A NUMBER of years ago a brilliant young biologist who was suffering from a physical and mental breakdown was given a copy of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. As he read through the first chapter with a certain curiosity but little enthusiasm, he thought to himself, "This really isn't my sort of book; it simply isn't the language or the kind of ideas that make sense to me." Yet he felt himself impelled to go on reading, and before he had finished the book he was healed.
More recently a young woman in Bombay, Western-trained, with an agnostic background, was given a copy of Science and Health. Halfway down the first page of the Preface she came to the sentence (p. vii), "Ignorance of God is no longer the stepping-stone to faith." As she read it a wave of astonishment swept over her. "A woman dared to write that!" she thought. A woman had dared to challenge the agelong basis of religious faith and dogma, not in the name of agnosticism but of Christianity. She had dared to say that God could actually and demonstrably be known. At that instant the knowability of God broke on the Indian woman's educated skepticism like a light.
These are only two examples of the innumerable ways in which individuals during the past one hundred years have found Christian Science. Some have drunk it in like a thirsty traveler in the desert; some have doubted and resisted and fought their way to an acceptance of its revolutionary metaphysical propositions. But child or scholar, housewife or banker, mechanic or artist, each one who has caught even a distant glimpse of the unclouded face of Truth has shared in some small measure the experience that made Mrs. Eddy the Discoverer of Christian Science.
