This lawsuit disclosed one interesting fact, namely, that while in 1893 securities of Mrs. Eddy amounting to $100,000 were brought to Concord, and in January, 1899, she had $236,200, and while in 1907 she had about a million dollars' worth of taxable property, Mrs. Eddy in 1901 returned a signed statement to the assessors at Concord that the value of her taxable property amounted to about nineteen thousand dollars. This statement was sworn to year after year by Mr. Frye.
Mrs. Eddy's Removal to Newton
About a month after Mr. Glover's suit was withdrawn, Mrs. Eddy purchased, through Robert Walker, a Christian Scientist real-estate agent in Chicago, the old Lawrence mansion in Newton, a suburb of Boston. The house was remodeled and enlarged in great haste and at a cost which must almost have equaled the original purchase price, $100,000. All the arrangements were conducted with the greatest secrecy and very few Christian Scientists knew that it was Mrs. Eddy's intention to occupy this house until she was actually there in person.
On Sunday, January 26, 1908, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Eddy, attended by nearly a score of her followers, boarded a special train at Concord. Extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent accidents. A pilot-engine preceded the locomotive which drew Mrs. Eddy's special train, and the train was followed by a third engine to prevent the possibility of a rear-end collision—a precaution never before adopted, even by the royal trains abroad. Dr. Alpheus B. Morrill, a second cousin of Mrs. Eddy and a practising physician of Concord, was of her party. Mrs. Eddy's face was heavily veiled when she took the train at Concord and when she alighted at Chestnut Hill station. Her carriage arrived at the Lawrence house late in the afternoon, and she was lifted out and carried into the house by one of her male attendants.
Mrs. Eddy's new residence is a fine old stone mansion which has been enlarged without injury to its original dignity. The grounds cover an area of about twelve acres and are well wooded. The house itself now contains about twenty-five rooms. There is an electric elevator adjoining Mrs. Eddy's private apartments. Two large vaults have been built into the house—doubtless designed as repositories for Mrs. Eddy's manuscripts. Since her arrival at Chestnut Hill, Mrs. Eddy, upon one of her daily drives, saw for the first time the new building which completes the Mother Church and which, like the original modest structure, is a memorial to her.
There are many reasons why Mrs. Eddy may have decided to leave Concord. But the extravagant haste with which her new residence was got ready for her—a body of several hundred laborers was kept busy upon it all day, and another shift, equally large, worked all night by the aid of arc-lights—would seem to suggest that even if practical considerations brought about Mrs. Eddy's change of residence, her extreme impatience may have resulted from a more personal motive. It is, indeed, very probable that Mrs. Eddy left Concord for the same reason that she left Boston years ago: because she felt that malicious animal magnetism was becoming too strong for her there. The action brought by her son in Concord last summer she attributed entirely to the work of mesmerists who were supposed to be in control of her son's mind. Mrs. Eddy always believed that this strange miasma of evil had a curious tendency to become localized: that certain streets, mail-boxes, telegraph-offices, vehicles, could be totally suborned by these invisible currents of hatred and ill-will that had their source in the minds of her enemies and continually encircled her. She believed that in this way an entire neighborhood could be made inimical to her, and it is quite possible that, after the recent litigation in Concord, she felt that the place had become saturated with mesmerism and that she would never again find peace there.
Mrs. Eddy at Eighty
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.