Death of Stetson

As it must to all, Death last week went to Mrs. Augusta Emma Simmons Stetson, battling, schismatic Christian Scientist who long claimed that she would never die. She died, hiding from mortality in her nephew's home at Rochester, N. Y., of heart disease.

Like the lives of many religious leaders --Moses, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Aimee Kennedy Semple McPherson, Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy--her biography is spotted with lacunae. She deliberately made them. She would never tell her age (it was about 87), nor her girlish life, nor permit her elderly photograph be taken, nor tell the source or spending of the millions of dollars given her. Luxuriously she spent and lived. The First Church of Christ Scientist which she founded in Manhattan a generation ago, when Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy was still her friend, cost $1,250,000. Next door is her splendid mansion. It cost scores of thousands. Each year since 1920 she spent more than $250,000. In five years she spent $750,000 advertising herself and sermons in newspapers. Her radio station VVHAP, damned for its vicious criticisms of Jews and Catholics, cost her $500,000 to run. It still exists. She always dressed expensively. She owned Mrs. Eddy's crown of diamonds.

But her spirit was lively, vibrant, domineering. Such are qualities religious chiefs since Mohammed have had. They stir their crowds; they tingle their emotions; they daze their thoughts; they get. adulation and money. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did that with the Mormons, John and Charles Wesley with the Methodists, Moody and Sankey with the evangelicals, Mrs. Eddy with the Christian Scientists. Judge Joseph Frederick Rutherford is doing likewise with the International Bible Students, Mrs. Annie Besant with the Theosophists, Mrs. Aimee Semple McPherson with the Four Square Gospellers. Theirs have been as much a profession of new business as a profession of new faiths. All of them, as soon as wealth came in sight had their schismatics, men and women who broke away from the prospering religious institution to form buccaneering organizations of their own. Judaism has had its breakaways; and Christianity, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Mormonism. Mrs. Stetson was Christian Science's divergent.