On page 404 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy says, "Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers." That regeneration and healing are inseparable in Christian Science I am proving to be true. Brought up in an environment of sickness and crude theological doctrines, my childhood was unhappy. The clouds never really lifted as I grew older; resentment at what appeared to me to be misunderstanding, and antagonism to the domination of those who seemed to have power to control my life, resisting to the hilt the efforts put forth to hold me to the religious beliefs out of which I had struggled, kept me in a continuous mental turmoil.
I was abnormally sensitive and very unforgiving. Delicate from childhood, I was now practically an invalid; every medical remedy had been tested, even to hypnotic suggestion; from the latter I experienced a hopeless collapse and realized the impotence of the human mind to heal. Having repudiated for years all theological teaching, I had ceased to pray; and yet I did pray, as only those groping in darkness can pray, for the light and the truth.
About this time, some six years ago, a verse of the Bible, which I had long ceased to read, frequently came to me,—"These things saith ... he that is true ... he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth . . . behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."
