As a boy I regularly attended the Christian Science Sunday School, but for many years I did not practice what I had learned there. Much later, as a man, I woke suddenly one night to hear the "still small voice" of Truth shouting to me that I must stop drinking. I knew that I drank excessively, but I thought that I enjoyed it and couldn't stop even if I wanted to. This moment was proving that kind of thinking to be wrong. Memories of several particularly bad drinking bouts flashed before me, and I realized that drinking had never really been any fun. I felt the touch of the Christ. In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says (p. 322), "The drunkard thinks he enjoys drunkenness, and you cannot make the inebriate leave his besottedness, until his physical sense of pleasure yields to a higher sense. Then he turns from his cups, as the startled dreamer who wakens from an incubus incurred through the pains of distorted sense."
Following this sudden awakening, I was led to pick up a copy of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy that had been sitting untouched on my bookshelf for over ten years. After the title page is a quotation of Christ Jesus (John 8:32), "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." From the instant I read these words, I knew that the book contained the truth which would give me the freedom I had been so desperately looking for in all the wrong places. As I read on, each word confirmed this. I was astounded! Spiritual truths learned years earlier in Sunday School welled up inside me and set me free.
The following Sunday my wife and I attended a service at a branch Church of Christ, Scientist, and enrolled our children in the Sunday School. When I heard a familiar hymn from the Christian Science Hymnal being played, I knew that we were all in our rightful place.
