Testimonies of Healing

When I lost my husband, I also lost my home. My little daughter, then three years and three months old, had only partly recovered from a very severe attack of grippe, accompanied by pneumonia and whooping cough, while I myself was unable to get over the weakness caused by grippe and inflammation of the larynx.

About eight years ago I was taken ill with inflammatory rheumatism. For three weeks I was not able to move unless some one helped me.

For many years I lived what is called a worldly life. I was fond of social drinking, was an inveterate smoker, and was obsessed with a mania for gambling.

Two years ago, when our youngest son was about three weeks old, we had a severe hailstorm in our vicinity, which broke several large windows in our house, letting in great gusts of wind and rain. The next night I was stricken with a gathering in my breast.

In the year 1913 I had the good fortune to meet a person who told me something about Christian Science. The textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, was procured, and while I was reading the first page of the Preface the thought dawned upon me that this was what I had been looking for for twenty years; and with a feeling that I had never experienced before, I joyfully expressed my newfound hopes to my wife.

I came into Christian Science at a very dark hour, after I had been pronounced tubercular by five physicians, and advised either to go West or else "make the most of my time. " I had asthma very badly, and was unable to lie down at night without the aid of an opiate.

I wish I could do justice in describing my appreciation of Christian Science. When this beautiful truth was brought to me I was in "the valley of the shadow," suffering from kidney and bladder trouble in a very severe form.

Christian Science was brought to my notice about the middle of 1910 by a dear friend in Canada, who wrote telling me of the help it had been to her, and very earnestly advising me to look into it. At this time I had never heard anything except adverse criticisms regarding it, and in my ignorance had a good-natured contempt toward it, rather than antagonism.

After going through many conditions of suffering which physicians had failed to heal, I was told of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. I knew absolutely nothing of it, or its author; but the little that was related appealed to me, and I sent to the public library for the book.

My first impression of Christian Science was as a religion of joy and of love; and I was led into it in the following way. At Christmas time, a few years ago, I arrived in the United States with only a slight knowledge of the English language and without a real friend within a distance of three thousand miles.