The Report of the Master (appointed the by Supreme Judicial Court in the Great Litigation involving The Christian Science Mother Church in Boston in 1919-1921) shows the distinction between the permanent Board of four Directors under the 1892 financial Deed of Trust, constituted before the church was formed, and the interim Board of five Directors under the Manual, constituted as an ecclesiastical church body that would cease to function when its first vacancy occurred after Mrs. Eddy’s passing.

The Master wrote:

“The Board was originally constituted not by any vote or By-Law of the Church but by Mrs. Eddy herself in an earlier deed of trust dated Sept. 1, 1892, before the church was organized. . . . There has resulted an ambiguity in the use of the above name of the Board, important to be kept in mind. By that name was originally designated only the Board of four trustees constituted by the deed of 1892. As often afterwards used in the church By-Laws or Manual, it designates a Board exercising also functions and power not derived from the deed at all, but from church By-Laws, purporting to confer them; and since Feb. 7, 1903, a Board containing one more member than the deed directs.”


In this report, the Master wholly upheld the 1898 Deed of Trust to the Publishing Society as a legal instrument outside of the church and as wholly unaffected by any Manual By-Laws; and his findings of fact were sustained in their entirety by the Court.

With these findings in mind, it is reasonable to assume that the church functions of the five Directors, as an ecclesiastical body, could be discontinued without affecting the functions of the original four Directors, or their successors, under the financial Deed of Trust of September 1, 1892.

The Master’s discrimination between the Board of Directors of The Mother Church and the Board of Directors under the 1892 financial Deed of Trust, before the church was formed, was in line with Mrs. Eddy’s Manual Plan which would permit the original Deed of Trust, given to the four Directors only, before the church was formed, to operate after The Mother Church was self-dissolved by reason of its inability to continue after it could no longer elect its officers, thus releasing the five ecclesiastical Directors from their superimposed church duties after their fulfillment, when they were unable to perpetuate themselves as five Directors under the Manual without Mrs. Eddy’s approval of the election of a Director to fill a vacancy due to the decease of a Director, and the election of other church officers.