News
July Vault Offerings: Examining Two “Independence Day” Celebrations
July 6, 2009
In this issue of the Vault offerings for July, we highlight two events centering on the 4th of July, the national holiday of the United States. The first of these was the 1885 Point of Pines picnic that celebrated the ninth anniversary of the founding of The Christian Scientist Association on July 4, 1876. The second event took place in 1897. On Communion Sunday, which occurred that year on July 4th, Mrs. Eddy issued an invitation for church members and guests to gather the next day at Pleasant View, her home in Concord, New Hampshire. There the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science fed her audience with the meaning and qualities behind the July 4 holiday - genuine liberty and true independence.
The Point of Pines picnic gathering took place on a strip of beach north of Boston, where about 100 of her students and guests celebrated with Mary Baker Eddy the early victories and progress of Christian Science healing. Sitting inside a small dining hall that day, the assembled group heard a resolution proclaim that July 4th, the anniversary of the founding of the Christian Scientist Association, "be perpetuated as a fit anniversary for giving thanks and rejoicing with this American nation; but in a still higher sense of religious liberty than that for which, on these very shores of New England, our Pilgrim Fathers struggled."
Twelve years later, on a hot July 5th in 1897, Mary Baker Eddy again welcomed a group, this time about 2,500 guests and dignitaries, to her Pleasant View home in Concord, New Hampshire, where she and several other speakers addressed the true meaning of July 4th.
Following are excerpts or paraphrases from the talks at this gathering, taken from the August 1897 Christian Science Journal.
Mary Baker Eddy: "To-day we commemorate not only our nation's civil and religious freedom, but a greater, even the liberty of the sons of God; the inalienable rights and radiant reality of Christianity, whereof our Master said, 'The works that I do ye shall do,' and, 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation' (with knowledge obtained from the senses), but 'The kingdom of God is within you,' within the present possibilities of mankind."
Captain John F. Linscott (veteran of the American Civil War): "God is all in all; this is our Declaration of Independence to the whole world."
Henry M. Baker (Mrs. Eddy's cousin and a former member of the U.S. Congress): "He ... emphasized the importance of good citizenship as a necessary condition of good government, and impressed upon his hearers their duty, as apostles of a larger liberty, in the careful and faithful exercise of the elective franchise."
Judge Septimus Hanna (First Reader of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, and editor of the Christian Science periodicals): "Our beloved Mother had been pioneering for more than thirty years for the independence not only of this country, but of the whole world. Until we understand that we are children, not of the flesh, but of the eternal God, we shall not attain to perfect independence. To reflect God is a possibility to all, and just in proportion as we demonstrate this mighty fact are we true citizens."
William P. McKenzie (a former Presbyterian minister who had become a Christian Scientist several years before): "We have the universal tongue, the prepared country, the Leader whom God appointed. Shall this prepared people count anything as loss that they may have to give up in laboring for the independence - the liberty - of the sons of God?"
Rev. Irving C. Tomlinson (a former Universalist minister who, the day before, had been admitted to membership in The Mother Church and who referred to himself as being "one day old"): "Loyalty is the child of Love, and the child best shows its loyalty to Mother by labor for her cause. We know that this day's blessing for ourselves means tomorrow's service for humanity."
