I have derived so much benefit from the testimonials presented in the columns of our periodicals, that I trust an account of my wonderful healing, by Christian Science, after being relegated by materia medica to years of invalidism, may stimulate and encourage others who are seeking freedom from the ills, spiritual as well as physical, of this dream of mortal life.
My father was a physician of the old school and I arrived at womanhood an ardent believer in the efficacy of the Æsculapian method, confident that it was adequate for every possible emergency of life. My religious training was in strict accordance with the dogmas of the Lutheran Church. When a person died, he had merely fulfilled his appointed destiny; it was but the unrolling of a mysterious panorama, predestined from the beginning.
The thought of death was a horror to my childish heart, but not for the ordinary reason. It was not from the terrors of "the other place" I shrank appalled. These were so repugnant to the child-thought that they never appealed to me as something to be dreaded, for I instinctively dismissed them as impossible, and not to be believed for a moment, therefore not to be feared. No, it was something very different which filled my childish heart with vague, disquieting visions of the life beyond the grave. After many years, I can still recall the haunting fear which possessed me, especially after the weekly catechism. On one point, however, I was quite clear: I did not want to go to heaven when I died. (I am obliged to confess that I usually succeeded in consoling myself with the reflection that, after all, my chances were comparatively slim.) The thought of a time absolutely endless, which I would have to spend playing on a harp ("harping" I used to term it in my childish soliloquies), alternately waving a palm branch, was not at all my idea of heaven. I stoutly protested, in these childish musings, against the infliction upon me of a musical instrument I could not manipulate; and even if I did learn up there, or wherever heaven might be, who would want to play on it all the time?
As I left my childhood behind me I gradually drifted away from the church entirely and finally became an agnostic. This state of mind, however, was evanescent. I was lost in a sea of speculative theories which, nevertheless, was less apprehensive as to the unknowable future than was the theology of my childhood. At this time I read Harriet Martineau and I was hopeful that she had, perhaps, reached the basis of a rational conclusion on the subject, in acknowledging a First Great Cause, incomprehensible to the mind of man, and supplementing this postulate with the assumption that immortality was a myth. This, I reflected, was re-assuring, at least. With a future state eliminated, one could get on here for a few brief stormy years, and then—annihilation. This relieved one from such a tremendous responsibility as to the future. It was effaced! There was no future! True, I had not found the loving heavenly Father whom I always longed to find, but this loss was partially compensated for in the thought that I was, at least, no longer in fetters to the stern, implacable God of my childhood and youth. I was glad, indeed, that all that was left of this God was a Cause. This appeared to me safely remote and indefinite.
In this darkened condition Christian Science found me three years ago. Once again was it proven that "Man's extremity is God's opportunity." After a period of protracted mental labor, in conjunction with the cares of motherhood, and as I was about to reap the fruit of my exertions, I was prostrated with a complication of maladies, the result, according to the medical verdict, of over-work, care, and anxiety. I rebelled most bitterly. To be stricken down in this manner under existing circumstances, was, to me, a monstrous injustice. Why was my hard-earned cup taken from my outstretched hand and I left only the lees to drink?
After a few weeks no prospect of immediate recovery was extended to me; on the contrary, I was compassionately bidden by the physician to resign myself to the inevitable and prepare for years, at least, of illness. I was not resigned. I had only a fierce, outraged sense of wrong ever before me. It was not right that I should be thus incapacitated, and my child, a daughter of seven, deprived of her mother's accustomed care. Nothing could make it right, and who did it, and why? This I was constantly asking myself; so, in addition to the physical misery of this unhappy time was added the burden of this cry, and a sense of unmerited injury, from some unknown, mysterious source was ever uppermost in my thoughts. I had no refuge in a religious belief, and could not, therefore, console myself with the thought that "it was the will of God," and that resignation on my part was compulsory.
At this juncture an aunt whom I had not seen for twenty years paid us a short visit. I knew that she was a Christian Scientist, and in my wretched mental state I felt that in the appearance of Christian Science upon the scene, the last remaining calamity was about to befall me. I had for years superficially regarded Christian Science as the fad of a day, and often wondered how a woman so uncommonly bright as I remembered my aunt to have been, could have embraced so preposterous a belief. I fully expected to have Christian Science hurled upon me broadcast, and to be told that there was nothing the matter with me, and I, with mortal mind inconsistency, indignantly protested in advance. It is superfluous to add that I heard nothing of the kind. I will remark, in this connection, that the delicate reticence observed at this period was the first thing that inclined me favorably toward Christian Science. It forced me to the conclusion that, at all events, it was a religion that was not ruthlessly intruded upon one, and that, I felt, was certainly highly commendable. I now know it to be a religion too sacred to be thrust indiscriminately upon the unprepared thought. This reserve aroused in me a dormant curiosity, and when, in the course of a few days, various members of my family proposed that I should take Christian Science treatment, I assented listlessly, for I was now hopeless of ever being any better. I was rapidly sinking into a state of utter despondency which would, in the usual course of such a complication of troubles, end in dementia.
I found, when I finally came to talk with my aunt upon the subject, that there were certain things I ought to do, upon which I certainly had not counted. I ought to stop taking any medicine and read the Bible and Science and Health. Had it not been that I was devoid of all hope from any medical source, these requisitions would have appeared to me insuperable. By this time, however, I realized that I had positively nothing tangible to depend upon, although my faith in drugs was my strong point, so to speak, and had always been. I believe I expressed my perturbation, but my aunt was firm and uncompromising in this regard, and I at length acquiesced and promised to follow her directions faithfully. I was still without a glimmer of light, for I was in total ignorance of the healing method, except that I was deeply impressed with the solemn asseveration that it was God, and God only, who healed the sick. I had been assuming that it was mesmerism or something of that nature, but in this new and unexpected phase of the subject a faint ray of light penetrated my clouded vision. My aunt was leaving immediately for her home in a distant state and I could not comprehend how it was possible for me to get well if she went away, and I saw her depart with a conviction that with her went my last chance of health and happiness.
