According to a statement of hers, she obtained her college charter from the State of Massachusetts in 1881, "with the right to grant degrees." But the act on which this grant was based was repealed in 1882. Then, in 1883, the conferring of "any diploma or degree" by any "corporation" or "association," was made a legal offense, punishable by a fine of not less than $500. Being the "president," not of any "corporation" or "association," but of a regular "college" (with a faculty of three beside herself), Mother Eddy's legal mind has held that this law, if aimed at her, failed to hit, though it knocked out all other mind-healing colleges.[39] But, in 1889, when, as persistent rumor has it, the problem was about to be solved by legal process against "Mother Eddy," the subject was practically closed by the closing of her "college," and by her retirement to New Hampshire, where "the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." Considering Mrs. Eddy's kind of "college-faculty" and "board," together with her exhaustive copyrights and the hierarchical monopolies consequent upon them, it is quite conceivable that when time was ripe she had no difficulty in "unanimously" passing resolutions to discontinue her "flourishing school." The little joker in this pack of resolutions soon came out in one of them. It deftly touched the matter of "organization," and then propounded that "the hour" had "come" when "the great need" was for "more of the Spirit," not "the letter," and that _Science and Health_ was the spirit's nutriment. It is not directly stated by Mother Eddy in this connection, that God Himself fixed the scale of prices for her book; but she does say it was "God" who "impelled" her to "set a price" for her "instruction in Christian-Science Mind-Healing." The price was three-hundred dollars a head, for a college course of three weeks. At first she "shrank from asking it." But "a strange providence" led Mary to these terms, and "God," she asserts, "has since shown" her, in "multitudinous ways," the "wisdom" of her "decision."[40] The "strange providence" and "the multitudinous ways" are not explained by her; but the "wisdom" of gathering together fat bank-deposits is unanimously acknowledged in the Church Scientist.