It was plain that the answers to questions would be in Mrs. Eddy's own spirit. She has a rapt way of talking, looking large-eyed into space, and works around a question in her own way, reaching an answer often unexpectedly after a prolonged exordium. She explained: “No present change is contemplated in the rulership. You would ask, perhaps, whether my successor will be a woman or a man. I can answer that. It will be a man.”
“Can you name the man?”
“I cannot answer that now.”
Here, then, was the definite statement that Mrs. Eddy's immediate successor would, like herself, be the ruler.
NOT A POPE OR A CHRIST
“I have been called a pope, but surely I have sought no such distinction. I have simply taught as I learned while healing the sick. It was in 1866 that the light of the Science came first to me. In 1875 I wrote my book. It brought down a shower of abuse upon my head, but it won converts from the first. I followed it up, teaching and organizing, and trust in me grew. I was the mother, but of course the term pope is used figuratively.
“A position of authority,” she went on, “became necessary. Rules were necessary, and I made a code of by-laws, but each one was the fruit of experience and the result of prayer. Entrusting their enforcement to others, I found at one time that they had five churches under discipline. I intervened. Dissensions are dangerous in an infant church. I wrote to each church in tenderness, in exhortation, and in rebuke, and so brought all back to union and love again. If that is to be a pope, then you
