ctors; Board of Education; Board of Lectureships; Future Board of
Trustees, Proprietor of the Publishing-House and Periodicals; Treasurer;
Clerk; Proprietor of the Teachers; Proprietor of the Lecturers;
Proprietor of the Missionaries; Proprietor of the Readers; Dictator of
the Services; sole Voice of the Pulpit; Proprietor of the Sanhedrin;
Sole Proprietor of the Creed. (Copyrighted.); Indisputable Autocrat
of the Branch Churches, with their life and death in her hands; Sole
Thinker for The First Church (and the others); Sole and Infallible
Expounder of Doctrine, in life and in death; Sole permissible
Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of Ostensible Hypnotists;
Fifty-handed God of Excommunication--with a thunderbolt in every hand;
Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches--the Perpetual
Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, "the Comforter."

CHAPTER X

There she stands-painted by herself. No witness but herself has been
allowed to testify. She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated
by her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative value as
a witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in
unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a
verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish
to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders,
she is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts
tomorrow.

But her acts are consistent. They are always faithful to her, they never
misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly,
precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only
those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion,
mood, and carriage that mark--exteriorly--the march of the years and
record the accumulations of experience, while--interiorly--through all
this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding
detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the
beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the
character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron
framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must
take, and keep, throughout life. We call it a person's nature.

The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally--with his
hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compassionate
can have that disposition