Whereas in truth the unmeddled-with liberties of a branch Christian Science Church are but very, very few in number, and are these: 1. It can appoint its own furnace-stoker, winters. 2. It can appoint its own fan-distributors, summers. 3. It can, in accordance with its own choice in the matter, burn, bury, or preserve members who are pretending to be dead--whereas there is no such thing as death. 4. It can take up a collection. The branch Churches have no important liberties, none that give them an important voice in their own affairs. Those are all locked up, and Mrs. Eddy has the key. “Local Self-Government” is a large name and sounds well; but the branch Churches have no more of it than have the privates in the King of Dahomey's army. “MOTHER-CHURCH UNIQUE” Mrs. Eddy, with an envious and admiring eye upon the solitary and rivalless and world-shadowing majesty of St. Peter's, reveals in her By-laws her purpose to set the Mother-Church apart by itself in a stately seclusion and make it duplicate that lone sublimity under the Western sky. The By-law headed “Mother-Church Unique” says-- “In its relation to other Christian Science churches, the Mother-Church stands alone. “It occupies a position that no other Church can fill. “Then for a branch Church to assume such position would be disastrous to Christian Science, “Therefore--” Therefore no branch Church is allowed to have branches. There shall be no Christian Science St. Peter's in the earth but just one--the Mother-Church in Boston. “NO FIRST MEMBERS” But for the thoughtful By-law thus entitled, every Science branch in the earth would imitate the Mother-Church and set up an aristocracy. Every little group of ground-floor Smiths and Furgusons and Shadwells and Simpsons that organized a branch would assume that great title, of “First Members,” along with its vast privileges of “discussing” the weather and casting blank ballots, and soon there would be such a locust-plague of them burdening the globe that the title would lose its value and have to be abolished. But where business and glory are concerned, Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything, and so she did not fail to take care of her Aborigines, her stately and exclusive One Hundred, her college of functionless cardinals, her Sanhedrin of Privileged Talkers (Limited). After taking away all the liberties of the branch Churches, and in the same breath disclaiming all official control over their affairs, she smites them on the mouth with this--the very mouth that was watering for those nobby ground-floor honors-- “No First Members. Branch Churches shall not organize with First Members, that special method of organization being adapted to the Mother-Church alone.”