As a child I attended a Protestant church and Sunday school and loved their teachings, but they did not go far enough. I asked to see results in the form of physical healings, and very early questioned why these results were not accomplished. To my questions there was never a satisfactory answer. Later I was sent away to school, and there I obtained my first knowledge of a God of whom it was said that He knew both good and evil. This resulted in great unhappiness, and when hope of finding the God who knew only good had almost fled, a copy of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, came into my possession and I indeed ate it up.
A few months later I accepted a position in a distant city very remote from civilization, and there made my home with a very cultured New England woman, who after a few days asked me about my religion. I kindly, but emphatically, told her I had none and did not want any; that I had a little book in my trunk whose teachings I expected to investigate, and that if its teachings were what I hoped they were I would be satisfied; if not, I expected to govern my life by the Golden Rule alone. By degrees I learned that the author of my little book was also the Founder of two periodicals and a daily newspaper which came into the home of this woman. Later on, I learned that this woman in whose home I was staying was a Christian Science practitioner. I found her well informed on the contents of Science and Health, capable of giving and willing to give a satisfactory answer to my questions. For six months I lived with her and spent almost every spare moment I had in study; and when necessary I appealed to her for an explanation of any sentence or statement which I was not able to understand.
One evening while we were discussing Christian Science, I told her I believed the miracles spoken of in the Bible and that they could be effected to-day by one who understood its teachings and was sufficiently spiritually-minded. Three months later an accident befell me which looked at first as if it might be fatal. My hand was severely injured and both lungs were pierced. I felt myself slipping into a stupor. Instantly I grasped the situation and made this emphatic declaration aloud: "God is my Life." My study of Christian Science thus far had taught me that "because Life is God, Life must be eternal, self -existent" (Science and Health, pp. 289, 290). At once there came to me the conviction that I would recover. I asked to be taken to the best hospital in the city, that my physical wants might be taken care of, and that no medicine be given me. Three days later I awoke in a hospital with every muscle in my body paralyzed except those governing my head. Three days later still, I awoke again to find that both motion and feeling were returning to my body. The next day I was able to walk, and seven days later I was dismissed from the hospital. This was on Christmas morning, and I had learned in the meantime the meaning of Christmas, or Christ with us.
