In 1919 I experienced a beautiful healing through Christian Science. At that time I knew nothing at all about this Science, and the healing was not then understood or fully appreciated. A severe surgical operation had been performed upon me in one of the London hospitals, and the effects of this, together with the numerous complications which followed, lowered me, after four months of suffering and misery, to the point of death. I was only a lad at the time, but the passing would have been welcomed. A good friend, finding me in this hopeless condition, implored my father to have Christian Science help on my behalf. Absent treatment was commenced, and immediately I began to improve. Wounds which had refused to heal closed naturally, and fourteen days afterwards I left the hospital for a period of convalescence. I am very grateful to the practitioner through whose sincere and earnest work this splendid victory over sickness and death was wrought.
Following this healing I drifted back into the ways of the world, but five years later, in May, 1924, a turning point came in my life. I attended a Christian Science service for the first time, wishing to know something of its teachings, and I went away from that meeting firmly resolved to study and strive to understand Christian Science; for the church service, at once so simple and so profound, made a great appeal to me.
My work up to that time had taken me constantly into London's vast slum areas, for industry often seems bound up with poverty, misery, and drabness; and this groping experience came near to embittering my thought. In consequence of this and of other unhappy human conditions, I was subject to morbid and melancholy moods, and only artificial pleasures could seemingly pierce this gloom, and then only temporarily. Physically I was at that time frail and poorly in appearance, in bondage to so-called hereditary weakness, and far from soundness in a moral sense.
