WHILE I am sincerely grateful for the physical benefits that have come to me through Christian Science, I appreciate far more deeply the mental and moral awakening that has been mine as the result of its teaching. Especially is this the case in my healing from the blindness of ingratitude.
At the time that Christian Science was presented to me, I seemed to have lost all that I had supposed made my life worth living. I had been a teacher for many years, and during that time had made special efforts to fit myself for the greatest usefulness in that profession. Then, just as it seemed that I was ready to take up work of a far wider scope than I had yet attained, the severest trials and tests confronted me. For more than three years I watched over my invalid mother, upon whom I lavished the most untiring devotion. But all of my care, all of my persistent efforts to find relief for her in materia medica were of no avail. I could find no physician, though I searched near and far, who could name the disease from which she suffered, and not one gave me the slightest hope that she could be healed. And when the end came, I seemed to stand alone in the world.
After this experience came three years of my own wretchedness, both in body and mind, till at length it seemed that I too must go down into that shadowy valley which my religious training had taught me to dread, even though it were the supposed gateway to heaven. In that extremity, which I now know was divine Love's opportunity, —when the last earthly hope had failed me; when prayer to an "unknown God." whom I had so ignorantly worshiped, seemed but a mockery; when my thought dwelt only on that gloomy pathway to the grave,—into that darkest hour came the first gleam of "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
