ould seem, so influential that Mrs. Eddy felt the necessity to limit
still further the Reader's power. Of course she could have dismissed
Mr. Hanna, but he was far too useful to be dispensed with. So Mrs.
Eddy made a new ruling that the Reader's term of office should be
limited to three years,[7] and, Mr. Hanna's term then being up, he was
put into the lecture field. Now the highest dignity that any Christian
Scientist could hope for was to be chosen to read "Science and Health"
aloud for three years at a comfortable salary.

_Why the Readers Obeyed_

Why, it has often been asked, did the more influential pastors--people
with a large personal following, like Mrs. Stetson--consent to resign
their pulpits in the first place and afterward to be stripped of
privilege after privilege? Some of them, of course, submitted because
they believed that Mrs. Eddy possessed "Divine Wisdom"; others because
they remembered what had happened to dissenters aforetime. Of all
those who had broken away from Mrs. Eddy's authority, not one had
attained to anything like her obvious success or material prosperity,
while many had followed wandering fires and had come to nothing.
Christian Science leaders had staked their fortunes upon the
hypothesis that Mrs. Eddy possessed "divine wisdom"; it was as
expounders of this wisdom that they had obtained their influence and
built up their churches. To rebel against the authority of Mrs. Eddy's
wisdom would be to discredit themselves; to discredit Mrs. Eddy's
wisdom would have been to destroy their whole foundation. To claim an
understanding and an inspiration equal to Mrs. Eddy's, would have been
to cheapen and invalidate everything that gave Christian Science an
advantage over other religions. Had they once denied the Revelation
and the Revelator upon which their church was founded, the whole
structure would have fallen in upon them. If Mrs. Eddy's intelligence
were not divine in one case, who would be able to say that it was in
another? If they could not accept Mrs. Eddy's wisdom when she said
"there shall be no pastors," how could they persuade other people to
accept it when she said "there is no matter"? It was clear, even to
those who writhed under the restrictions imposed upon them, that they
must stand or fall with Mrs. Eddy's Wisdom, and that to disobey it was
to compromise their own career. Even in the matter of getting on in
the world, it was better to be a doorkeeper in the Mother Church t