I feel it to be both my duty and my privilege to tell what Christian Science means to me. For many years I had known vaguely of its existence; I had met Scientists, and been interested in their accounts of wonderful healing, either their own or that of their friends. I had never any feeling of antagonism toward it, but having read and studied many philosophies and religions, I was quite willing to regard it as one of many, all more or less helpful, all containing some aspects of Truth. A friend lent me a copy of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" and asked me to read it. I did so, carefully, as it then seemed to me, but it did not appeal to me and I returned it with a few civil words and gave the matter no further consideration for many years.
From time to time I heard of marvelous cures which those concerned attributed to Christian Science, and I remember that a vague interest was thus aroused; but I regarded it merely as one of many systems of mental healing, and that it should affect the lives of those who were healed in a religious way struck me, in as far as I thought of it at all, as very strange. It seemed to me curious that nobody appeared to be healed by Christian Science without becoming a Christian Scientist. It was to me then as if no one had ever been cured by a doctor without immediately embracing the profession of medicine! Its logic struck me as being nil, its religious aspect nonexistent. I accepted it as a curative agent pure and simple.
I had always enjoyed remarkably good health, and the circumstances of my life were often very trying, entailing much traveling and a good deal of what is commonly known as "roughing it." Suddenly, or at least so it seemed to me, I fell ill, and found myself gradually becoming not only unable to do things I had formerly done, but suffering continual pain; worst of all, there was a vague physical terror which was less endurable even than pain. With a friend I went to see a doctor. To me he spoke in very guarded language, but he told my friend quite plainly that I was suffering from a very painful and incurable form of heart disease, that I might drop dead at any moment, and that at best I could only hope to be an invalid for the rest of my life. The entire treatment he prescribed it was not then possible for me to carry out, circumstances preventing my doing so, but so far as I could I carried out his directions. Then followed a year I do not care to look back upon, of ever greater and greater suffering. Sometimes I seemed to be temporarily better, helped by powerful drugs; often the pain was deadened by opiates; but always the terrible mental depression and physical fear of I knew not exactly what, remained. I can never say how kind and considerate the doctor was to me, nor how he tried to help me, but nothing seemed to do me any real or permanent good.
