Testimony of Healing March 14, 1901 Issue

Found Health at Last

Mary Stevenson Thomas

To be grateful for the blessings of Christian Science, is little in return for a healthy body and peaceful thought.

I had from childhood earnestly sought, in a blind, groping way, to find this peace, trying as mortals do to find it in material pleasure and work, and in human love. I spent years of constant effort in the field of mental improvement until only the finest and highest in literature could in any sense gratify the longing for intellectual food, with which I was trying to feed the starving human sense of life in material existence. I did not know that Life is a knowledge of God, Good, and that to know God, Good, is the work of eternity. These were the first thoughts that came to me with any clearness, after ten years of constant, al most unavailing, effort on the part of a sister to show me my way out of the ills of the flesh.

At the age of fifteen I was an invalid with stomach trouble. For weeks at a time I could retain almost no food. Scrofulous enlargement of the glands of the neck, the lumps or bunches reaching from the collar—bone to the ear, to the number of seven, and hereditary tendency to consumption, made life much of the time a weary burden. This was followed by twenty years of much the same experiences in varied forms, such as facial neuralgia two successive summers, the grip and its resulting effects in spinal trouble of ten years' standing, so that walking was almost out of the question except with a cane, and then with great suffering. Finally, after traveling over the United States repeatedly for eighteen years, spending eight successive summers in Glenwood, Minn., one in Colorado, two in Idaho, one in Oregon, one in Califorma, a winter in Texas, one in California, and one in Hot Springs, Ark., I finally finished in Santa Barbara, Cal., with pneumonia in May, 1896. When I came home in September I was the most discouraged of mortals, coughing constantly, frightened almost to death by the lung trouble, and ready finally, after all these years, to take God for my guide and listen patiently and humbly to the sister who had tried so lovingly and long to help me out of this sea of human troubles. I want to say here to those who may not know what is keeping them from this universal Good, Christian Science, as taught by Mary Baker Eddy, when they are trying unceasingly, as I did, to extricate themselves, that in my case it was a belief in human intelligence. I thought if Mrs. Eddy and my sister could find their way out I could. I stood all this time trying to put this sham of egotism in the place of divine Love, which fills immensity and is the only reality and power.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

Restored to Home and Friends