After she was gone, the conditions imposed upon me in accepting Christian Science treatment, recurred to me, and for a time I was submerged in such an agony of mind as I know will never assail me again. It really seemed to me impossible that I could conform to them. I concluded at length that I might read the book. Science and Health; yes, and the Bible, too, if I really had to, but I simply could not get along without medicine. No, clearly, that was asking too much. But I had promised her that I would not touch it while under her treatment, and the fact that she had gone so far away with the assurance that I would comply strictly with her conditions, was at length sufficient to emphasize the necessity of disposing of the drug question, and that at once. But how? Only that very morning two bottles of very expensive medicine had been purchased, and it appeared to me a great extravagance not to use it. Finally I went into the room where they were. They did look so alluring! Perhaps these were the very ones that would have cured me, I thought. Why had I made so foolish a promise? But it was made, and began to "loom up portentously." It was too late to recall it, and I must abide, therefore, by these formidable conditions. I contemplated these two bottles and their mysterious contents with much the same feeling of despair with which one looks his last upon the face of a friend he shall see no more. Again I saw my father's office and the rows and rows of bottles of medicine, which I had long since grown to reverence, as possessing some supernatural power, and I felt myself a traitor to the memory of that far-off time, in that I could, for a moment, doubt their efficacy, or that of the two now before me. True, I had been trying medicine for many a weary month, and not a particle of good had come that way. But these might be the very ones I had been so long in reaching! What was I to do? At that very instant I was potently aware of a fact, latent from the first, that, in the end, the medicine would have to go. It was the only honorable way out. My aunt had reiterated the fact that it was God who healed the sick. God? But I did not believe in God. The only God I had ever known never healed the sick. Quite the contrary. But it was insisted that that was a wrong concept of the true God. He, "the Christian Science God is universal, eternal divine Love, which changeth not, and sendeth no evil and no sin upon man" (Science and Health, p. 34) I was repeatedly assured. Light was beginning to shine in the darkness. If this were true, and He really did heal the sick, of course He did not need that medicine there before me. Even the God of my distant childhood was not a God needing the inventions of man to supplement His work. Steadying myself for a final effort, I grasped a bottle in either hand, reached the door, and with sudden strength threw those bottles far out into the garden. This was in the summer of 1897, and from that hour to the present, not a drop of medicine has passed my lips. As I turned away from the door, a sense of peace, such as I had never known, pervaded my consciousness. Later, I knew it was the approving smile of the God for whom I had searched so many years, and whom I was about to find, not as the God of creeds and dogmas, but the God who is Life and Truth and Love.
The next day I applied myself most earnestly to the study of the Bible and Science and Health. As yet, my only thought was the physical healing, and I began the study of our text-book simply because I felt obliged to do so, if I were to reap the full benefit of the treatment. There was no choice left me, and as the medicine was prohibited, my intention was to supply the hiatus and get well; if it were necessary to read, I would do so, although, to be candid, the task was, at first, utterly distasteful, there were so many books I should have preferred to read if the choice were left to me. However, I read and studied faithfully; soon with growing interest, and in a very few days I found it almost impossible to fix my attention on anything else. I had found the well of living water and could not satisfy the thirst of a lifetime by a superficial perusal of this wonderful revelation, for I intuitively perceived that it was a revelation. Even to my darkened understanding this marvelous book speedily became something sacred and holy, and I felt that through the Bible and this, the Key to the hitherto incomprehensible Scriptures, I was to win my way through all obstacles imposed by mortal mind and find the living God. One beautiful vista after another opened before my searching inquiry, and I was losing all thought of the healing of my body, in the delight of my discovery of the true God.
Here I first learned something of the omnipresence of God, in the practical realization that my aunt's absent treatment was as efficacious as if she were with me, because God was with her, in her distant home, as well as with me. This was to me so beautiful a thought that I was immediately inspired with confidence in Him. To come into even a partial realization of this omnipresence filled my heart with such buoyant hopefulness and with such an expanding sense that I felt health, like a river, flowing in upon me. In eight days I walked half a mile, and in two weeks I walked two miles. In fact, I found myself suddenly well. I had been born again. I was in a new and beautiful world, and how different was now my outlook on life. I had renounced materia medica forever, and in the time which has elapsed since then, three years last August, I have never, for an instant, been tempted to return to medical methods. Nor has there ever been the slightest recurrence of the claims of which I was healed. These three years have been by far the busiest of my life. Filled to the brim with work, I find each one of them to be tempered according to my strength, which is illimitable, for God is my strength. This I demonstrate, day by day.
And what can I say of the spiritual regeneration which accompanied this physical healing? Beautiful as this was, enabling me to resume my place in the world, from which disease had banished me, and perform my most sacred obligations to my child, I was very soon convinced that this physical restoration was of minor importance, compared to my rescue from spiritual oblivion.
To emerge from the darkness of unbelief and a dread uncertainty as to man's ultimate destiny, into the effulgence of "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world," was joy unspeakable. On the angel wings of this uplifting thought my doubts and fears were borne into the realms of a past which nothing could resurrect. In my heart was established a joyous confidence in the brooding Love which hovers over the aspiring heart, as it reaches out to the Everlasting Arms and up to the out-stretched wings which "cover my defenceless head." In the sweet assurance that instead of the barren waste, traversed by mortals, I henceforth may walk my upward way amid "green pastures" and beside "still waters," is found the inspiration which transforms each material task into a prayer.
"And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there: and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."
