Article September 8, 1898 Issue

IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT

BY MARTHA SUTTON THOMPSON.

I was the weakly one of the family, and the ordeals of school life, teaching, disappointments, and an injury received on the school ground culminated in invalidism. For twelve years I kept my bed, excepting that during two years of that time I was able to be wheeled in a chair and go about the room hanging on crutches. But after that, for three years before I found Christian Science, I was quite bedfast.

I was very hopeful, and clung to the conviction that something would cure me. I had lost faith in medicine, and quit its use. The hardest trial came just before the dawn. My sight was nearly put out, and for fifteen months I had to lie in a dark room. No one knows the awfulness of this condition unless he has experienced it. During the last two years of my invalidism I struggled constantly for divine healing; was sometimes better, but afterwards worse than ever.

I became almost crazed sometimes, with the conflict of thought. The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, promised healing conditionally; but in proportion as I considered I fulfilled the required conditions, I grew worse. I could not give up the struggle for God's healing, and to go on seemed to threaten insanity. At last one day my sister-in-law read from the St. Paul Pioneer Press an account of healing by Christian Science. I had had a magazine of Mental Science stating cases of wonderful healing, but paid no attention to it. But as soon as I heard this I believed. Hardly knowing whom to approach, I wrote to three practitioners. To each I put the question, "What is the difference between Mental Science and Christian Science?" Two letters came explaining that no difference existed between Christian Science, Mental Science, Divine Healing, and the doctrines and practice of Jesus. The third letter sent the simple reply, "The difference between Christian Science and Mental Science is just the difference between the truth and a lie." I said, "This last letter is from the real Christian Scientist." I began treatment, saying in my first letter that I had every confidence in my recovery. The healing was gradual. I was treated four months. In eleven days my eyes had so far recovered that I could open the blinds and look out of doors upon one of our beautifully shaded streets. After fifteen months of darkness, neither pen nor tongue can describe the beauty of that scene as it appeared to me. My muscles were flimsy as rags, but I learned to "run and not be weary, walk and not faint."

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