Article June 21, 1900 Issue

A Year of Christian Science

BY J. B. TWISS.

Two sayings of Christ have recently been impressed on my thought as never before: "Seek, and ye shall find," "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick."

A year ago I was sick,—sick physically,—and had been so for eight years, but more sick mentally; life for me had been a hopeless tangle, and up to that time I could see no pleasent prospect, no hope of desire fulfilled. By great effort and sacrifice on my own part and on the part of others I had received a good education and had tried to make myself useful, respected, and valuable to the world around me; but every year was lessening my hold on these things that I valued, and life had degenerated into a desperate struggle for existence, with every chance seemingly against me. Eight years of chronic diarrhœa had so weakened me that while the disease had partially left me, the discouraged heart-sickness had vastly increased. I needed a physician and I knew it, but I had tried all schools and classes of doctors with little avail. I now see that I diagnosed my needs very well when I came to the conclusion that if I gained any benefit it would be by some mental method that I had so far failed to discover.

But I then classed mental and spiritual methods as distinct and separate, hence my first move was in the wrong direction, and my first effort to seek was in the fields of animal magnetism. I had previously in my early life explored spiritual fields as presented in the evangelical churches, and for the last five or six years had dropped them as not fully supplying my needs. But mesmerism and animal magnetism proved further from my needs than all else. Finally, as I was in the Public Library in Lowell, Mass., one day, wondering if among all that array of books and literature there was yet any thought, or system, or wisdom, that the ages had accumulated that was or could be of any value to me, or was it still true as in Solomon's day that "of making books there is no end," and "all is vanity," when I sat down at a table in the reading room and picked up the Christian Science Journal for May, 1899, the first one I had ever seen, and, practically, the first I had ever heard of Christian Science. Before I left that table I knew that if half that I found in that Journal were true, I should have to seek no further, for I had found what I wanted. I soon was able to prove to myself whether the testimony in that Journal was true or not, for I went from that table to the desk and learned that the book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker G. Eddy, was in the library, and I took that home with me. I had read the book only to page 2 when this expression arrested my attention: "The divine Spirit testifying through Christian Science unfolded to me the demonstrable fact that matter possesses neither sensation nor life." What, thought I, no life nor sensation in matter? but my body is called matter and that has both, has it not? But how if I have left this body? does the body have life or sensation then? Then it is not the body but I, mind or soul or whatever governs the body, that experiences the sensations and exhibits life; and if this be so, as it must be, perhaps the author has found a way to control, through God's omnipotent power, this life and sensation. I have tried enough to know I cannot control it myself.

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