About four years ago I was in a bad condition due to what is known as acute neurasthenia. I had the advice of five different physicians, and carried on the treatments prescribed by them with intense eagerness, only to find myself getting rapidly worse, till the fear of having a stroke and of losing my reason seemed always with me. I had spent many years in the service of materia medica, and was at the time a nursing sister in a London military hospital, but had long been awake to its limitations. I knew the medical profession had no cure to offer me, and so became utterly without hope.
Through many dark months I had a firm conviction that if I could find out what was the power that held the universe in its grasp and the "wind in his fists," I should find peace. During those months, every now and again I would hear as it were a voice saying the two words "Christian Science;" and this kept on with such quiet insistence that at last I took steps to find out what Christian Science was. When I learned that it was a religion, and was told that the first record of creation was the true one,—that "man is not material; he is spiritual" (Science and Health, p. 468),—I bought a Bible and began a study of the Scriptures in a new light. Taking as a basis of reasoning the fact that God, being omnipotent, and His image and likeness like Himself, could need no aid from a human being to improve on His handiwork, I put away spectacles, which I had been unable to do without for years, even for a few moments; and defective eyesight, which had forced me almost entirely to give up reading, was instantaneously healed. My sight has proved ever since, like all the Father's gifts to His children, good and perfect. This healing was a great joy to me and filled me with hope, as I saw that not only was it impossible to lose one's reason, but that for the first time in my experience I had learned how to reason correctly; and such reasoning, healing my eyes, proved to me that I had at last found absolute Science, that I had attained to something of a knowledge of God, and true being.
As I studied the Scriptures more and more in the light of the Christian Science textbook, my understanding of God increased; and numerous chronic ailments, such as rheumatism, hepatic colic, pyorrhea, laryngitis, and train sickness left me.
