Twenty years ago I was an invalid, under the special care of a physician. Although still a child, I had undergone three operations. I had been kept out of school for a year, and was told that if I returned I would live only three months. Both my mother and my father were also ill. My mother was suffering from a number of ailments, the chief of which was rheumatism. At that time she met a Christian Scientist and, in her extremity, asked to be told something about it. This Scientist answered all her questions very lovingly and directed her to a practitioner. She was healed in a few treatments. My mother then put me under Christian Science treatment, and sent me back to school.
My healing was slow. It took a number of years. In fact, it was not until I began to work to uncover error in my own consciousness and found an old hatred which had been covered over and ignored since childhood, that I began to see the healing take place. Meanwhile I had many healings in other ways. I was healed of heart trouble instantaneously.
During the war I allowed a keen sense of resentment to enter my thought, and this resulted in a severe case of influenza and pleural pneumonia. I was traveling at the time, and grew steadily worse for a week or so. I seemed to be in an apathetic state and did not call a practitioner. One night I felt as if I were passing on. So I took the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, and read and worked all night, between spells of what I now realize was delirium and unconsciousness. The only thing that I could grasp was the court-room trial beginning on page 430 of the textbook. This trial scene had never meant anything to me before, and I had always skipped over it in reading Science and Health. After reading all night as much as I could, I finally fell into a natural sleep, and awoke in the morning perfectly well and with the greatest sense of freedom.
