation remove any reader at any time that
she sees fit to do so.[6]

Mrs. Eddy herself seems to have considered this a safe arrangement. In
the same number of the _Journal_ in which she dismissed her pastors
and substituted Readers, she stated, in an open letter, that her
students would find in that issue "the completion, as I now think, of
the Divine directions sent out to the churches." But it was by no
means the completion. By the summer of 1902 Septimus J. Hanna, First
Reader of the Mother Church in Boston, had become, without the liberty
to preach or to "make remarks," by the mere sound of his voice, it
w