It is with a feeling of the deepest gratitude that I wish to testify to my deliverance, through the earnest study of Christian Science, from a condition called neurasthenia, approaching melancholia.
A more miserable and pitiable mental state than that I was in it would be difficult to imagine; and the physical condition became more and more hopeless as fear took possession of my thought. Through great anxiety and sorrow during the war. followed by an attack of diphtheria contracted in London in 1921, I was reduced to a state of physical and mental exhaustion and depression so extreme that I was allowed to read or talk only for a short time each day, and any work or exercise was impossible. I was strictly dieted and had to take four drugs. Doctors and specialists did their best —but finally recognized that it was beyond their power to "minister to a mind diseased." During the long, sad, sleepless watches of the night the thought used to come at times that there surely must be a means of deliverance, but what it was I knew not.
I was sent away from home for a rest cure for some months at great expense, and benefited by the care and kindness received; but when I returned and tried to take my place in the home, the old condition returned. To add to my worries there was the possibility of having to give up our house; and feeling quite unable to look for another, I began to get rid of superfluous furniture. A large bookcase was one of the pieces, the books in which were brought for me to see. One of them was "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, which to my knowledge I had not seen before, but which I afterwards found out had been there for about twenty years!
