Testimony of Healing May 7, 1904 Issue

When I was a little girl, I was taught to say "Thank you,"...

Cyrene Emery

When I was a little girl, I was taught to say "Thank you," whenever anybody did me a kindness. For a long time now I have wanted to say "Thank you" to the faithful Sentinel and Journal whose visits mean so much to us all, bringing as they do, from all over the world, words that test and teach and inspire. I am very grateful to them both.

It was one day in November, 1897, that my feet turned carelessly into a new path. It looked like a very narrow and unimportant little path that day, marked only by a guide-post that read "Physical Healing," but ever since, it has grown wider and wider, until now I know that it is nothing less than the way to Truth and Life. I had no thought of any change coming to my petted opinions and convictions, which seemed to me very fixed and fine, but on the second day of treatment the practitioner gave me the illustration of the mirror as it is given in the chapter on the "Science of Being" in our text-book, and I do not believe that I have ever doubted from that moment that Christian Science is the one true thing in all the world, although many things have come very slowly to my consciousness, and the kind patience of my teacher has had much to do for me. On the third day of treatment I took off the glasses that I had worn for a long time, and the rest has followed, easily and quickly when I have been faithful, slowly and with many pangs when I have forgotten my royal descent as daughter of the King. For all the way that God has guided and guarded and kept me, I thank Him. For the loyal, true teaching that I have had, for our text-book and the other books that Mrs. Eddy has given us, for the Sentinel and Journal, for our dear church here in Concord, for the massive gray walls of the new church building soon to be our home, and for the happy, holy work that lies hidden in the years to come, I thank Him again. For her, through whose translucent thought it has all become possible, even the dawning of "the day of his coming," I thank Him again and yet again.

About a year ago I had an experience that was a great help to me, showing, as it did very clearly, that the root of all suffering is indeed "a false sense mentally entertained, not resisted" (Science and Health, p. 411). One Saturday morning, as I was busy about my work, I suddenly thought of a pot of beans that was baking in the oven of my very hot stove. I went to see if they needed any attention, and in my haste took the hot handle of the bean-pot in my bare hand. I seemed to see what I was about to do before I fairly touched the burning surface, only not quite in time to avoid it, so that the thought of protection, of "being covered," was ready almost in the instant of my need. I do not think it was three minutes before every sense of burning, of redness, of blistering, had disappeared. That was good so far, and proved to me that "God is ... a very present help in trouble" now, as truly as in the days of the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace, "upon whose bodies the fire had no power." But then I made a mistake. Instead of giving God the glory, and letting it all slip away like the dream it was, I kept rolling it over and over in my thought,—how wonderful it was, how burned I might have been, how hot that bean-pot was,—until presently, in perhaps a half hour, my hand began to smart and burn, and pretty soon I had a bona fide burned hand, as far as my senses could see, red, smarting, and showing signs of blisters. That time it took a good deal longer to wipe it out, and it wasn't satisfactorily done even then. If I had doubted before that "the cause of disease obtains in the mortal human mind" (Science and Health, p. 174), I could never doubt again. It showed me, too, that it is as wrong to remember evil as real in the past, as it is to believe it real in the present, or to dread it as real in the future, since God is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and the eternal Christ forever His image and likeness.

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