So, as Mrs. Eddy splendidly puts it, "In 1895 I ordained the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, as the Pastor, on this planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science Denomination." In the Journal of April, 1895, she announced, without previous warning, that there were to be no more preachers; that each church should have, instead, a First and a Second Reader, and that the Sunday sermon was to consist of extracts from the Bible and from Science and Health, read to the congregation. In the beginning the First Reader read from the Bible and the Second Reader from Mrs. Eddy's book. But this Mrs. Eddy soon changed. The First Reader now reads from Science and Health, and the Second reads those passages of the Bible which Mrs. Eddy selects as correlative. This service, Mrs. Eddy declares, was "authorised by Christ."[1]
When Mrs. Eddy issued this injunction, every Christian Science preacher promptly and silently obeyed it. Many of them kissed the rod. L. P. Norcross, one of the deposed pastors, wrote humbly in the August Journal:
Did any one expect such a revelation, such a new departure would be given? No, not in the way it came. . . . . A former pastor of the Mother Church once remarked that the day would dawn when the current methods of preaching and worship would disappear, but he could not discern how. . . . Such disclosures are too high for us to perceive. To One alone did the message come.
Mrs. Eddy had no grudge against her pastors, and many of
- ↑ In a notice to the churches, 1897, Mrs. Eddy says:
"The Bible and the Christian Science text-book are our only preachers. We shall now read scriptural texts and their co-relative passages from our text-book—these comprise our sermon. The canonical writings, together with the word of our text-book, corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their denominational, spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present, and future, constitute a sermon undivorced from truth, uncontaminated or fettered by human hypotheses and authorised by Christ."
