students that over fifteen hundred members united before the first annual meeting, held in October, 1893.
Now the building fund began to grow as it had not done before. The donations returned by the doubting Thomas were sent back doubled and trebled. In order to secure the more rapid completion of the Mother Church edifice forty students each contributed one thousand dollars in 1894. Mrs. Eddy privately summoned her student, Joseph Armstrong, to Pleasant View, placing in his hands the power of decision in vexatious questions that might arise, and through his able, loyal, patient direction the original Mother Church was completed in every perfection of detail on the night of December 30, 1894.
Thus was the great labor of her mind during the first five years of her retirement brought to a satisfactory conclusion. The little local church, which in 1888 had threatened to eject the founder of the Christian Science movement, was no more; it had been dissolved and swallowed up in that larger organization which, in the provisos of its trust deed, pledged itself to teach nothing within the church walls which should not be in strict harmony with the doctrine and practise of Christian Science as set forth by Mary Baker G. Eddy in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” The trustees, moreover, now constituted the board of directors of the Mother Church and they elected Mrs. Eddy pastor emeritus. The church was dedicated January 5, 1895.
