When I first heard of Christian Science I was seemingly "without hope and without God in this world." I had strayed away from all religion, as I could not love a God who I thought sent me so much suffering.
For several years I suffered with nervous prostration, headaches, and ulcerated sore throat. The latter had been treated by specialists for a number of years. It finally became so bad that the physicians told me that I could not live in Brooklyn any longer, but must go to a dry climate, so we made all our preparations to move in the fall. In the mean time my little son and I went to the Adirondacks. The landlady of the hotel where we were stopping was a Christian Scientist. When she saw how I suffered she asked me to read Science and Health. I am sorry to say she asked me several times before I would so much as look at the book, for I had heard that all Scientists were cranks, and believed it. But once, after a more than usually severe spell of headache, she offered it to me again, and I asked, in rather a savage way I must confess, what good it would do me to read that book. "Why," she replied very sweetly, "I can keep myself out of all suffering just by reading it." Then I took it and began reading, but it was only at intervals that I could catch the faintest glimpse of its meaning.
In studying the book I forgot all about my headaches, and after three weeks constant reading my husband came up. His first exclamation on seeing me was, "What have you been doing to yourself? You look five years younger; and how is the head?" It just struck me then, that I had not had a headache in three weeks, and I told him so, and that it must have been the reading of the Christian Science text-book that helped me. His face fell and he implored me not to go into any such nonsense as that. But a week later he said, "I never saw such an improvement in any one as there is in you. If you think it is owing to reading that book perhaps you had better continue." In the fall I placed myself under Christian Science treatment, and was told not to leave Brooklyn, for if I went to a dry climate I would think it was the climate, and not Christian Science that had healed me. So we remained, and in spite of the fact that the winter proved a severe one I went out in all sorts of weather and never once suffered with my throat.
