Items of Interest November 26, 1932 Issue

Items of Interest

Occasionally one who reads an article in an out-of-print issue of the Christian Science periodicals which he would like to preserve for his own personal use, desires to copy it, and he wonders why in some Christian Science Reading Rooms there is a rule that copying will not be permitted.

In the Reading Rooms of The Mother Church copying is not generally permitted, but the rule is not a rigid one. There are times when a Christian Scientist has a legitimate reason for making notes or copying excerpts from the Christian Science periodicals which are not available to him except in the files of Reading Rooms. One reason why copying has led to disaster is the fact that minor inaccuracies appear not only in the first copy but in subsequently made copies until in some known cases there has been an absolute reversal of the author's expressed sentiment. If one is permitted to copy he would do well to decline to duplicate his notes or excerpts for others, except, of course, that he can freely quote, giving title, page, and line, in letters to patients or friends in his efforts to help them.

An additional objection to the circulating of copies is that a number of them taken from the earlier periodicals have been erroneously attributed to Mrs. Eddy's authorship. It is fortunate that some Christian Scientists receiving such documents consult the Directors of The Mother Church regarding their authenticity, when in nine cases out of ten, or perhaps more, the copied documents are found to be unauthentic or much garbled.

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