Jesus said, "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" These words always came to my mind when I was asked to believe in a God who permitted, if He did not actually send, sorrow, sickness, want, and woe to His children: and it is because Christian Science has given to me a God who does none of these things, but who is in very truth infinite, omnipresent good, that I have gratefully accepted this wonderful truth, revealed to this age by Mrs. Eddy. By its help I have been freed from the bondage of an illness which for many years failed to yield to the best medical help obtainable in Australia and England. I was always considered a delicate child, and when I came to England from South Australia, where I was born and brought up, I developed asthma and chest troubles, which kept me a prisoner to the house for a large part of many winters.
In 1897 my knees began to give serious trouble, and three times during the following ten years I was entirely invalided for a year at a time. It was while I was suffering from the third attack that one of my sisters wrote from Johannesburg, South Africa, that she had been meeting a good many Christian Scientists, and that they seemed to her the most consistently Christlike Christians she had ever met. She quoted several passages from Science and Health, and asked me to get and read the book. I promised to do so, but I did not know where to procure it; so it was not till two months later, when I returned in a very weak condition from a nursing home in London, that it was put into my hands by a cousin who had become interested in Christian Science through the healing of a friend from paralysis of eight years' standing.
At first I cordially disliked the style of the writing, and a great deal of it seemed to be contradictory and impossible to understand, but now and then I came across a passage which arrested my attention, and in spite of the feeling of irritation which frequently made me put down the book, declaring that I would read no more of it, something always impelled me to take it up again and continue its study. After about three weeks I found I was healed of a tiresome complaint for which I had for years taken medicine every day. A little later, a severe bronchial cold was overcome in a few hours; also a catarrhal trouble, from which I had suffered from the time I was sixteen, gradually disappeared.
