My introduction to Christian Science came at the age of four years when I was enrolled in a Christian Science Sunday School. The logic of its teachings and the intelligent presentation of the Bible to the young children, in contrast to the parties and play I had experienced in the orthodox Sunday School I formerly attended, were apparent to me even at that early age.
That the teachings of Christian Science are completely practical, even for a young child, I had ample opportunity to prove in the years that followed. I experienced immediate freedom from many so-called childhood diseases, complications from falls, and so on. At the age of nine, with the help of a practitioner, I had a healing of what the health officer diagnosed as smallpox. Though I was quarantined for the prescribed period of time in obedience to the law, it was a period I spent in play, completely free of any symptoms, and I had no scars whatever from the disease. It was many years before I really appreciated what great protection I had enjoyed in this instance.
Then the time came when, as a young mother, I was tempted to eat of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Having been reared in Christian Science, I knew nothing of medical laws; and I was afraid that, lacking such knowledge, I would be considered ignorant. Taking the children to the pediatrician seemed a desirable status symbol. Little by little, materia medica crept into our experience until drugs and the doctor's bills were taking a sizable sum of our monthly budget.
