Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/488

430 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