Mary's soul was much disturbed at times, notwithstanding the religio-scientific consolations of her surrounding guardians. She began to demonstrate, in her own scattered little person, the one everlasting assumption of "Christian Science," that the human body is an illusion to be dispelled. In other words, Mary Nash was fast sinking into what ordinary doctors of medicine and divinity term illness, and it became extreme. Then, not for the first time, her father, went to Boston himself, to take, if possible, his daughter back to his care and her mother's heart, at the Augusta home. But still, still--unless by some accident of a moment--she was always under the eye and the power of a "metaphysical" keeper. Then Mary said "no"--she "could not leave the fount of Christian Science." So she stayed in Boston; for she was of age, and could select her castle and companionship while she had the ways and means to maintain them. Now what could a poor law-abiding citizen of New England, who had once been a mayor, do in such a case? Had Mary's father been a wild citizen of the West or the South, he might have taken his handy "gun" along with him, and removed his child or "cleaned out the ranch." But Maine and Massachusetts are too subdued for such stringent remedies. So Mayor Nash mourned of "hypnotism," and offered--the distracted father that he was--five hundred dollars, to release his daughter from the blessings of her religion. This mercenary offer was spurned, as suspect perchance in legal and ecclesiastic form; but the way was pointed out in which the money might be received for lessons in Christian Science, at the Woodbury cut-rates. Meanwhile, it being ascertained that Mary Nash had a modest bank-account in her name, the money was sent for, by herself nominally, but visibly through a person in the number seven shoes of a "loyal student." The bank men--who were not "in Science"--declined to pay Mary's demand, and referred the matter to her father. He agreed with the bank in holding the proceeds of his daughter's account, and his very stomach, not to say his soul, rejected the thought of exchanging cash for religious instruction from Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury. So little Mary Nash became of no further promise to "Christian Science." And there was no time to lose. Mary was plainly departing from the state of deception--certainly such to _her_--called "earthly life." Hastily, at last, she was permitted to journey home with her father, and presently the sad man laid his daughter away in what to him was death.[54] From the history of "Christian Science"--set down in these pages as the thing really is--it must be clear to anybody not quite emptied of all "mortal sense" that Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury has been the most logical sequence, the most practical outcome, of the whole firmamental illumination.