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
