In a single sentence, of touching tenderness, in the Manual of The Mother Church, Mrs. Eddy describes the origin of her Church: "In the spring of 1879, a little band of earnest seekers after Truth went into deliberations over forming a church without creeds, to be called the 'Church of Christ, Scientist.'"Man., p. 17.
"A little band of earnest seekers after Truth." One cannot think of that first handful of students without feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude for their courage, their spiritual insight. Did that "little band of earnest seekers" know they were caught up in a God impelled activity that was to change forever the orthodox, conventional concepts of church and its organization to an understanding of church as based on Christian healing and a divine Science? Perhaps not. But they were!
An early church structure of the children of Israel described in the Bible is the tent-tabernacle carried by the people of the Exodus through the desert and set up at each encampment. More permanent, more elaborate, and larger structures for the worship of the one God developed in the ensuing twelve hundred and fifty years to Jesus' time. What probably represented to the Jews the epitome of church structure then was Herod's grandly fashioned temple in Jerusalem—the same temple that was destroyed, along with Jerusalem itself, by Rome in A.D. 70. In intervening centuries, the impetus toward erecting grand structures brought great heights of cathedral building in the Middle Ages.
