The Church of St. Bunco : $b A drastic treatment of a copyrighted religion-- Un-Christian Non-ScienceClark, Gordon
Religion
The Church of St. Bunco : $b A drastic treatment of a copyrighted religion-- Un-Christian Non-Science
Clark, Gordon
Christian Science
It will be observed that Mrs. Woodbury seemingly dealt in "metaphysics" at
cut prices, the "Mother's" regular rate for instruction being three
hundred dollars, not two hundred. But, for value received from Mrs.
Woodbury's "loyal students"--she, like "the Mother," so naming her
disciples--from seven to ten lessons only, according to the _Traveler_,
were imparted to them. Then the course was indefinitely repeated, in
accordance with the demand that could be created for the healing staples.
Here, to be sure, was something that might have greatly offended "Mother
Eddy." Yet daughter Woodbury's cut prices were only colorable, not actual;
for, in the frequent repetition of the same wisdom and religiosity to the
same "loyal students," she must have done less work for more money than
was ever done even in the Mother's college itself.
Again, if we follow newspaper files and court records in the case of the
Boston _Traveler_,[47] we are told that Mrs. Woodbury had a family
interest in putting on the market certain stock in a hot-air engine--a
kind of "Christian Science" stock in which, if her "loyal students" took a
religious flyer, their secular dealings would be sure to turn up with the
right end in the air. This, perhaps, was a prime investment; but, on
investigation, one "loyal student"--plaintiff Chamberlain of the suit we
have touched--somehow received the impression, though doubtless through
"mortal mind," that the holy engine stock had a slight smell of the Keeley
motor. Unetherealized man that he was, this affliction of his base common
sense was the immediate cause, he declared, of all his trouble. His pious
wife was unable to bear such an affront to divinity in the person of her
"teacher," St. Josephine Woodbury. So the "teacher" stuck to the wife, and
the husband was left out in the cold.[48]
That Boston newspaper, the _Traveler_, in spreading the Chamberlain
unpleasantness, was assiduously biographical. Particulars can be
curtailed. It is only necessary to say that the distinguished Mrs.
Woodbury was depicted as a self-made woman who had once been known to
plain environments, but who, with preaching, healing, scientific religion
and engine-stock, had become financially as well as spiritually beatified.
Finally she had reached a shining abode on Commonwealth Avenue--that kind
of mansion, in Boston, being the very next thing to "a mansion in the
skies."
Her "loyal students," it is true, were not represented by the _Traveler_
as having been enriched in the same way. Still, if already wealthy, as
most of them were said to be, what was the use of it? Might they not
better come unto St. Josephine Woodbury, and cast upon her the dross and
sorrow of their material accumulations?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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