I HAVE heard and I have read many wonderful testimonies of the power of God to heal the sick, but I regard my own healing as being far more wonderful than any of the cases that have come under my notice, for it has lifted me from the very depths of invalidism and despair to the heights of health and happiness.
I was born a Jew, and brought up in the Jewish faith, but I was unable to reconcile its ancient formulae, law, and symbolism with the metaphysical and scientific advancement of the age. I therefore became at the age of fifteen a confirmed skeptic, and as years went on this skepticism mellowed into agnosticism, the plane of consciousness on which Christian Science found me. A firm believer in evolution, the atomic theory, etc., I was led by the human reason, and naturally mistook effect for cause, pleasure for happiness, matter for substance, sensation for life; and so inevitably drifted farther and farther away from Truth, God, and from health and happiness. I slid down the steep incline which was well-worn, for I thought, believed, and acted as did the world. Being in the world and of it, it required no special effort on my part to accept matter as my basis of thought, and thus God was logically excluded from my basis of reasoning. Having no faith in God, I naturally had no faith in good, in things unseen, but gradually acquired a belief in the power of evil, this belief being based on the testimony of my personal senses. I became grossly material and utterly selfish. My highest ideals, my gods, were success, fame, wealth, beauty in externalized forms (art). I nourished anger, revenge, and envy, was easily offended, and brooded over supposed injury. I drank deeply and often, I smoked continuously, gambled, and swore. According to the world's standards I was rated a good fellow, for I lived well within the pale of the civil and social laws, —in short, I lived a conventional life. Thus I went on, life was one round of mingled pleasure, pain, work, play, enjoyment, misery, health, and sickness,— making existence a chaos, a self-evident contradiction, a burden. I often asked myself what was the object of my existence, what it meant. Theology, philosophy, and science had spoken, but their replies had only increased my perplexity, and I endeavored to solve the problem of existence myself by plunging deeper and deeper into the game of mortal life.
I was fairly successful in my profession (that of writing for the stage), and had no financial worries, but my health began to give way, my nervous system broke down, and in a very short time I counted among my assets, liver complaint, insomnia, dyspepsia, nervous irritability, and a constant dread of some impending danger, an almost absolute hopelessness, which state made not only me but my family exceedingly unhappy. I consulted physicians, specialists, alienists, even druggists, as to the possible remedies for my multifarious diseases. I took nearly all their advice, and as much of their medicine as my stomach would stand. I lived on sedatives, purgatives, tonics, hygienic foods, and alcoholic stimulants in various forms. I read medical works, and would go to my doctor with positive pride when I discovered I had a new complaint for which he could write a new prescription; but it was all of no use, nothing did me any permanent good, life was a living death, and death seemed to offer the only hope. Incipient melancholia set in, and I took a saddening pleasure, a morbid interest in thinking of the joys of oblivion. Life had completely lost its interest for me. In addition to my own troubles, my wife was almost an invalid. She suffered from general debility, pulmonary troubles, throat disease, headache, and chronic colds.
These were the general conditions governing me at the time when Christian Science found me. I do not think I have exaggerated in my description of the above conditions. Everything seemed terribly real, and evil seemed to predominate to such an extent that I left good almost entirely out of my calculations as a potential factor in human affairs, believing good and evil to be co-ordinate, with the chances in favor of evil. I believed fully in the testimony of my senses, and my senses saw all as matter and ideas proceeding from matter. Sometimes I plunged deeply into the gaieties of life, in the hope of finding happiness in some particular mental state, through material means but every hope was only destined to become part of my general experience, that nothing was real or lasting or true, and the longer I lived the more perplexed, unhappy, and ill I became.
One day. a memorable day in my history, a friend of mine noticed my condition, and I, glad of the opportunity to air my woes, unburdened myself to him. I ticked off my ailments to him with a sort of morbid pride in the possession of so many diseases with unpronounceable names. I told him I had tried every known remedial agent, medical, hygienic, philosophic, but all in vain. He asked me if I had ever tried Christian Science, and I looked at him with a smile of bland superiority, mingled with pity. Why Christian? and why Science? Being a Jew, I objected to the word Christian, and being a materialist, I objected to the association of the terms. My friend told me that Christians were those who understood the Christ, Truth, whether they were Jews or Gentiles. What impressed me most of all was his evident gratitude to this Science, which I neither believed in nor understood; in fact, the subject mystified me completely, but I promised to look into it when I had the time, and he gave me the address of a practitioner. Now I left him fully intending to go to my club, where I had an appointment with some friends, but precisely at this moment a most astounding event took place, an event I regard as almost miraculous. I deliberately jumped on a car and went to see that Christian Science practitioner. As I wondered at my own unaccountable action, a feeling of hope came over me, a vague, indefinable hope. Could there be any truth in this Christian Science? How, I asked myself, could such an intangible thing have power to do that which so many tangible realities had failed to do? However, impelled by this inexplicable, indefinable hope, I said to myself, I'll see this nonsense through. All the isms and ologies of the centuries have failed to cure me, and I might as well have another laugh at myself. Ashamed of my credulity, and yet hoping against hope, I ushered myself into the office of a Christian Science practitioner. There were two or three persons waiting for treatment, and there was an atmosphere of peace and calm about the office that soon extended itself to me, for, seating myself in a chair, I fell into a sound sleep.
