Although their tactics had been successful in securing the so-called letters of dismissal, after their expulsion the seceding students declared they had considered a plan for expelling Mrs. Eddy from her own church and the Christian Scientist Association. However, the points held by Mrs. Eddy on this occasion and with which the belligerent students disagreed are to-day reckoned among the commonsense practises of Christian Science, and this incident is an example of the numerous instances where the short-sightedness of the pupil has attempted to brush aside the more mature and accurate judgment of the teacher, and where Mrs. Eddy proved her worth as a leader of the Christian Science movement. With such deep-boring desire to explode the citadel of Christian Science faith and blow into the heavens its foundation stones, the insurrectionists would have accomplished destruction had it been in human power to do so, and the dust of centuries might again have settled over the spiritual revelation, as Spofford had once foretold would be the result if Christian Science were demolished.
“Under Divine Providence there can be no accidents,” Mrs. Eddy says in “Science and Health,” and the rebellion in the Boston church in 1888 was no more a fortuitous or calamitous occurrence than the rebellion in Lynn which resulted in the transplanting of the work to Boston, the establishment of the college and Journal, and the creation of the National Christian Scientist Association. Mrs. Eddy had safeguarded the text-book of Christian Science by copyrights, and in the months
