A line just read has recalled me to my sense of obligation to the cause of Christian Science, viz.: "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" To those who have believed because they understood, it could not seem incredible. "What cannot God do?" (Science and Health, p. 135). But much more than the material evidence, which to the skeptical people of that day seemed so like a miracle, is the ever-present, daily evidence of men being raised from the dead, that living death, that hell upon earth, the Sodom and Gomorrah which so many are now leaving behind, as they enter upon the journey from sense to Soul, as taught them in Christian Science.
It is because I have been raised from the dead that I have every reason for giving my testimony of benefits received through the study and application of Christian Science. From the time I was nineteen years of age, although raised in a loving Christian home, I was wild, and was soon known as a man (?) of the world, one of the so-called "good fellows," and never was the word "good" more abused. I was a cigar salesman by profession, and as my business obliged me to solicit trade in drug-stores, clubs, and saloons, the pace I kept was terrific. If an assertion once made to me by a noted physician is true,-that "it takes a drink of whisky six weeks to entirely eradicate itself from the human system," then I doubt if I could claim to have been entirely sober in over thirty years. I had smoked ever since I can remember, thirty-five years at least, and the quantity of the weed consumed was limited merely by my sleeping hours. I was in sanitariums and liquor "cures" and had taken great quantities of every remedy of which I ever heard or that friends recommended, only to fall back again in the same old pathway of sin after a few days' trial.
I did earnestly try to be cured, but I relied only on self-will, and with the mortal body demoralized from dissipation I could not find the way until Christian Science found me. Then all was changed as if "in the twinkling of an eye." From misery, want, disgrace, desperation, with a broken home, bleeding hearts, and the tears of those who had loved me, I was suddenly, almost miraculously, in possession of happiness and plenty,—even affluence. I had aspirations and my cure seemed to be contagious to those around me. To any man who is groping in the dark, struggling with this alleged curse, and who may read these words, I want to say that divine Love through Christian Science will do for you all that it has done for me if you will only accept it, and it will never cause you one hour's uneasiness while you are testing its efficacy. It will cure you effectively, thoroughly, and forever, and I do not believe anything else will. I do not know when I discontinued smoking, I never knew until weeks afterward; in fact I did not stop, the error, finding the soil unprolific, just left me, as all error does when one earnestly exercises man's divine prerogative as a child of God, made in His image and likeness.
