This morning while out on an errand I saw what looked like a doctor's carriage standing in front of a residence. Before hardly realizing what I was doing I commenced looking back in my past life and comparing it with the present, thinking what a difference now from over six years ago. I had got to the place where I was so filled with fear on seeing the physicians' carriages stop at the door (at times my bed was so placed in the front parlor that I could look on the pavement), that I longed for the time when it would be all over and ended. I thought that only death could place me in harmony, heaven. At each visit and consultation I would wonder what awful experiment would be tried next.
After having nineteen physicians and surgeons in different parts of the world—New York, Colorado, San Francisco, England, Austria, and Germany—and trying many climates and famous watering resorts in Europe and America, Christian Science found me in Santa Barbara, Cal., where I had been taken to be made easy and enabled to be wheeled out to get fresh air, willing and ready to look away from death and seek the understanding of Life, God. "The sharp experiences of belief in the supposititious life of matter, as well as our disappointments and ceaseless woes, turn us, like tired children, to the arms of divine Love. Then we begin to learn Life, in divine Science. Without this process of weaning, 'who by searching can find out God?' It is easier to desire Truth than to rid one's self of error. Mortals may seek the understanding of Christian Science, but they will not be able to glean from it the facts of Being, without laboring for them" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker G. Eddy, page 218).
By reading a line at a time until I could read a paragraph, and committing it to memory in this way, in three months time I was enabled to leave my wheeling chair in Santa Barbara and go to Riverside, Cal., where I placed myself under the care of a loyal Scientist. I arrived with my mother at Riverside on Saturday night. Although the journey seemed to cause great suffering. I was not discouraged. The day following our arrival the healer came to me, but advised me to leave the hotel and be near her, so I could go for my treatment. I told the healer I could not walk down-stairs, in fact, I told her so many things that I wondered how she was going to remember them all. On the following Friday after arriving at Riverside (less than a week), I let my mother return North, leaving me with perfect strangers. I now can look back and find I certainly had faith in Christian Science, as I had been waited upon like a baby, not being able to comb my own hair even. Before mother left me she saw me walk nearly three blocks, which gave her courage to leave me. I never told her what seeming suffering that walk caused me, for I knew if I did she would not be willing to leave me, but it seemed best that she should, for she insisted upon my trying a material remedy.
