Having passed through many stages of unbelief,— skepticism, agnosticism, and infidelity,—and having for a year enjoyed the peace of God as revealed and proved in Christian Science, I wish to give such of my experience as may be helpful to others.
Like many another wanderer, I enjoyed the privileges of a home governed by love and genuine piety, a home in which a Christian father and a God-loving, God-serving mother strove to the best of their understanding to lead me in the way they believed I should go. At my mother's knee I learned the immutable facts that God is love, ever-present, all-knowing, supreme, always ready to hear and grant requests. While still a lisping infant, I learned that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being," that He created the dew-frosted cobweb and the rolling planets, the toiling ant, and the lordly oak,—all things. The seeds so early planted sprouted and took root, but Nature's manifestations seemed to find a more congenial soil, perhaps because I could see and handle them and observe their development; whereas the invisible realities of God's realm were intangible.
By the time I was about nine years old, having proved, many times that my childish prayers did me no apparent good; having concluded that the professions of others, in many instances at least, were idle words; and having found from experience that neither the omission of my morning prayer occasioned special distress during the day, nor the neglect of my evening petition any loss of sleep, I decided that prayer of that kind was a farce, and I would not play the hypocrite but would drop praying altogether. There was no apparent evil consequence. Then I fairly launched myself for a twenty-five years' cruise upon the ocean of doubt, and by the time I was twelve was so far out to sea that I positively refused to be confirmed in the church. The correctness of this decision seemed to be vouchsafed in the apparently prompt downfall of a majority of my quondam classmates.
