Today when our hearts are filled with love and gratitude for the Christian Science Sunday School and the many blessings it is bringing to our children, how precious it is to recall the account of the quiet evening in a cosy parlor of a New England home when the idea of the Christian Science Sunday School unfolded to Mary Baker Eddy. The account constitutes a portion of the recollections of one of Mrs. Eddy's students and is found in Lyman P. Powell's biography of our Leader. It was after the customary singing of hymns, when nearly everyone had left the room, that a little child of five years climbed up onto Mrs. Eddy's lap to tell her good night. After a minute or two Mrs. Eddy said: "'We must have a Sunday School, Warren. You shall be the first scholar.' He fell in with the plans but immediately said, 'how can we have a Sunday School with only me.'"
But Mrs. Eddy smilingly explained to him that "that was only to begin with, & soon other little boys & girls would come." The next day she told Warren again of a plan she had to open her Sabbath School the following Sunday, and "he was to speak from the platform" at Hawthorne Hall "one verse before she began the regular services of the church....She taught the boy how to walk to the front of the platform, how to bow to the audience, how to scrape his foot or draw it backward and the general fine gestures before his recitation."
The following Sunday, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Eddy, becomingly but simply dressed, with a rose in her hair for the special occasion, entered Hawthorne Hall and walked to the platform hand in hand with the little child. Mrs. Eddy stepped to the front and "spoke of the Sabbath School in a few words, & as if it already existed." She then introduced Warren as "one of the representatives of the school, who would recite a short verse." With beaming countenance the child admirably recited the verse of a hymn Mrs. Eddy had taught him to say. As his mother later wrote, "Is it any wonder he should meet the excellence she expected?" The wonder was that Mrs. Eddy "could ever find time to attend to these details. It all enforces the fact, however, of her thoroughness in laying foundations. In her mind the idea of the church with a Sabbath School was a truly engrossing affair, so she frequently said." It is significant that it was not to the members of her Church, who perhaps considered that their Leader already had too much to attend to in connection with the Church, but to the pure, receptive thought of a little child that our divinely directed Leader imparted the idea of forming the first Christian Science Sunday School.
