After years of bitterness, of resentment, and of loss of faith in God and man, after years of suffering which resulted from these wrong conditions of thought, I began the study of Christian Science, without realizing that it was a religion. After I had searched for health through all material means, a physician sent me to a Christian Science practitioner, telling me he felt sure she could help me to bear the suffering, though I must not hope to be healed.
I cannot tell of any immediate physical healing, but only of gradual growth in the overcoming of impatience and irritability, and of then becoming conscious that I could eat without the consequent suffering I had before endured. As conditions of morbidity, sorrow, self-pity, and self-justification yielded to hope and even a faint sense of joy, I found action taking the place of inaction and stagnation. As skepticism and doubt, pride and intolerance yielded to faith and love, I could say with the psalmist, "In thy light shall we see light," and my eyes, which were fast growing dim, began to express perfect sight. After two years, I was awakened to the fact that a sense of intense resentment was holding me, and I aroused myself to overcome it with love. In two months I found a spontaneous thought of love in my heart for one whom I had felt it would be beyond the human to forgive; and in a very short time after this, rheumatism, from which I had suffered for over twenty years, left me. During the ten years since then I have had need to prove Christian Science in every way, and it has enabled me to see God as my source of supply, the friend "above all others," my strength, and giving me wisdom to guide and care for a family; and Truth has never failed me in my need.
Christian Science has given me the quiet peace, the sweet assurance, the freedom from fear and anxiety and grief, that the world can never give and never take away. It has given me a knowledge of God which has caused me to love, not only Him, but also my fellow-men. It has enabled me to return hatred and jealousy with love and compassion. It has taught me how man may have dominion over the beasts of the field. It has taught me to see God's law as supreme. It has taught me that the facts of existence are unchangeable; that man is now the image and likeness of God.
