"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." These words of Jesus constitute the first quotation on page iii of Science and Health, the great textbook left by a pure and selfless woman, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, a book which is bringing peace and healing to a suffering world. I can state that this promise of the Master has come true in my own experience.
In 1911 I was taken ill in New York, and the physician designated the condition as abdominal inflammation. As I steadily grew weaker during the following week, I consulted another physician, who announced that I had diabetes. This caused me to feel greatly disturbed, and when in addition to this trouble pain in the stomach set in I consulted a few more physicians, one of whom told me that I had an abscess in the stomach, while another said the trouble was a tumor. I had been under medical treatment for five months when my last physician advised me to go to California soon. There, in San Francisco, I found a specialist who in two months' time brought me to where I was able to resume work. Every doctor told me, however, that for the rest of my life I would have to be under medical treatment and eat nothing which contained sugar or starch.
In this depressed, hopeless condition, having one foot in the grave, as it were, I dragged myself along fully five years. My wife's attention was often called to Christian Science, but I would not listen to anything of the sort, as I had never believed in God and had not attended church for thirty-five years. Since my wife herself was a good deal of a sufferer from bowel trouble and pain in the head and back, she went to see a Christian Science practitioner in July, 1916. The change which took place in her during the following days was such that I concluded there must be something of a higher order in those teachings, and when after her first attendance at the church she told me of the kind welcome which the members with whom she came in contact extended to her, I made up my mind to go with her the next time.
