The Manual of The Mother Church is a small book of by-laws, first issued in 1895 and revised by Eddy through dozens of editions until shortly before her death in 1910. It regulates the whole church in detail: the reading of the Lesson-Sermon, the terms of Readers, the conduct of practitioners, the discipline of members, the relation of branch churches to the Mother Church in Boston, and the composition of the self-perpetuating Board of Directors that governs it. Several of its by-laws carry an unusual attachment, a requirement that a named action be taken only with Eddy's own written consent or over her signature. While she lived, these clauses concentrated authority in her hands.
After she died they became a problem with no obvious solution, since a rule requiring the consent of a person who cannot give it either freezes the action permanently or must be read as having lapsed, and the church's own officers disagreed about which. The disagreement broke into open litigation between the Board of Directors and the trustees of the church's publishing society in the years around 1920, a conflict remembered as the Great Litigation, which the courts resolved in the Directors' favour and which left the consent clauses in place. The same question, what a church may lawfully change when its constitution was written to be unchangeable, has resurfaced in different forms since, and it is inseparable from the doctrine of the impersonal pastor, which was itself a decision to fix in text what other churches leave to living judgement.