I must have slept fully half an hour, for when I awoke, the others had gone, and a portly, smiling, business-like gentleman stood in the doorway of the inner office and asked me what I wanted. I did not know, and I told him so. He asked me what he could do for me, and I replied that I did not know that he could do anything. He said I was quite right, inasmuch as God does all. I smiled superiorly. So far as I was concerned God was a vague hypothetical abstraction. I was very positive on this point, and the gentleman, seeing I was so well-informed and had nothing to learn, did not argue with me; on the contrary, he let me talk myself out, and after I had pretty well exhausted my catalogue of ills and woes, my Christian Science friend calmly informed me that God, divine Love, would destroy them all if I were willing. This of course was arrant nonsense to me. I had been willing for years, and God, if He could have cured me, would have done so. As for divine Love, I saw very little evidence of its existence.
With a marvelous exhibition of patience, the practitioner gently explained that God did not create evil, and has no consciousness of evil, for God is Love, Life, and Truth, infinite Mind, and that the recognition of this infinite Mind would destroy the false mental pictures that were manifesting themselves on my body, destroying my peace and happiness, and thus creating all my apparent woes. The word "apparent" annoyed me. Why apparent? Was I not to believe the testimony of my own senses? To my utter astonishment he replied, "No." I asked him to explain, and he showed me a book, the title of which was "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker G. Eddy. I looked it over and thought it was a sort of ethical culture handbook. I said I would investigate it, and I did! A short time after this, my Christian Science friend went away, and I met another practitioner, a lady, who treated me for my various ailments. As I have said, I was a man of the world, a member of several clubs, social and literary organizations, and numbered among my friends many of the most prominent physicians, lawyers, and artists. I was a confirmed materialist, and yet I make the following statement, fully realizing the difficulty of its being understood by those who do not understand Christian Science. Indeed I myself would not, and could not, in the light of my worldly training, have believed in such a contradiction of accepted theories and material laws before I studied Christian Science. All the same, it is true that from the time I received these treatments, from the time I opened and read that book, I gradually, indeed almost immediately, recovered my health, my peace of mind, professional and financial success, and happiness far beyond my wildest dream, and I have never taken a drug nor consulted a physician since that hour.
Under Christian Science treatment all traces of kidney disease disappeared. I suffered no more from insomnia. I lost my desire for alcoholic stimulants, and stomach troubles which I had from boyhood, dyspepsia, nervous irritability, heart, gastric, and bowel ailments, all left me by degrees; I had no more of those awful fits of depression, and my whole life was changed. Nor was this all; my wife was healed of general debility, pulmonary and throat diseases of a most pronounced type, headaches, and neurasthenic tendency. She had seemed to be ill all the time, but she soon recovered her health through treatment and the reading of Science and Health. In addition to all these blessings, my son was healed in two treatments of hernia from which he had been a sufferer for seven years, and I cannot begin to enumerate the various other physical discomforts from which my family and myself were relieved. What I would like to dwell on now, is the wonderful spiritual healing we have experienced. There are eight of us, all partakers of the blessings of Christian Science, and right here I want to express publicly my deep and abiding gratitude to Mrs. Eddy for having shown me the way to health, to happiness, and to eternal life.
I know now what caused my diseased physical and mental condition, for Mrs. Eddy's book. Science and Health, has taught me that my body only reflected my thoughts, and that diseased thought manifests a diseased body. I know now that I lived in a constant state of mesmerism, a prey to every mental suggestion, controlled by the thoughts of others, because I knew not how to resist scientifically these influences. Instead of allowing God to govern my thought, I permitted false beliefs, false gods, hatred, envy, avarice, and self-love to govern me. I believed in the power of evil, and evil ruled me. As soon as I learned that this power is a fiction, and that God, good, is the only power, it conferred on me not only health and happiness, but also the power to help others, and this is my greatest joy.
This truth has not only restored me to health, but it has enabled me to begin to comprehend the Bible, which had hitherto been utterly unintelligible to me. When I first read Science and Health, I could understand but little of it, but its clear statements of truth soon made themselves felt, and I groped on blindly, discarding little by little my false human knowledge, until finally my persistence was rewarded and the truth burst upon me, bringing in its train the joys and blessings which I am never tired of enumerating. It taught me the difference between good and evil. It showed me my real self, and how to destroy my false sense of self. This truth gave me no rest until I discarded my false material beliefs, then was I soothed by divine Love. It taught me that the belief in evil—popularly known as the devil—has a poisonous influence on the human body, working through the mortal mind and externalizing itself in disease. It showed me that man is not a hopeless creature, working blindly against overwhelming material forces, or a cruel, revengeful, personal God, but on the contrary, that we can destroy these evils—disease and sin—with the knowledge of Truth, as we follow in the footsteps of the great Nazarene.
When I see the depth of the pit of human belief and worldly knowledge, and then get a glimpse of the vast distance we have to travel in our journey from sense to Soul, from the material to the spiritual, a faint sense of the meaning of infinity is unfolded to me. When I think of myself as I was, in all my falsity (ignorance of my real self), trying to separate myself from God and from my fellowman by imbedding myself in sense, when I think of the selfish motives and their inevitable punishments from which I have been rescued, I feel so grateful to our dear Leader for pointing the way to eternal life, health, and happiness, that I find it difficult to refrain from the use of extravagant terms. I used to wonder why Christian Scientists were so profuse in their expressions of gratitude, but I no longer wonder, in fact when I think of what Christian Science has done for me, and that it is through her we have received this truth, I feel that her great work for mankind is under-rated rather than over-rated. I know that I have not yet sufficient understanding either to realize or appreciate its greatness.— New York, N. Y.
