e and have to be abolished.

But where business and glory are concerned, Mrs. Eddy thinks of
everything, and so she did not fail to take care of her Aborigines,
her stately and exclusive One Hundred, her college of functionless
cardinals, her Sanhedrin of Privileged Talkers (Limited). After taking
away all the liberties of the branch Churches, and in the same breath
disclaiming all official control over their affairs, she smites them on
the mouth with this--the very mouth that was watering for those nobby
ground-floor honors--

"No First Members. Branch Churches shall not organize with First
Members, that special method of organization being adapted to the
Mother-Church alone."

And so, first members being prohibited, we pierce through the cloud
of Mrs. Eddy's English and perceive that they must then necessarily
organize with Subsequent Members. There is no other way. It will occur
to them by-and-by to found an aristocracy of Early Subsequent Members.
There is no By-law against it.

"THE"

I uncover to that imperial word. And to the mind, too, that conceived
the idea of seizing and monopolizing it as a title. I believe it is Mrs.
Eddy's dazzlingest invention. For show, and style, and grandeur, and
thunder and lightning and fireworks it outclasses all the previous
inventions of man, and raises the limit on the Pope. He can never put
his avid hand on that word of words--it is pre-empted. And copyrighted,
of course. It lifts the Mother-Church away up in the sky, and
fellowships it with the rare and select and exclusive little company of
the THE's of deathless glory--persons and things whereof history and
the ages could furnish only single examples, not two: the Saviour, the
Virgin, the Milky Way, the Bible, the Earth, the Equator, the Devil,
the Missing Link--and now The First Church, Scientist. And by clamor of
edict and By-law Mrs. Eddy gives personal notice to all branch Scientist
Churches on this planet to leave that THE alone.

She has demonstrated over it and made it sacred to the Mother-Church:

"The article 'The' must not be used before the titles of branch
Churches--

"Nor written on applications for membership in naming such churches."

Those are the terms. There can and will be a million First Churches
of Christ, Scientist, scattered over the world, in a million towns and
villages and hamlets and cities, and each may call itself (suppressing
the article), "First Church of Christ. Scientist"--it