Testimony of Healing December 17, 1904 Issue

It is not a year since I came to Christian Science, yet I...

Lillian M. Stephenson

It is not a year since I came to Christian Science, yet I feel as if I had never lived before and that all my blessings have come through it. Prior to my acceptance of this truth I had never belonged to any church, but attended one quite regularly. I had early found bewildering and startling inconsistencies, and awoke to the knowledge that the whole truth was not preached from the pulpit. The minister would preach that God is all powerful, yet taught that there is another power opposed to God, called the devil. I would listen to a sermon, thinking perhaps I might be helped to meet a problem that had presented itself to me, but spiritual food I did not receive, and I came away feeling there was nothing practical in what I heard.

I studied Science and Health over two years before I gained much spiritual insight. I was eager and intensely anxious to understand the truth, but I wanted to grasp it all at once, and I see now that the intensity of my thought kept me longer from the understanding, as Science and Health says we must "Emerge gently from matter into Spirit" (p. 485). I made another mistake in trying to understand God intellectually, and thus I found only confusion. I then prayed earnestly for light, and gradually the clouds lifted and admitted such a radiant light and understanding that all anxiety vanished and I saw clearly that "This understanding is not intellectual, is not the result of scholarly attainments; it is the spiritual fact of things brought to light" (Science and Health, p. 505). Through Christian Science my disposition has been changed, and from being gloomy, melancholy, and morbid I have come to a sense of complete happiness, rest, and contentment. I have loftier desires and ambitions, and I have found in Science and Health the grandest conception of God, the highest ideal of manhood and womanhood, and the most consistent and demonstrable explanations of the statements contained in the Bible, that I have ever met. As a public school teacher, I find Christian Science to be an invaluable help, and I know that a spiritual recognition of man's true relationship to God, held constantly in thought, gives us strength and power.

I love Christian Science more every day, and am grateful to the pure, noble woman who has shown us the way to obtain that consciousness which gives a peace that passeth understanding.

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