"A random thought, calling itself dyspepsia" (Science and Health, p. 175) found lodgment with me for over ten years. Pampered, believed in, and feared, it grew into a dominant power in my physical and mental condition until a point nearing dissolution was reached. In this long struggle, materia medica, hygiene, and climate, all faithfully tried and abandoned as useless, left me willing to turn to mortal man's last resort, God.
Christian Science had been in my home and around me elsewhere with its visible healing for all these ten years and more yet, as I was without any religion or positive belief in man's relation to God, its appeal to me resulted more in indifference than denial, and I was inconsistent enough (though consistent with mortal mind as I now see it) to continue in my vain efforts with useless and hopeless means of cure. When the conviction reached me that these means could not help me, I was living in California, and was visited most opportunely by one whom I had last seen near death's door with consumption, but who was now in radiant health, and overflowing with love and gratitude to God and Christian Science. At her request I consented to write to a practitioner for treatment. The practitioner was more than three thousand miles away, and I waited passively for a reply to my letter. Possibly within a week after writing this letter, upon retiring to bed one evening, I was startled by a most urgent mental demand to remove a hygienic appliance for oxygen treatment that I had continued to use more as the result of habit than with any faith in its efficacy. "Take it off!" "Take it off!" came to me suddenly, clearly, and so vehemently that I sat up and removed the instrument almost before I had a realizing sense of the meaning of the words. This gave me food for thought and in a measure wakened me out of my mesmeric dream, and when the reply to my letter came I commenced to believe there was help for me.
My healing was slow. Had it been otherwise, I feel that my feet started in the footsteps of truth would most surely have strayed, and I would have looked on my healing with no more gratitude or understanding than if it had come from a doctor of medicine. But divine Love was leading me, and to-day I can realize there was much more to accomplish than my physical healing, to bring me to the beginning of a faith and understanding which leads "to all truth."
