I have great reason to be thankful to Christian Science for many things. Most of all, I am inexpressibly grateful that it has given me an understanding of God, and a consequent peace of mind never before attained in all the years of manhood. Although reared in a religious environment, I had, before I was twenty, by a rather unusual course of study for that age, as well as through certain trying experiences, left the faith of my fathers, deciding that the whole thing was utterly false. I found that I did not believe in the God which the Old Testament seemed to describe, and concluded that the Bible was a mixture of tradition, fable, and a little fact.
The overpowering sense of evil which promised more or less misery for every one,—pleasure recompensed by its penalty of mental or physical pain, and all inevitably leading to the great catastrophe,—became a terrible thing to contemplate; yet contemplate it I did, for there seemed no escape. Much bitterness against existence itself was the result of this line of thought. I became depressed, irritable, given to worry and discouragement, full of fear of every kind,— fear of the present, of the future, of pain, poverty, death,—suspicious of others, condemnatory of self. Study of the so-called best literature, some delving into German and English philosophy, only confirmed me in despair and pessimism. Behind the mask, as it were, I thought I beheld nearly everybody in the same miserable mental condition.
Now Christian Science has changed all this. It has first of all given me a "key" to the right understanding of the Scriptures, whereby I am able to grasp in some measure the Bible teaching in its true or spiritual import, where formerly I had seen little else than the literal and material meaning, which, as we learn in this Science, is the erroneous conception of the Adam-man. Through the study of Christian Science I found that much that was inconsistent or unintelligible in the Scriptures was beginning to take on a meaning wonderful in its significance. I was led to the apprehension of the fact that there really exists, in the words of the psalmist, "the living God" whom "my soul thirsteth for;" a God who is Spirit, as Jesus said, who must be worshiped "in spirit and in truth;" and I have learned something of what this worship means and how it is to be achieved.
