Three years ago this month (January, 1897), I made my first bow to a Christian Scientist after a long and fruitless search for Truth in the tangled wilderness of "ists" and "isms" which go to make up this latter-day Christianity.
I searched "from Dan to Beersheba," beginning with the Roman Catholic Church, in which I received my early training. I left my native village in Massachusetts when but a youth, and continued my search for the "Christ Child," wandering from city to city and from State to State, forever driven on by an unconquerable longing for an unknown something that always seemed to be "just ahead" of me. After following this "will-o'-the-wisp" for twenty years I found myself a resident of this beautiful city of the southland (Atlanta, Ca.), so circumstanced by marriage, etc., that further travel was out of the question. Then came the "book period." I searched diligently the records from Dante's Inferno to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. After summing up the results of my labors, I came to the final decision that the wisdom of man ended where it began,— in dust.
Here followed the drink habit, in which Heaven became a myth, and hell a reality, within whose corporate limits I was a citizen and taxpayer. I followed the usual course, from a social glass over which to discuss a religious topic, to delirium tremens. My worldly possessions soon disappeared behind the bar, and my friends vanished into their native nothingness. I stood alone, but my time had come— to be saved.
