# The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy/Chapter 23

CHAPTER XXIII
JOSEPHINE CURTIS WOODBURY AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL—BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF PEACE—MRS. EDDY WITHDRAWS HER SUPPORT—"WAR IN HEAVEN"
Mrs. Eddy's absence from Boston made it possible for some of her ambitious leaders there to exercise a stronger personal influence than they could ever have done had she been at her old headquarters in Commonwealth Avenue. This opportunity was seized, and abused, so Mrs. Eddy thought, by one of her most prominent aids, Josephine Curtis Woodbury.
Mrs. Woodbury had been associated with Mrs. Eddy since 1879, and had been one of her foremost healers and teachers. She had written a great deal for the Journal, had preached and lectured as far west as Denver, had organised classes and church societies, and had conducted a Christian Science "academy" at the Hotel Berkshire, in Boston.
Mrs. Woodbury was clever, self-confident, given to theatrical display, ready with her tongue and pen, and she possessed an amazing personal influence over her adherents. In short, she was the only Christian Scientist in Boston who ever bade fair to rival Mrs. Eddy in personal prominence. Like Mrs. Eddy, she was ambitious, and delighted in leadership. She, too, could send her students hither and yon, and keep them dancing attendance upon her telegrams. Some of them lived in her ​house and went to Maine with her in the summer; they sat spellbound at her lectures, and put their time and goods at her disposal.
Mrs. Woodbury's group of students and followers were, on the whole, very different from the simple, rule-abiding Christian Scientists who had been taught directly under Mrs. Eddy's personal supervision. Mrs. Eddy's own people never got very far away from her hard-and-fast business principles, while Mrs. Woodbury's students were distinctly fanciful and sentimental, and strove to add all manner of ornamentation to Mrs. Eddy's stout homespun. There were two or three musicians among them, and a young illustrator and his handsome wife, and most of them wrote verses. Some of Mrs. Woodbury's students went abroad with her, and acquired the habit of interlarding the regular Christian Science phraseology with a little French. Mrs. Woodbury and her students lived in a kind of miracle-play of their own; had inspirations and revelations and premonitions; kept mental trysts; saw portents and mystic meanings in everything; and spoke of God as coming and going, agreeing and disagreeing with them. Some of them affected cell-like sleeping-chambers, with white walls, bare except for a picture of Christ. They longed for martyrdom, and made adventures out of the most commonplace occurrences. Mrs. Woodbury herself had this marvel-loving temperament. Her room was lined with pictures of the Madonna. When she went to Denver to lecture on Christian Science in 1887, her train was caught in a blizzard; in relating this experience, she describes herself as "face to face with death." Her two children fell into the water on the Nantasket coast; Mrs. ​Woodbury "treated" them, and they recovered. She writes upon this incident a dramatic article entitled "Drowning Overcome."
Mrs. Woodbury and her students thus succeeded in giving to Mrs. Eddy's homely "Science"—pieced together in dull New England shoe towns and first taught to people who worked with their hands—an emotional colouring which was very distasteful to Mrs. Eddy herself. Never was any woman less the religieuse. "Discovering and founding" Christian Science had been her business, performed, in spite of all her flightiness, in a businesslike manner, and her success was eminently a businesslike success. With yearnings and questings and raptures, Mrs. Eddy had little patience, and Mrs. Woodbury's romantic school, with its spiritual alliances, annoyed her beyond expression.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Woodbury's students inevitably found their miracle. In June, 1890, Mrs. Woodbury gave birth to a son whom her followers believed was the result of an "immaculate conception," and an exemplification of Mrs. Eddy's theory of "mental generation." Mrs. Woodbury named her child "The Prince of Peace," and baptised him at Ocean Point, Me., in a pool which she called "Bethsada." "While there," writes Mrs. Woodbury, "occurred the thought of baptising little Prince in a singularly beautiful salt pool, whose rocky bottom was dry at low tide and overflowing at high tide, but especially attractive at mid-tide, with its two feet of crystal water. A crowd of people had assembled on the neighbouring bluffs, when I brought him from our cottage not far away, and laid him three times prayerfully in the pool and when he was lifted ​therefrom, they joined in a spontaneously appropriate hymn of praise."
Mrs. Woodbury would not permit the child, who was called Prince for short, to address her husband as "father," but insisted that he address Mr. Woodbury as "Frank" and herself as "Birdie." The fact that he was a fine, healthy baby, and was never ill, seemed to Mrs. Woodbury's disciples conclusive evidence that he was the Divine principle of Christian Science made manifest in the flesh. It was their pleasure to bring gifts to Prince; to discover in his behaviour indications of his spiritual nature; and they professed to believe that when he grew to manhood he would enter upon his Divine ministry.
