My reasons for gratitude to God for Christian Science are numerous and continuously present, for through Christian Science I have learned how to think and how to live. I can and do recommend Christian Science as practical, everyday religion for practical, everyday men and women.
I was the son of Christian parents, members of an orthodox church, who were earnest in their beliefs and who lived good lives. I subscribed to the creed of my parents, joined their good old church, took an active part, and was elected to important offices in the organization; but when I tried to find a reason for the faith that I professed, I could not find a reason and I was unable to discover any one else who seemed to know. Meanwhile, certain misfortunes and trials which befell loved ones led me to rebel against the injustice, as it then seemed, of a forgetful and tyrannical God. I left the church, closed my Bible, and for twenty years I trod with eagerness the streets of Vanity Fair, chasing after material illusions of business, of pleasure, and of pain, and taking on, as business equipment, profanity and social drinking. I had good health but as I see it now, like a boat cast loose upon a swift, downward current, I was drifting rapidly into physical and mental decline and into deadly, mortal beliefs of oncoming disease.
In time, my wife fell ill, and having obtained no help from many physicians, came to believe herself incurable. In despair, and as a last resort, she turned to Christian Science and was healed. She took to studying the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. Interested and impressed by my wife's healing and grateful for it, I began to look into the textbook. As I read the first chapter, the one on "Prayer," with its clear, clean, logical, satisfying explanation of the nature, use, purpose, and benefit of man's prayer to God, I began to see light. I took down and dusted off, as it were, my Bible, and found it to be a new book, sane, wise, shining with living truth, and a practical guide for a practical man's life. I began to experience healing. Habits of profanity and use of alcoholic stimulants disappeared as completely as if one should lay off and destroy a worn-out garment. My old weakness, that of "taking cold," is no longer a habit, and if, once in a great while, symptoms of a cold should seem to appear, the healing is done by application of the truth as found in the two books—the Bible and Science and Health.
