Article July 18, 1901 Issue

The Annual Communion Season

BY C. W. CHADWICK.

For three consecutive years it has been my privilege to attend the Annual Communion service in the Mother Church, and each time I have returned home with a happier heart, and with renewed animation and determination to do better work in the Master's vineyard. Each year latent errors have been unearthed and repented of, bringing to individual consciousness a higher and purer sense of Life and its eternal demands.

Our last Communion has brought to us manifold blessings, so that we can all return to our respective fields of labor and there let our daily lives attest our gratitude for what divine Love has done and can do for us as individuals and for the whole world. I for one feel more thankful than ever before to our beloved Leader for her unselfish and untiring efforts in behalf of all humanity. Incomplete indeed would be my gratitude if it did not embody a correct and just estimate of her selfless mission to the world. It is more patent to my thought than ever before, how that many a poor, suffering mortal, through a false concept of Mrs. Eddy as the Discoverer of Christian Science to this age, bars his own door to an understanding of the Science and to the manifold blessings it brings; and I can say from the standpoint of honest conviction that Christian Scientists are not worshiping Mrs. Eddy's personality. The Spirit of Truth and Love made manifest during our last Communion has given me authority to make this statement. Her comprehensive message to her church, fraught with compassionate love, the quiet and orderly pilgrimage of some three thousand of the students to her home in Concord, unaccompanied by any of the too common manifestations of hero worship, the heavenly uplifting, the joy and peace, that have come to us through these experiences, are convincing evidence to me of the power and presence of the impersonal Christ, Truth, chastening our wavering affections and directing thought heavenward.

This large gathering of people during Communion week, coming from the four corners of the earth, perhaps means vastly more to Christian Scientists than to the world at large, but its holy influence will be felt far and near. Never before was the quickening Spirit more in evidence. Expressions of love and good-will greeted us at every turn. All seemed anxious to extend a helping hand, to share with others the blessings they had received. This manifestation of love in lifting one another's burdens is the healing balm that binds up the broken-hearted and wipes away all tears. No one present could have failed to sense the aroma of such an atmosphere. It was proof to me that all were abiding "under the shadow of the Almighty."

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