Article July 4, 2011 Issue

Healing — our ‘Declaration of Independence’

By Susan Fleming

The voice of God in behalf of the African slave was still echoing in our land, when the voice of the herald of  this new crusade sounded the keynote of universal freedom, asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a Son of God, demanding that the fetters of sin, sickness, and death be stricken from the human mind and that its freedom be won, not through human warfare, not with bayonet and blood, but through Christ's divine Science.

—Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 226

Several years ago, I was given a beautiful paperweight etched with the word Freedom in gold letters. It still sits on my desk, where it serves as a continual reminder to claim my freedom—in essence, to assert my own “Declaration of Independence.”