In November, 1909, I found myself unemployed, homeless, and deserted by all my former friends, and so ill in mind and body with a complication of ailments (including frequent severe hemorrhages) that I could not have taken employment had it been offered me. My doctor, who was a very dear friend of several years' standing, finally told me that neither he nor any other man could do anything for me. His distress was so manifest that, ill as I was, I changed the conversation. Five years ago my home was broken up through discord, and there were times when I drank "not wisely, but too well."
Going one day into a public library for shelter and warmth, I found that nothing which I read was of the slightest interest to me in my weak condition, until I came across a copy of The Christian Science Journal. Although never at any time fond of religious literature, the motto on the cover attracted my attention, and I had not read more than a page of a short article on "Casting Out Fear" until I was deeply engrossed and a sense of silent joy suffused my whole being. It was indeed an angel-message of divine Love, and as I read on, it cast out one form of fear after another. The sense of lack of food, shelter, employment, friends, health, etc.—all in turn seemed to "fold their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away." At last I had gained an intelligent concept of divine Love, the God who "healeth all thy diseases," and who is indeed ' the source of all supply. A prayer of profound gratitude awoke within me; an array of dark years went trooping past, and I knew that my lonely wandering in the wilderness of doubt and despair was at an end. Here was the truth I had been seeking from childhood, the truth that maketh free, and the "perfect love" which "casteth out all fear."
Twenty years ago I had left the church in which I had been an active worker because I could not conscientiously reconcile its teaching with the sorrow and suffering around me, and for the greater part of that time I plunged headlong into the new labor movement, going the whole length of "its propaganda as speaker, editor, etc. For five years I served as a councilor on the largest poor law authority in Great Britain, only to become so obsessed with the idea of poverty that eventually I became as poor as the people I sent to the poorhouse, and as ill as those I had in duty to send to the poorhouse hospital. My illness extended over several years, and it was only through that intelligent knowledge of God which Christian Science brought me in my extremity, that I found the way "out of darkness into his [God's] marvelous light." The loving help and counsel of Christian Scientists encouraged and sustained me until I found perfect health of mind and body,—the real work in which a man's soul delighteth, and that wonderful sense of emancipation from the thraldom of wrong thoughts which is indeed the resurrection and the life, and which is the rightful heritage of all God's children.
