When I was a young man, I received a violent blow over the heart while playing football which rendered me unconscious. Although after a while I appeared to recover, the subsequent hardships of active service for two years in France in the First World War produced a liability to sudden attacks of complete unconsciousness if any sort of strain or excitement was undertaken. The Army medical board finally decided that I was permanently disabled, and a pension based on this diagnosis was awarded. I was advised to take a certain drug before anticipated strain of any sort and was warned that failure to do so would result in the distressing attacks I had come so much to fear. It was admitted also that this drug would gradually affect my health adversely in other ways. I appeared to be faced with the fact that my business career would be seriously arrested and that my health would progressively deteriorate.
Christian Science was first brought to my notice about 1912, when a friend was healed by its means of Bright's disease, but I was of a skeptical nature and was not at that time completely convinced.
Although brought up by my parents in an orthodox faith, I could not reconcile the presumed existence of an omnipotent God of wisdom and love with either the horrors of war or the many other unsatisfactory features of human life. As I could find no answer to this dilemma, I had become agnostic in thought. After the war, however, I read an article in a periodical which dealt impartially with Christian Science, and in my extremity I decided to make my own inquiries at an authorized Reading Room and to read Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy. Its wonderful and confident promise of restoring physical well-being on the basis of a practical acceptance of God founded on the teachings and demonstrations of Christ Jesus seemed at first too good to be true. I persevered in my reading, however, and gained new hope and courage from the realization of the truth expressed in Science and Health (p. 494), "It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good." With the aid of a Christian Science practitioner, the conditions which had been so distressing gradually disappeared.
