I am not a Christian Scientist, but I feel impelled to tell others of my own remarkable experience. On Jan. 9, 1899, I was caught in a wreck on the Union Pacific at Sunoe, east of Sidney, in which eight persons were killed and a number injured. The car I was in was completely wrecked, but I was finally extricated and in examining me the surgeons found that my injuries were most serious, almost the entire body being involved. A broken limb was placed in splints, and other injured parts bound up. The collision had occurred before daylight, but it was dark again before they got the rails laid around the wreck so that the Pullman car in which the injured were placed could be taken to Sidney. During this time I neither craved nor was given any water, stimulant, nourishment, or medicine.
Previous to this time I had been skeptical of Christian Science and ridiculed the claims advanced by its adherents, but just a few weeks before the accident I had promised an intimate friend who had become a practitioner that if I ever felt the need of a physician I would call upon him. Mindful of this promise, I refused all proffered palliatives, intending to wire him upon reaching Sidney. But the noon edition of the Omaha papers had contained an account of the wreck, and at Sidney I found a telegram from him, advising me that he was giving me treatment. What then appeared to me miraculous was that from about noon of that day I was perfectly free from pain, nor did I have even the slightest headache or reactionary fever. Instead of being paralyzed, as the doctors predicted, the organs performed their functions that night. Wet cloths, changed at frequent intervals, were the only applications to my eye, which had been terribly injured, and in forty-eight hours it simply went back into place, and it is a better eye than the other one to-day. One of the most eminent surgeons in the State, who put my limb in the plaster cast, said the ankle would always be stiff, but it is as supple as it ever was. My nose healed before the plaster was removed, and no one can detect the slightest scar where the cut was. I was also told that it would be impossible for me to return to my ranch for four months at least, but having business which called me to Boston and Providence, I left Omaha on the 9th of March, just sixty days after the wreck, making the trip without the slightest inconvenience and simply using a cane in walking.
Before this I had been a constant smoker for twenty years, and could not understand why I felt no desire to smoke the many cigars my friends left for my enjoyment. I had likewise found fancied pleasure in the social glass, and I also prided myself on the artistic shading of profanity with which I colored and emphasized almost every assertion. These tastes and habits all left me, during the few weeks' treatment in Christian Science, as naturally as feathers fall from a molting fowl; and the moral cleansing that has taken place in me, as well as the many other demonstrations that I have had of the remarkable efficacy of Truth, lead me to say unhesitatingly that Christian Science is the greatest remedial and reformatory agency known to this age.