Six months before the birth of Prince, Mrs. Woodbury paid a visit to Mrs. Eddy, and she seems to imply that the venerable leader oracularly foretold the coming of her child. "In January," writes Mrs. Woodbury, "I enjoyed a visit with my ever-beloved Teacher, who gave comfort in these words, though at the moment they were not received in their deeper import: 'Go home and be happy. Commit thy ways unto the Lord. Trust him, and he will bring it to pass.' " This may have suggested to the faithful the visit of Mary to Elizabeth; but if there was any miracle-play of this sort in progress, Mrs. Eddy had certainly no intention of playing Elizabeth to Mrs. Woodbury's Mary. When word was brought her of the birth of Mrs. Woodbury's "little Immanuel," as he was often called, she was far from being convinced. "Child of light!" she exclaimed indignantly. "She knows it is an imp of Satan." In the libel suit which Mrs. Woodbury later brought against her Teacher, a letter to her from Mrs. Eddy was read in court, ​in which Mrs. Eddy said: "Those awful reports about you, namely that your last child was illegitimate, etc. I again and again tried to suppress that report; also for what you tried to make people believe; namely, that that child was an immaculate conception, . . . and you replied that it was incarnated with the Devil."
Mrs. Eddy was the more vexed with Mrs. Woodbury because she herself had undoubtedly taught that in the future, when the world had attained a larger growth in Christian Science, children would be conceived by communion with the Divine mind; but she probably had no idea that any one of her students, ambitious to "demonstrate over material claims," would actually attempt to put this theory into practice. She was wise enough, moreover, to see that such extravagant claims would bring Christian Science into disrepute, and she vigorously denounced Mrs. Woodbury's zeal.
Besides her school in Boston, Mrs. Woodbury had a large following in Maine, where she usually spent the summer. In 1896 Fred D. Chamberlain began a suit against her for the alienation of his wife's affections—his wife being a pupil of Mrs. Woodbury's. At this time, the Boston Traveller, in discussing Mr. Chamberlain's charge, took up the question of the claims that were made for Mrs. Woodbury's son, Prince. The Traveller asserted that some of Mrs. Woodbury's students had been induced against their will to buy stock in an "air-engine" which Mr. Woodbury was exploiting, and published interviews with George Macomber and H. E. Jones, both of Augusta, Me., who stated that their wives had believed that Mrs. Woodbury's child was immaculately conceived, had desired to make presents ​to it, and had urged their husbands to buy stock in the air-engine. The Traveller also made the statement that Evelyn I. Rowe of Augusta had applied for a divorce from her husband upon the ground of non-support, saying that he gave all his earnings toward the education and support of Mrs. Woodbury's son, Prince, whom Mr. Rowe believed to have been immaculately conceived. After the publication of this, Mrs. Woodbury promptly sued the Traveller for criminal libel, and lost her case.
All this notoriety brought matters to a crisis between Mrs. Woodbury and Mrs. Eddy. Although Mrs. Eddy had found Mrs. Woodbury very useful, she had long distrusted her discretion, and had endeavoured in various ways to put a check upon her. Mrs. Woodbury had first become a member of Mrs. Eddy's church in 1886. When the Mother Church was reorganised, it was necessary, in order that Mrs. Eddy might cull out such persons as were distasteful to her, for all the old members to apply for admission and be voted upon, just as were the new candidates. Mrs. Woodbury was admitted only upon the condition that she would undergo a two years' probation, and she had some difficulty in getting back even upon those terms. Several months before her admission on probation, she wrote to Mrs. Eddy, begging her to use her personal influence in her behalf. To this petition Mrs. Eddy replied:
Dear Student:
I have your letter asking my assistance in getting admission to the church. I have made a rule, which has been published in our Journal that I shall not be consulted on the applications for membership to this church or dismissals from it. This responsibility must rest on the First Members according to the rules of the church. Hence I return your letter to you and the church.
​May the love that must govern you and the church influence your motives, is my fervent wish; But remember, dear student, that malicious hypnotism is no excuse for sin. But God's grace is sufficient to govern our lives and lead us to moral ends.
    With love
    Mary Baker G. Eddy.
On April 8 Mrs. Eddy wrote to Mrs. Woodbury:
Now, dear student try one year not to tell a single falsehood, or to practise one cheat, or to break the decalogue, and if you do this to the best of your ability at the end of that year God will give you a place in our church as sure as you are fit for it. This I know. Don't return evil for evil, and you will have your reward.
April 17 Mrs. Eddy again wrote Mrs. Woodbury a warning letter:
My Dear Student: I am willing you should let them read my letter. I forgot to mention this, hence my second line to you. Now mark what I say. This is your last chance, and you will succeed in getting back, and should. But this I warn you, to stop falsifying, and living unpurely in thought, in vile schemes, in fraudulent money-getting, etc. I speak plainly even as the need is.
