Childhood
Bliss Knapp, C.S.B., was born on June 7, 1877 in Lyman, New Hampshire. His parents, Ira Oscar Knapp and Flavia Stickney Knapp, were students of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and they were pioneering workers in its growth. Ira Knapp was one of the original directors to whom Mrs. Eddy deeded the land on which the Original Edifice of the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, was built.
Bliss Knapp's mother Flavia had studied under Eddy at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, having completed her Primary in April 1889. In the summer of 1895 she taught a Primary class with Bliss as a member. He finished this class before the beginning of the fall session at the university. Bliss's sister Daphne was in Mrs. Eddy's last class of 1898, the so-called "Class of Seventy" as seventy invitations had been sent out although 67 attended. Mrs. Knapp was selected as the first teacher in the new Board of Education. Mrs. Knapp taught 85 primary class pupils as a teacher of Christian Science. She was selected to teach the 1898 Normal class but died on March 15, 1898. Her death was a tremendous blow to Bliss's father. However, Eddy proceeded to pray for Ira audibly and this prayer supposedly healed him of his grief.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)