When my weary journey brought me to the straight and narrow way of Christian Science, I was a trustee of a denominational church, and the first attention given to the reading of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" was rather more with a sense of critical investigation of its merits than with any expectation of benefits therefrom.
The teachings of my church had failed to heal the grief which had for many years oppressed me as the result of the passing away of a beloved sister. The kindly intentioned pastor of the church to which we both belonged, offered the best he knew of comfort, the irreconcilable statement, "In His inscrutable wisdom, God has taken your sister away, and you must love Him, for He knows best." Throughout the following summer I often went to a near-by forest, there in its solitude to try and reconcile this saying with reason, but to no purpose. The more I thought upon it, the more I rebelled against the concept of God which portrayed Him as the cause of sickness and death. The reading of Science and Health soon made it plain to me that God was revealing Himself to me in His true nature—the loving Father-Mother who is not the cause of any evil, the God my aching heart required to heal its grief.
At this time there was with me an unwelcome form of disease which my kindly intentioned physician had informed me "would be with me for life," it being the aftereffect of an almost fatal illness of a previous period; but the result of being freed from this wrong concept of God was soon made apparent in the healing of the physical disease, to my surprise and great delight.
