I HAVE heard and I have read many wonderful testimonies of the power of God to heal the sick, but I regard my own healing as being far more wonderful than any of the cases that have come under my notice, for it has lifted me from the very depths of invalidism and despair to the heights of health and happiness.
I was born a Jew, and brought up in the Jewish faith, but I was unable to reconcile its ancient formulae, law, and symbolism with the metaphysical and scientific advancement of the age. I therefore became at the age of fifteen a confirmed skeptic, and as years went on this skepticism mellowed into agnosticism, the plane of consciousness on which Christian Science found me. A firm believer in evolution, the atomic theory, etc., I was led by the human reason, and naturally mistook effect for cause, pleasure for happiness, matter for substance, sensation for life; and so inevitably drifted farther and farther away from Truth, God, and from health and happiness. I slid down the steep incline which was well-worn, for I thought, believed, and acted as did the world. Being in the world and of it, it required no special effort on my part to accept matter as my basis of thought, and thus God was logically excluded from my basis of reasoning. Having no faith in God, I naturally had no faith in good, in things unseen, but gradually acquired a belief in the power of evil, this belief being based on the testimony of my personal senses. I became grossly material and utterly selfish. My highest ideals, my gods, were success, fame, wealth, beauty in externalized forms (art). I nourished anger, revenge, and envy, was easily offended, and brooded over supposed injury. I drank deeply and often, I smoked continuously, gambled, and swore. According to the world's standards I was rated a good fellow, for I lived well within the pale of the civil and social laws, —in short, I lived a conventional life. Thus I went on, life was one round of mingled pleasure, pain, work, play, enjoyment, misery, health, and sickness,— making existence a chaos, a self-evident contradiction, a burden. I often asked myself what was the object of my existence, what it meant. Theology, philosophy, and science had spoken, but their replies had only increased my perplexity, and I endeavored to solve the problem of existence myself by plunging deeper and deeper into the game of mortal life.
I was fairly successful in my profession (that of writing for the stage), and had no financial worries, but my health began to give way, my nervous system broke down, and in a very short time I counted among my assets, liver complaint, insomnia, dyspepsia, nervous irritability, and a constant dread of some impending danger, an almost absolute hopelessness, which state made not only me but my family exceedingly unhappy. I consulted physicians, specialists, alienists, even druggists, as to the possible remedies for my multifarious diseases. I took nearly all their advice, and as much of their medicine as my stomach would stand. I lived on sedatives, purgatives, tonics, hygienic foods, and alcoholic stimulants in various forms. I read medical works, and would go to my doctor with positive pride when I discovered I had a new complaint for which he could write a new prescription; but it was all of no use, nothing did me any permanent good, life was a living death, and death seemed to offer the only hope. Incipient melancholia set in, and I took a saddening pleasure, a morbid interest in thinking of the joys of oblivion. Life had completely lost its interest for me. In addition to my own troubles, my wife was almost an invalid. She suffered from general debility, pulmonary troubles, throat disease, headache, and chronic colds.
