In May, 1902, I was divinely led to attend a Christian Science Wednesday evening meeting, in the hope that I might hear something of a religious nature to take my mind from mental troubles. I had readied a state of mental depression from which it seemed that I could get no relief. No one asked me to attend this meeting, but it came to me very clearly to go there for help, and I shall never forget that first service in a Christian Science Church. I know I was wonderfully benefited mentally and spiritually that evening.
I had been a member of an orthodox church forty years, but for many years had had such a hungering and thirsting after righteousness, that while I did not seem to get all the help from the Bible which I felt was in it for me, I comforted myself with the promise that all such were blessed and would some day be satisfied.
After the service that night I was invited by a member of the church whom I had met once a few months previous,—the only Christian Scientist whom I had ever talked with,—to visit their reading room, which I did in a few days. I was kindly loaned a copy of Science and Health, and had read in it but three days, when my eye caught these words, "Divinity is always ready" (p. 458). Those words stayed with me, and made a deep impression upon my mind. They seemed to say to me, Trust in God for physical help as well as for mental and spiritual help, and I decided that night to trust Him to take care of me without drugs. That decision meant a great deal to one who had seldom failed to take medicine every day nearly twenty-five years, for what the physicians claimed to be an incurable form of constipation caused by adhesions and strictures, the result of long years of suffering and invalidism.
