Statue of Religious Liberty, Centennial Celebration, 1876.
One hundred years elapse, with their cares and joys, jeopardy and success, and America celebrates the centennial year of its existence by a grand exhibition in the city where is deposited the liberty bell that proclaimed "liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." The massive engine that moves obedient machinery sings a pæan to the Republic!
The nimble shuttle and the agile loom weave chaplets and trophies! Lightning-flashes leap from fathomless seas and speak with living fire congratulations of emperors, kings, and potentates! Human handicrafts, from Occident to Orient, delve and build, and fuse and shape tributes of felicitation to the glory and honor of praise, aye, even worship, of the land of Washington!
Fairmount Park blazes with the light of human advancement in science and art, literature, education and religion; and, with humility be it stated, no portion of God's footstool is more to be credited with aiding and nurturing the progress of the century than the land of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin.
There, on the Centennial grounds, the Israelites of the United States, through one of their organizations, "the Sons of the Covenant," placed their homage. It is in the shape of a group of statuary in Carrara marble styled
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.
It was executed in Rome, by one of their own people, Moses Ezekiel, a native of Richmond, Virginia. Upon the pedestal is an inscription, neither narrow in scope nor sectarian in spirit. The promoters of this tribute felt the eloquence of the Bill of Human Rights they desired to typify, and simply transcribed the clause of the Constitution which reads:
Congress Shall Make no Law Respecting
an Establishment of Religion or Prohibiting
the free Exercise Thereof.
An eminent and thoughtful foreigner, a statesman of world-wide fame, passing through Fairmount Park, earnestly gazed at the marble group, and exclaimed: "If the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 resulted in this work of art and did nothing else, the American people should be satisfied. I, the subject of a monarch, salute the Nation that makes this creation possible."[23]