Testimonies of Healing

Christian Science has come into my life with such a large measure of good works, and has changed so many of the former conditions of discord, that I wish to add my testimony and sound a note of praise for this truth as a blessing to humanity. Four years ago Christian Science was brought to my attention through friends, and I was induced to buy the text-book, Science and Health, and to read it.

I feel very thankful for the many blessings which have come to me through the understanding of Truth gained in Christian Science. It has been an ever-present help in time of sickness and seeming inharmony.

My heart is warm with especial gratefulness this morning for our blessed gift of the Lesson-Sermons—lessons prepared for us to work at daily, laid out faithfully and wisely for us by those whose very thought holds healing. The attraction of the regular Bible study from a spiritual standpoint appealed to me from my first dawning knowledge of Christian Science, and before I cared to leave my own church, even prior to my making any acquaintance among Scientists other than the practitioner whose kindly offices had quickly relieved me of nervous depression, sleeplessness, stomach trouble, and a host of similar woes, and of fear to a great extent.

In the year 1890 I turned to a dear Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, and asked earnestly for help for the bad condition of my heart. Our first meeting was brief but blessed, for I had found a treasure like the pearl of great price, of which the Bible tells us that the man sold all that he had and bought it.

About four years ago I was taken with stomach trouble, which steadily grew worse until I became so emaciated and weak that I was no longer able to walk to and from my work. During the first two years of my suffering I was unable to eat anything of a solid nature without its causing severe pain.

For several years I had been suffering from severe attacks of pain, which were becoming more frequent and more acute. I was obliged to seek special advice, and the doctors were agreed that the attacks were caused by an abnormal growth, with complications which would necessitate a serious operation.

I desire to testify to my gratitude for what Christian Science has done for me. Previous to coming into Science I was addicted to the excessive use of liquor and opium.

For more than thirty years a student of medicine and of law,—necessarily absorbing the theories and tenets of the former profession, and in an active and diversified court practice acquiring the combative tendencies inseparable from the latter,—I feel that my condition of thought did not offer a hopeful field for the inculcation of Christian Science, unless it should appeal to reason and be indeed eternal truth. With my knowledge, limited as I now gladly admit it to have been, but which I then deemed extended, I ascribed the various healings of which I had read and heard, and the authenticity and verity of which I did not question, as having been due to some effective eradication of hysteria from the patient or as the result of hypnotic suggestion.

It is with gratitude and love that I give the following testimony. As I look back over the past three years, and realize all that Christian Science has brought to me, I feel I cannot be grateful enough to God and to Mrs.

In August, 1893, Christian Science came to me in an hour of dark despair. The sentence of death was hanging over me,—"only a question of a few days," the doctor had said.