CELEBRATING THE ABOLISION OF SLAVERY

If there be anyone to whom much credit should be given regarding her role in abolishing slavery, it is the American author and religious leader, Mary Baker Eddy, whose name is boldly written on the American Women’s Hall of Fame. She was married to the famous Colonel Glover of Charleston, South Carolina, who was considered wealthy, but much of his property was in slaves. Upon being deceased in 1844, Mrs Glover Eddy (as she was then known), refused to inherit her husband’s wealth of slaves. As she later wrote in a letter to The Mother Church in 1902, page 15, “I could never believe that a human being was my property.” She had taken this stand in spite of the abject poverty and political persecution she was facing at that time, coupled with her publisher’s refusal to pay her royalty on her first published work, Science & Health with key to the Scriptures. As she later wrote in that book, “Legally to abolish unpaid servitude in the United States was hard, but the abolision of mental slavery is a more difficult task. Men and women of all climes and races are still in bondage to material sense, ignorant how to obtain their freedom. The rights of men were vindicated in a single section and on the lowest plane of human life, when African slavery was abolished on our land. That was only prophetic of further steps towards the banishment of a world-wide slavery, found on higher planes of existence and under more subtle and depraving forms. Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made man free.” Paul said, “I was free born.” “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Love and Truth make man free, but evil and error lead into captivity.” (ibid. 225). As the world celebrates the abolision of slavery, it will only be fair and just to remember the pioneers such as Mary Baker Eddy, who vehemently resisted the urge to sacrifice her woes on the altar of human slavery.