Freedom is native to man because it is God-derived. This is why men, throughout the ages, have worked and lived, fought and died, for their ideals of freedom. Patrick Henry expressed the value which men have placed upon it when he cried, "Give me liberty or give me death!"
It was because the early settlers of America prized their freedom above all else that they left the comfort and security of their native lands and built their homes in the wilderness of the new world. Here they watchfully tended and cultivated the tender plant of freedom, until it grew into a great and hardy tree, and under the shelter of its great branches the people, too, grew and prospered.
But, as yet, the tree of freedom had not borne its full fruitage. When the hearts of men were prepared for the revelation and experience of freedom in its diviner aspects and deeper meaning, the longawaited fruition came. In 1875, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy was published. In this book we read (p. 226): "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."
