It has been many years since Christian Science came to my attention. A loved one was suffering, and a traveling salesman who was calling on a business errand, seeing our need, left with the parting remark: "Get Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy and read it. It will not do you any harm." A few days later the loved one purchased a copy of the textbook and brought it to me, suggesting that I read it to see if I thought it was worth while.
At the time I was wearing an abdominal belt, and I never got out of bed in the morning until I had put it on and never removed it at the end of the day until I was in bed. Before I had finished reading the first chapter, entitled "Prayer," I knew that the belt was unnecessary and saw clearly that man is God's image and idea, not the material creation of a corporeal deity, as is brought out in the following passage from Science and Health (p.13): "Because of human ignorance of the divine Principle, Love, the Father of all is represented as a corporeal creator; hence men recognize themselves as merely physical, and are ignorant of man as God's image or reflection and of man's eternal incorporeal existence. The world of error is ignorant of the world of Truth,—blind to the reality of man's existence,—for the world of sensation is not cognizant of life in Soul, not in body."
For more than sixteen years prior to the above healing neither church nor religion had interested me. I had read many books on philosophy and the exercise of will power, but these theories did not satisfy me. However, before I reached the chapter entitled "Recapitulation" in Science and Health, I knew Christian Science was what I had been searching for.
