With a heart full of love and gratitude to God, and to His messenger for this age, Mrs. Eddy, I bear witness to the saving and healing power of Christian Science. Like many others, I came to Christian Science as a last resort when all material remedies had been found unavailing. I was afflicted—in belief—with many diseases. When a little girl, a skin trouble came upon me which the doctors pronounced incurable,—some because it was hereditary, others because the cause was unknown. I was a trial to my dear mother, as the trouble was ever manifest and had to be attended to, and I was kept on a most rigid diet ever after. My childhood and girlhood years were a living death, and I grew to womanhood nursing the disease, fighting it, and hiding it. Needless to say that I was rebellious and resentful against my mother's admonitions to be patient, because it was evidently the will of God—that my sufferings were a punishment to her.
After I became a graduate medical nurse, and continued my professional career in caring for other sufferers, I began to ponder upon the ills of humanity and the "why." I refused to accept the beliefs about God, as taught in the Jewish faith in which I was born. My inherent sense of right maintained that such inflictions were too cruel and horrible a punishment, even from a human parent, and impossible to attribute to a God who is infinite Love and of tender mercy, as the Scriptures tell us. I could find no solution to the problem, so tried at least to endure my trouble with fortitude and resignation. At times, when the trouble was at its worst,—the whole body being affected, and the nights being worse to get through than the days,— suicide stared me in the face as the only relief from my agonies. In fact, the last two years of that time I slept with a sure dose of morphine within reach to end it all.
At this time, September, 1906, Christian Science was presented to me. What I heard and saw at that first Wednesday testimony meeting was a revelation, and I lost little time in looking up a practitioner. Right here let me say, for the benefit of those who may think their healing slow, and who give way to discouragement (as I did at first), that for the first nine months, in which time I was studying Science and Health with the Bible, and for the greater part of that time was having Christian Science treatment in Los Angeles, where I then lived, the skin trouble seemingly continued to grow worse. But just so soon as I was willing to "put off the old man,"—in the form of pride, self-will, self-justification, stubbornness, and some of the myriad army of sins and evils of the carnal mind,—the healing was accomplished in thirty-six hours. I accepted a position of inferior work (the kind I had said I never would do), and when I arrived at my destination (my present home), I awoke the next morning to find myself "every whit whole."
