general convention at New York City, February 11, 1886.”[1]
Thus Mrs. Eddy describes how, from her address to the association in Boston which held its tenth annual meeting on January sixth of that year at the college building, the action was immediately taken to carry out her views and wishes for the associations in other cities to be drawn into a unity of purpose. On February tenth the first regular meeting of the national association was held in New York City with delegates present from Boston and Chicago. This national association held four subsequent meetings and was of tremendous aid in the formative period of the church. It held its second meeting in Boston, its third meeting in Chicago, its fourth meeting in Cleveland, and its final meeting in New York, when Mrs. Eddy requested its members to adjourn for an indefinite period. She had then other plans for the church which unfolded successfully and harmoniously.
It was somewhat in consequence of the forming of the national association, somewhat in the gradual missionary work of the Journal, and largely because of the healing work of the students, who went out from the college month after month, that the Christian Science doctrine spread to every part of the country. This book is not a history of the Christian Science movement, hence it is not within its province to show how it came about that thirty academies were in existence in 1888. But so it was, and these schools were in Colorado, Kansas, California,
- ↑ “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 73.
