It is more than twenty years since I was healed by Christian Science of chronic abscesses of the ears and catarrhal inflammation of the inner ears, for which I had been treated by some of the best physicians and specialists in this country, without being cured.
When the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, was offered to me by a friend who was a Christian Scientist, I consented to read it in the hope of finding out the truth about God. I had been reared in an orthodox church but left it when I was sixteen years of age, as I was not satisfied with its teachings. Then began a pilgrimage into the various denominations; I found them all teaching some measure of good, but I was seeking the whole truth, which I could prove for myself.
I began to read the textbook in April, not for healing, but to find God. I was struck with the opening lines in the Preface (p. vii), "To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings," and as I read on, a satisfactory answer loomed up on page 4, where Mrs. Eddy says, "The habitual struggle to be always good is unceasing prayer." I had not been able up to this time to see how we could obey Paul's admonition to "pray without ceasing," but on reading the above-quoted words I could see that prayer did not consist of wordy petitions, but that true prayer is the "desire for growth in grace, expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds" (ibid., p. 4). I was so happy that I read on eagerly, rising at five o'clock in the morning to gain more of this new-found joy.
