Eight years ago I turned to Christian Science for relief from physical and mental suffering without knowing anything about it except that it promised help when materia medica had failed.
Before beginning treatment one day, my kind healer, a devoted student of Mrs. Eddy, handed me an old-fashioned school reader opened to a poem entitled, "Willie and the Guide-post," which he asked me to read. The substance of the poem was that a little boy was overtaken by darkness and a snowstorm and lost his way. While groping blindly along a ghostly, grotesque apparition appeared before him from which in terror he started to run away, but finally he bravely faced about, determined to go up to it and investigate it. When he did so he found it to be a friendly guide-post pointing out his homeward way.
I saw the point at once, the nothingness or phantom of my fears and my claim, but the full import of the lesson was revealed to me as I advanced in understanding. I have so often thought of the story in connection with other lessons on not running away from any errors, but bravely and squarely facing them, investigating their substantiality, handling them scientifically, and not being terrified by a seeming phantom which becomes indeed a friendly guidepost if we do not run away, and we find that it points us to our God-given freedom in the understanding of Divine Science.