I am not ignorant of your sins, and I am trying to have you in the church for protection from those temptations, and to effect your full reformation. Remember, the M. A. M., which you say in your letter causes you to sin, is not idle, and will cause you to repeat them, and so turn you again from the church, unless you pray God to keep you from falling into the foul snare. In the consciousness that you and your students are mentally speaking to me, I warn you this is forbidden by a strict rule of the by-laws as well as by conscience.
    Mary B. Eddy.
After her admission to the Mother Church, Mrs. Woodbury did not go through her two years' probation. Her name was dropped from the church roll in the fall of the first year, and in the following spring (March 24, 1896) she was reinstated. Ten days later she was, in the language of the directors, "forever excommunicated."
​What Mrs. Eddy wished was that Mrs. Woodbury should cease to identify herself in any way with Christian Science. "How dare you," she wrote to Mrs. Woodbury in the spring of 1896, "how dare you in the sight of God, and with your character behind the curtain, and your students ready to lift it on you, pursue the path perilous?" But Mrs. Woodbury was not made of such yielding stuff as the men who had aforetime obliterated themselves at Mrs. Eddy's bidding. She insisted upon going to Mrs. Eddy's church even after the directors refused to let her a pew, and after the little Prince of Peace had been taken up by his jacket and put bodily out of the Sunday-school.
Disgruntled Christian Scientists usually went off and started a church of their own, and there were by this time almost as many "reformed" varieties of Christian Science as there were dissenters. Mrs. Gestefeld taught one kind in Chicago, Mrs. Crosse another kind in Boston, Frank Mason another in Brooklyn, Captain Sabin was soon to teach another in Washington, while nearly all the students who had quarrelled with Mrs. Eddy or broken away from her were teaching or practising some variety of mind-cure. Mrs. Woodbury, accordingly, hired a hall—this seemed to be the only necessary preliminary in those days—and started a church of her own, to which her little flock followed her. In the Legion of Honour rooms she conducted services every Sunday morning. Sometimes she preached, sometimes she lectured, and sometimes she read a poem. When it was impossible for her to be there, her daughter, Gwendolyn, supplied her pulpit.
In 1897 Mrs. Woodbury published a veiled account of her ​differences with Mrs. Eddy in a pamphlet modestly entitled War in Heaven. In this book her criticism of Mrs. Eddy is courteous and respectful enough to suggest that she may still have hoped for reinstatement. But Mrs. Eddy had by this time become convinced that never, since the days of Kennedy, had there been such a mesmerist as Mrs. Woodbury. Indeed, Mrs. Eddy was not alone in accrediting Mrs. Woodbury with a strange hypnotic power. Some of Mrs. Woodbury's own students were confident that if they displeased her she had power to bring upon them sickness, insanity, and disaster. They whispered tales about Robert W. Rowe of Augusta, Me., who had disobeyed and died. Whether Mrs. Eddy really believed that the woman was possessed of some diabolical power, or whether she saw that Mrs. Woodbury's adventurous temperament would bring ridicule upon Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy was determined to be rid of her, and lost no opportunity to discredit her. The two women had it back and forth for several years, and in April, 1899, Mrs. Woodbury published in the American Register, Paris, a poem which attacked Christian Science and which ended with these significant lines:
Is the Dame that seemed august A Doll stuffed with sawdust, And must we believe that the Doll stuffed herself?
Mrs. Woodbury finally crossed the Rubicon by publishing in the Arena, May, 1899, an exposure of Mrs. Eddy and her methods.
In this attack Mrs. Woodbury satirically touched upon Mrs. Eddy's conviction that she is the star-crowned woman of the Apocalypse, and then took up the Quimby controversy, ​producing Mrs. Eddy's early letters and newspaper contributions as evidence that she got her theory of mind-cure from Mr. Quimby. She criticised the English of Science and Health; ridiculed the Mother Room; insinuated that Mrs. Eddy had illegally conferred degrees, and had been compelled to close her college for that reason; accused her of an inordinate greed for money and of "trafficking in the temple." She declared that Mrs. Eddy had been a medium, and that she was the victim of demonophobia—the fear of witchcraft. Mrs. Woodbury stated that Mrs. Eddy claimed that she had cured the Prince of Wales, now King Edward VII., of his serious illness in 1871, and that to do so she had treated him through his royal mother, as the Prince's life had been such that she could not approach him directly. According to Mrs. Woodbury, Mrs. Eddy said that she treated President Garfield after he was shot, and would have succeeded in saving his life had not Kennedy and Arens maliciously interfered to prevent her from making this convincing demonstration.
