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?
