CHRISTIAN SCIENCE found me, thirteen years ago, discouraged and disheartened. My wife was a hopeless invalid, and my two children were afflicted with chronic diseases; I was in debt, had lost interest in political and church work, and apparently the worst was yet to come. As a newspaper man since I was twenty years of age, my entire life had been spent in semi-public and public work. It had always been my purpose to stand for right ideas and to labor for the advancement of every good cause, yet, after years of striving for human betterment, of activity in political, reform, temperance, young people's and similar movements, in church and Sunday School work, I found myself almost ready to give up the fight and tempted to exclaim, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
The darkest hours were now approaching. The comrade of my years of struggle for an honorable part in the world's work and achievements, the sharer of my ambitions and hopes, the "little mother" of our once happy household, was getting steadily worse, and finally was prevailed upon to go to a hospital—one which had been established in part through my endeavors—for a serious surgical operation. This trying ordeal through with, we had been promised that all would be sunshine, health, and happiness. But again "human helps" failed, and in a short time my loved one faced the open grave; the only alternative, in the view of the doctors, being a second operation for the removal of an internal growth which otherwise would in a few weeks result most seriously. Having been brought to death's door by the first operation, and having suffered agony for weeks, my poor wife refused to permit another trial of the knife and was prepared to meet her fate.
At this juncture Christian Science was proposed, and the treatment was entered upon; one present treatment and three weeks' absent treatment being sufficient to restore the patient to her usual strength, destroy the inflammation, and remove those abnormal conditions which were the cause of such serious alarm. Some further treatment was obtained —more "to make sure," as I then thought, than anything else; and the trouble was entirely cured, except for some work that it seemed necessary the patient herself should do, and in the doing of which the power of God, the infinite good, was made beautifully and helpfully manifest. From an emaciated, weak, and pain-nacked woman of eighty-four pounds, kept up for years through the heroic exercise of an unconquerable will-power, our "little mother" became a well, strong woman—stronger and freer than in her girlhood— and soon weighed one hundred and ten pounds. She could now go when and where she wished, and enjoyed doing work that she had never before thought possible.