It seems that in this article Mrs. Woodbury wished to explain how she had been led to make such extraordinary claims regarding the birth of her son, Prince. She asserts that Mrs. Eddy taught her women students that they might become mothers by a supreme effort of their own minds, and that girls were terrified by the doctrine that they might be made pregnant through the influence of demons. Mrs. Woodbury had probably repented her own efforts to give a concrete example of Mrs. Eddy's theory of "mental generation," and she attacks her on this point with peculiar bitterness. She quotes the following passage from Science and Health:
The propagation of their species without the male element, by butterfly, bee, and moth is a discovery corroborative of the Science of Mind, because it shows that the origin and continuance of these insects rest on Principle, apart from material conditions. An egg never was the origin of a man, and no seed ever produced a plant. . . . The belief that life can be in matter, or soul in body, and that man springs from dust or from an egg, is the brief record of mortal error. . . . The plant grows not because of seed or soil.
Commenting upon this passage, Mrs. Woodbury says:
To what diabolical conclusions do such deductions lead? One may well hesitate to touch this delicate topic in print, yet only thus can the immoral possibilities and the utter lack of Divine inspiration in “Christian Science” be shown.
The substance of certain instructions given by Mrs. Eddy in private is as follows:
If Jesus was divinely conceived by the Holy Ghost or Spirit, without a human father, Mary not having known her husband,—then women may become mothers by a supreme effort of their own minds, or through the influence upon them of an Unholy Ghost, a malign spirit. Women of unquestioned integrity, who have been Mrs. Eddy's students, testify that she has so taught, and that by this teaching families have been broken up; that thus maidens have been terrified out of their wits, and stimulated into a frenzy resembling that of deluded French nuns, who believed themselves brought into marital relations with the glorified Jesus, as veritably the bridegroom of his church. Whatever her denials may be, such was Mrs. Eddy's teaching while in her college; to which she added the oracular declaration that it lay within her power to dissolve such motherhood by a wave of her celestial rod.
The selfish celibacy of nuns and clergy, Christian or heathen, with consequent ecclesiastical interference in family life, have been, and are, mischief-breeding blunders, fatal alike to morals and health. One result of this interference on the part of Mrs. Eddy is that Christian Science families are notably childless.
Very tenacious is she of the paradoxical title carved on her Boston church, “The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.” Surely a “Discoverer” cannot be the “Founder” of that which he has been under the necessity of discovering; while a “Founder” would have no need of discovering her own foundation. What she has really “discovered” are ways and means of perverting and prostituting the science of healing to her own ecclesiastical aggrandisement, and to the moral and physical ​depravity of her dupes. As she received this science from Dr. Quimby it meant simply the healing of bodily ills through a lively reliance on the wholeness and order of the Infinite Mind, as clearly perceived and practically demonstrated by a simple and modest love of one's kind. What she has "founded" is a commercial system, monumental in its proportions, but already tottering to its fall.
This certainly was strong language from one who had taught Christian Science for ten years, who had often been compared to John, the beloved disciple, and who had leaned upon the bosom of her Teacher. Mrs. Woodbury's article appeared the 1st of May, and during that same month her husband, Frank Woodbury, died. This, to many of Mrs. Eddy's faithful retainers, seemed like a direct judgment upon the apostate.
Mrs. Woodbury might have known that Mrs. Eddy would have the last word, and that it would be no gentle one. In her annual message to the Mother Church, read before the congregation at the June communion service, a few weeks after Mr. Woodbury's death, Mrs. Eddy indulged in certain vivid rhetoric which Mrs. Woodbury and her friends believed referred directly to Mrs. Woodbury; to her efforts to get back into the church; to her alleged practice of malicious animal magnetism; and to her widowhood. The address was not only read aloud in the church, but was published in the Christian Science Sentinel and in the Boston Herald. Mrs. Woodbury, accordingly, brought a suit for criminal libel against Mrs. Eddy.
The case came to trial in the following June, when Boston was full of Christian Scientists who had come to attend the June communion. Mrs. Woodbury lost her suit because such Christian Scientists as were summoned as witnesses testified that they had not understood Mrs. Eddy's denunciation to refer ​to Mrs. Woodbury in particular. One of the witnesses, however, Mr. William G. Nixon, Mrs. Eddy's former publisher, stated that he had understood that Mrs. Eddy meant Josephine Woodbury.
During the trial the courtroom was crowded with Christian Scientists, and Mrs. Woodbury decided that they had effected the outcome of the suit by concentrating their minds upon the judge and witnesses, and by "treating" them in Mrs. Eddy's behalf. She, accordingly, would not permit an appeal, but abjured Christian Science and retired into private life; and with Mrs. Woodbury's defeat perished the romantic movement in Christian Science.