Article May 31, 1900 Issue

Blessings Christian Science has brought Us

BY C. E. H.

Until three years ago this spring and summer I cannot remember one day in my whole life that I did not suffer pain. I have heard my mother say that when I was only a babe they did not expect me to live, that I could not walk until I was two years old, and twice after that I was very ill. From that time until I was sixteen I was a constant care to my friends. Then I rallied and was able to go to school and teach until about nineteen years of age, when fourteen weeks of brain fever kept me in bed, or idle for six months.

March 7, twenty years ago, I was married in Groton, N. Y., and came West to live in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, to what was then known as the Soldier's Fort of Abercrombie. Only a house now and then dotted the prairies. For one year I enjoyed the best health I had ever known, then an accident kept me in bed nearly all summer. At last I got about, but the doctor gave me but little hope of getting well. Then a terrible blow came to us. My only brother, then eighteen years of age, who had never known a day's sickness before he came West, passed on the first of August, my father following him the next February.

After my brother's death they took me away about three hundred miles to Rochester, Minn., where I underwent a very trying treatment for about four months. Then by wearing a steel brace or belt I could walk a little at times. There would be days that I could not walk without putting one knee in a chair and holding on to the chair as a balancer; this enabled me to work some, and I taught four terms of school by being carried to and from the school-house; but for between thirteen and fourteen years I felt I was a burden to my husband and mother. Everything was done that our means would permit and that love prompted. After undergoing an operation only to come out in much the same condition, I sent to my mother, then living in Chicago where she had been healed through Christian Science, asking her or my sister to come to St. Paul, Minn. She then wrote to me and wished me to try Science, adding that she could not come. I told her I had tried it, for I had had the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker G. Eddy, for a year, and I believed I had studied it faithfully, as I was told the book would heal me; but I thought it contrary to my Bible, which was my constant companion. I told her if she would come and stay a while and tell me about it, I would try it, and the first train brought her. She came in the morning about nine o'clock, and in the afternoon I had my dress on for the first time for many a weary day, lying on lounge and bed at times. I was ready for my trip to Chicago in four or five days. I left home on the third of March, 1897, and was gone seven weeks.

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