I deem it no less a duty than a privilege to testify to the manifold blessings which have been showered upon me during the three years and upward since I came into Christian Science, until I feel that "my cup runneth over." The first demonstration made for me, of which I wrote about three years ago, actually startled me into an appreciation and acknowledgment of the power of Truth. In the face of a skepticism on my part which at most admitted no more than the operation of mortal mind in the alleviation of such diseases as are generally assumed to arise from a so-called debilitated nervous condition, I was healed in three days of a painful physical injury which my physician had gravely informed me would afflict me for five or six weeks.
A few months afterward I was healed "in the twinkling of an eye" of the drinking habit, to which I had been addicted more or less for about thirty-five years. There had been times, it is true, when for indefinite periods I had abstained from indulgence; but this only served to fill me with a mortal egotism that alcohol was not my master, because I could stop its use whenever I so wished. Yet invariably I had returned to it, and therefore on these occasions had been released only temporarily from its thraldom; but from the very instant of my healing in Christian Science, even its odor became repugnant to me, and never since have I had the slightest desire for it. For a period of about three years there followed showers of blessing in almost every form; occasional attacks of illness were overcome speedily; I gained a much clearer understanding of business problems, and things which before had been perplexing and at times insurmountable became the most easily managed incidents of every-day life; and there was, withal, a spiritual exaltation that words are inadequate to describe.
Nevertheless, the most recent demonstration seems the most wonderful of all. For a few weeks I had been in California and Mexico, and as the weather had been warm, on returning East I selected a route which was intended to give me something of a vacation, by steamer up the coast to Vancouver, B. C, and thence eastward via the Canadian Pacific railway. The morning I left Seattle, to mortal sense I never felt better; that same afternoon I was stricken with a malady which, seemingly beyond the knowledge of the medical profession to diagnose, brought me into the very "valley of the shadow of death." A friend of mine, for thirty years a physician, designated it a very malignant case of ptomaine poisoning. Suffice it to say that in my journey across the continent, from Vancouver to Philadelphia, I was seldom free from chills, which no amount of covering could overcome, at other times suffering from fever beyond alleviation by human means.
