AT the time Christian Science was presented to me I was receiving treatment from an osteopathic physician for an organic displacement, as well as a dislocation of the hip, and was taking medicine from a medical doctor for heart trouble. I was also having my eyes treated by an oculist, but without any apparent relief. I cannot remember a whole day of physical harmony in my life, until I knew the truth through Christian Science, yet the first time a friend spoke to me of it, telling me her husband had been healed through its application, I doubted, and never gave it another thought. Had she told me that he was healed through the right understanding of God and His spiritual laws which govern man, I might not have been so skeptical.
I knew that I had often gone to church longing for something, although I could not understand what it was, and had come away with that longing unsatisfied. I was continually asking myself why God had made man so subject to disease and accident; so imperfect physically and morally, why He had made this world and put us in it, when the pain and sorrow outweighed the pleasures. Health did not seem to make people happy, neither did wealth or social position. Then I would feel self-condemned for entertaining such thoughts, and tried to believe that it must be all right, for God is Love and He must know the why. I could not understand the Bible, and I wanted so much to teach my children something of God, but I felt so ignorant of what the truth really is that I never tried to teach them anything from the Bible.
A few months before Christian Science was presented to me, my little boy, then a child of five, woke up quite ill, and by noon was covered with an eruption. We called in a doctor, who pronounced it a case of fever, and the boy and myself were quarantined in one room upstairs. I was always filled with fear for the children, and this seemed the greatest trial I had ever had. By nine o'clock he did not recognize me at all. I looked at the medicine, and it seemed very plain to me that if God wanted to take that boy, He certainly could not be thwarted by that glass of medicine; and if He did not want to separate us, there was no other power that could. I lay down beside the child and went to sleep without giving him the medicine. I never awakened until he woke me at six o'clock the next morning and asked for his clothes and breakfast just as any perfectly well boy would do. There was not the least trace of the disease to be found on him. Not knowing of Christian Science then, we just decided that the boy had never had the fever and told the doctor so. He, however, said he could not be mistaken in his diagnosis of the case, as he had seen too many like it, and we were kept in quarantine the required length of time, but the child was never sick one minute after this experience. I can easily understand now, through Christian Science, that it was truly the light shining in darkness, and that the darkness comprehended it not.
