The years since 1890 Mrs. Eddy has spent in training her church in the way she desires it to go, in making it more and more her own, and in issuing by-law after by-law to restrict her followers in their church privileges and to guide them in their daily walk. Mrs. Eddy, one must remember, was fifty years of age before she knew what she wanted to do; sixty when she bethought herself of the most effective way to do it,--by founding a church,--and seventy when she achieved her greatest triumph--the reorganization and personal control of the Mother Church. But she did not stop there. Between her seventieth and eightieth year, and even up to the present time, she has displayed remarkable ingenuity in disciplining her church and its leaders, and adroit resourcefulness and unflagging energy in the prosecution of her plans. Mrs. Eddy's system of church government was not devised in a month or a year, but grew, by-law on by-law, to meet new emergencies and situations. To attain the end she desired it was necessary to keep fifty or sixty thousand people working as if the church were the first object in their lives; to encourage hundreds of these to adopt church-work as their profession and make it their only chance of worldly success; and yet to hold all this devotion and energy in absolute subservience to Mrs. Eddy herself and to prevent any one of these healers, or preachers, or teachers from attaining any marked personal prominence and from acquiring a personal following. In other words, the church was to have all the vigor of spontaneous growth, but was to grow only as Mrs. Eddy permitted and to confine itself to the trellis she had built for it. _Preaching Prohibited_ Naturally, the first danger lay in the pastors of her branch churches. Mrs. Stetson and Laura Lathrop had built up strong churches in New York; Mrs. Ewing was pastor of a flourishing church in Chicago, Mrs. Leonard of another in Brooklyn, Mrs. Williams in Buffalo, Mrs. Steward in Toronto, Mr. Norcross in Denver. These pastors naturally became leaders among the Christian Scientists in their respective communities, and came to be regarded as persons authorized to expound "Science and Health" and the doctrines of Christian Science. Such a state of things Mrs. Eddy considered dangerous, not only because of the personal influence the pastor might acquire over his flock, but because a pastor might, even without intending to do so, give a personal color to his interpretation of her words. In his sermon he might expand her texts and infinitely improvise upon her themes until gradually his hearers accepted his own opinions for Mrs. Eddy's. The church in Toronto might come to emphasize doctrines which the church in Denver did not; here was a possible beginning of differing denominations.