It is with sincere gratitude for Christian Science that I write this testimony for the periodicals, which, through the faithful workers in charge, reach us wherever we live. For a period of nearly sixty years I have been a student of Christian Science. I first heard of this wonderful Science while living in the Channel Isles, and through the reading of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, I was healed of the need for wearing glasses.
More recently I found that I was using only one eye. I began working prayerfully about this condition and declaring that, as Mrs. Eddy says (Science and Health, p. 442), "An improved belief cannot retrograde." When I found that the other eye was also troubling me, I asked for help from a practitioner. Although I received much encouragement and the sense of fear was eradicated from my thought, I found it very difficult to study the Lesson-Sermon in the Christian Science Quarterly. Later I could see only large objects around me like shadows.
I saw that I must get into my treasure house and shut the door—dwell in spiritual consciousness and work out the problem alone with God. These words from Isaiah kept continually coming to my thought (Isa. 32:3): "The eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken." Isaiah, when he wrote this verse, had been deploring the mesmerism from which his people suffered. They seemed to desire only matter, or materiality, and lacked spiritual insight and alertness. Many times I asked myself, "What am I seeing?" I knew that when I looked at matter, it was a case of mortal mind looking at nothing. Nothing looking at nothing!
One cannot be conscious of the spiritual and the material at the same moment. As I lived alone, I daily sang aloud all our Leader's hymns and thought over the many spiritual treasures I had made my own. I was no longer depressed! When I was tempted to be sorrowful and doleful, or to think I could do nothing, I asked myself: "What am I thinking? Spiritual man is never doleful, for he is not under any law of time or age, and time is not a factor in spiritual progress." The glory of which Jesus spoke was his "before the world was" (John 17:5). I thanked my heavenly Father that He had also given me that glory. It did not matter how much I might have been wronged by mortal mind: my real self had never been affected. The faculties of man can never be limited. There is but one power, God, and but one way to think, since He is the one intelligence.
All through this period of blindness I was wonderfully protected. I did not need to go out of my home for anything. I could dial the telephone through knowing the position of the numbers and feeling with my fingers. When I telephoned, everything was sent to me. One morning on awakening I could see the frame of a picture opposite my bed, and in a short while I could read each day some of the Bible Lesson outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly. The healing was not complete for some time, but there was steady progress. Today I see perfectly without glasses.
Previous to that experience I was healed of what I think would have been diagnosed as arthritis in my hand. I have also been healed of other ailments, sometimes with the help of a practitioner and sometimes through my own work. I am grateful to God for His loving-kindness throughout the years and for His protection during World War II. Also I am grateful to Christ Jesus for proving to all mankind the nothingness of sin, disease, and death by overcoming them, and to our Leader for her discovery of the law of spiritual healing, which she has given us in our textbook.— Gentofte, Denmark.
