[Christian Science by Mark Twain]@TWC D-Link bookChristian Science CHAPTER VII 17/35
Although we have seen that she has absolute and irresponsible command over her spectral Boards and over every official and servant of her Church, at home and abroad, over every minute detail of her Church's government, present and future, and can purge her membership of guilty or suspected persons by various plausible formalities and whenever she will, she is still not content, but must set her queer mind to work and invent a way by which she can take a member--any member--by neck and crop and fling him out without anything resembling a formality at all. She is sole accuser and sole witness, and her testimony is final and carries uncompromising and irremediable doom with it. The Sole-Witness Court! It should make the Council of Ten and the Council of Three turn in their graves for shame, to see how little they knew about satanic concentrations of irresponsible power.
Here we have one Accuser, one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman--and all four bunched together in Mrs.Eddy, the Inspired of God, His Latest Thought to His People, New Member of the Holy Family, the Equal of Jesus. When a Member is not satisfactory to Mrs.Eddy, and yet is blameless in his life and faultless in his membership and in his Christian Science walk and conversation, shall he hold up his head and tilt his hat over one ear and imagine himself safe because of these perfections? Why, in that very moment Mrs.Eddy will cast that spiritual X-ray of hers through his dungarees and say: "I see his hypnotism working, among his insides--remove him to the block!" What shall it profit him to know it isn't so? Nothing.
His testimony is of no value.
No one wants it, no one will ask for it.
He is not present to offer it (he does not know he has been accused), and if he were there to offer it, it would not be listened to. It was out of powers approaching Mrs.Eddy's--though not equalling them--that the Inquisition and the devastations of the Interdict grew. She will transmit hers.
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