Over twenty years ago I walked into a Christian Science Reading Room and bought a copy of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which had been recommended to me as a worth-while book to read. The pleasant-faced woman who sold me the book was the first Christian Scientist I had ever seen, as the friend who told me about the book did not then claim to be a Scientist. I had no idea that my whole life was to be made new by reading that book, but in the years since that first reading there have been so many proofs of its truth that I realize something of how the Apostle John felt when he said, "If they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."
In my immediate family cases of broken bones, hardening of the arteries, angina pectoris, malaria, hemorrhoids, rheumatism, burns, and many other physical ills have been quickly healed by the application of the Christ, Truth, which makes free. I will speak specifically of pneumonia. As a young girl I had a light case, attended by a physician, and was in bed for several weeks. Years after, when I first found Christian Science, I had such an acute attack that my husband, not then acquainted with Christian Science, begged me to let him call a doctor. I told him that I knew it was too severe a case to trust to a mere mortal, but that I knew I was safe with the great Physician. I asked him to lie down and take his night's rest and leave me with God. In a few minutes we were both asleep, and when we awoke in the morning there was no slightest trace of the ailment. I had fallen asleep as I repeated the twenty-third Psalm—the first time I had discovered the healing power of Bible passages.
A third case of pneumonia, under different circumstances, was healed as I walked through snow and sleet on an errand which was mine to do. I knew what the trouble would be called in medical diagnosis, and that in other times I should have "caught my death" out in such weather, but with the new interpretation of Moses handling the serpent of which he was afraid, and that serpent becoming a rod of power, I dared to do the thing of which I had been afraid, and returned from that mile walk in the icy slush entirely whole again.
