Testimony of Healing July 18, 1914 Issue

I desire to express my gratitude for the many blessings that...

Charles O. Fletcher with contributions from Berenice Cornell Fletcher

I desire to express my gratitude for the many blessings that have come to me and to my family through Christian Science. For many years I was very much prejudiced against this teaching, for I was viewing it from the standpoint of materia medica, as I had spent years in the study and practice of medicine, and for five years of that time I lectured in the medical department of a midwestern university. I believed Christian Science to be a form of hypnotism, and therefore an imposition on the people, and I felt it my duty to oppose what I thought it to be, and therefore proceeded to do so.

In the fall of 1902, through the redemptive power of Truth as taught in Christian Science, my wife was healed of an internal abnormal condition after everything medical had failed. When I learned later of the source of her healing, I did not believe that she could remain well. She has done so, however, and through the study of the Bible and the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, I am learning more clearly each day why this was not only possible, but indeed natural. At that time I was addicted to the use of tobacco in different forms, the social drink habit, profanity, etc., and through Christian Science I was healed of these errors without effort on my part, whereas all my efforts to rid myself of them in the past had failed. The fact that these habits and appetites never returned, and that I noted the great reformation, both mentally and physically, which was taking place in the life of my wife as she gained a better understanding of Christian Science, caused me to investigate this teaching more fully.

The result of this humble and earnest investigation was that much prejudice, selfishness, envy, and many other happiness-destroying conditions have been overcome in my experience. As I, through reading the Bible and the Christian Science literature, gained an understanding of God as never-changing divine Principle, omnipotent and omnipresent good, I could see more surely the empiricism of materia medica, and I abandoned its practice in 1908. A few months later I was healed in Christian Science of a kidney affection, from which I had suffered periodically since childhood. I am very grateful for the physical healing, but the spiritual uplift and regeneration that I have experienced through the understanding of Christ, Truth, as it is taught and explained in Christian Science, is a cause for much gratitude.

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