Although it is many years since I found health in Christian Science, that experience remains one of the most wonderful events in my life, and I now send an account of it with renewed thankfulness. For ten years I had been an invalid, seeking relief from various physicians and methods of cure, and from travel at home and abroad. I had a seemingly incurable case of weakness of certain internal organs, so that I could not walk from one street to the next without great pain and nervous exhaustion a catarrh of the head which made me offensive to my friends; and extreme astigmatism which caused constant headache, so that I used to spend days in a darkened room for relief these were phases of my condition. In 1886, I had reached such an exhausted, helpless state that it was thought advisable to send me to a "rest-cure" that had been recommended. At the same time, a friend, who had been healed of inflammatory rheumatism by Christian Science, was urging my mother to try that means of cure for me, but I was reluctant and unbelieving. For two years before this time I had been going to an oculist regularly, twice a week, hoping to get relief for my eyes, but the difficulty only increased. One day I asked the doctor if he thought Christian Science would do me any good. He replied that one of his patients, for whom he could do nothing, had been cured by that method of treatment, and advised me to try it, adding, that if I received any benefit to let him know of it. My mother then took me to a practitioner and I began to improve from the first treatment. A hopefulness such as I had never known came to me at once, and although there followed various fluctuations, at the end of six weeks I felt myself healed. By degrees I had thrown away the several pairs of glasses to which I had been confined, and could read Science and Health freely for hours without discomfort, but other reading was, for some time, accompanied by pain.
When I called on the oculist and told him that at last I had found a cure for all my ills, he examined my eyes in astonishment, and naively remarked, "That is something I do not understand." Another oculist, who had formerly treated me, hearing that I had been healed by Christian Science and had given up glasses, said, "A year will not pass before she will be compelled to return to them but it is now many years since that statement was made, and I have never worn glasses nor needed them, and am strong and well in every respect.
My mother and I became deeply interested in Mrs. Eddy's wonderful book, Science and Health, and could neither talk nor think of anything else, and two years later I had the priceless privilege of class instruction from our Leader herself. The great facts of Science have been growing upon me year by year, until now I begin to know that God is all-in-all. While it is right to acknowledge our thankfulness in words, nothing can really express gratitude to God, and to our beloved Leader, save heeding the "still, small voice" which repeats in tireless reiteration, "Feed my sheep," and "If ye love me, keep my commandments."
