From infancy I was always ailing, being supposed to have inherited throat and lung disease. I earned my own living from the age of seventeen, but often lost my positions through sickness, as once or twice every year I was laid up with serious attacks of illness. These attacks finally resulted in asthmatic trouble and hay-fever, also an eye affection, which finally led me to seek Christian Science.
Meanwhile the sense of pain and misfortune wrought in me such a morbidly acute perception of suffering in other human beings, as well as among animals, that as the years went on my sense of unhappiness became crushing. I frequently said that even if it were possible for my own troubles to disappear, I yet should never know a moment's peace, such seemed to be my insight into the misery of all living creatures. Theological works taught me that this was the true cross borne by our Redeemer, but I used to wonder how, if this were so, Christ Jesus could move among those afflicted multitudes which thronged him everywhere, apparently undisturbed by the sight of their suffering. Constantly communing with these unhealthy thoughts, I seemed to suffer more and more. The eye trouble was pronounced incurable by the best oculists, and powerful drugs failed even to relieve the pain, which for weeks would prevent me from sleeping more than a few minutes at a time. During the summer of 1906 I was idle four months, must of the time in the house. That fall I was operated upon in a hospital, but after a whole winter's treatment the disease recurred in the spring. Then I turned from matter-physicians forever.
At the first Sunday morning service I attended in the Christian Science church, I knew instantly that these people had something I lacked! The reverent stillness, the atmosphere of mental repose, the tranquil faces, the quiet outward look of the eyes around me,—these stole into my harassed, self-centered consciousness, at once a rebuke and a benediction. My first treatment by a practitioner destroyed the pain, and I was able to go on with my work, laying aside the glasses which I had worn every waking moment during twenty years. In the fifteen months since then, all my old complaints have appeared and have been overcome. I now have no troubles; if the sense of unhappiness assails me, I find its cause in some erroneous thought unwittingly admitted to consciousness; and when this is cast out, sunshine comes again. As to the welfare of creation in general, these words of our Leader set my heart at rest: "'God is Love.' More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go" (Science and Health, p. 6).
