About fourteen years ago a young college student, a Christian Scientist, was staying in my home. She lived very close to the teachings of Christian Science, and this made a great impression on me. One after-noon she came home from school suffering from a bad cold. Believing colds to be contagious, I was fearful that I would catch the cold and pass it on to my two small children. But the next morning when this girl arose, she was entirely normal, and needless to say no one else in the home manifested this condition.
One morning I began to manifest the symptoms of grippe. That afternoon I kept a social obligation, and I sat around in my coat suffering alternately from fever and chills, while the other guests commiserated with me. When I returned home, I told this student that I was very ill, and she lovingly went to the store to do the shopping for me. She had not been gone more than a very few minutes when suddenly the grippe, with all its miserable symptoms, completely disappeared, and in its place was the greatest sense of joy and peace that I had ever known. When she returned, instead of finding the sick, unhappy creature she had left, she found me in the kitchen singing, going happily about preparing dinner. That great sense of joy stayed with me for days, and my thought was so removed from my body that I felt as though I were walking on air. I knew that the girl had something to do with this healing. She had not given me a Christian Science treatment, for I had not asked her to do so; she had simply refused to accept the suggestion of a sick mortal and in her own consciousness had replaced it with the spiritual facts of God and man.
It was a year later that I became a student of Christian Science. I had been under the care of medical specialists for several months, and their final verdict was that a colonic condition, for which I was taking three kinds of medicine daily and which necessitated a rigid diet, was incurable. They also pronounced an incurable heart ailment and a nervous condition, from which I had suffered for years. Knowing nothing of Christian Science except that it heals, I turned to a Christian Science practitioner for help and was instantaneously healed in one treatment. I began at once to eat normally, with none of the previous suffering. I stopped all medicine and took up my normal activities, caring for the children and doing all my own housework. A Reading Room attendant showed me how to read the Lesson-Sermon in the Christian Science Quarterly, and I began what has been a daily study since that time. A year later my husband also turned to Christian Science for healing and became an earnest student. Our two children have enjoyed the benefits of the Sunday School and are learning to make the teachings of Science practical in their own experience.
