Testimony of Healing February 24, 1906 Issue

Memory turns back this morning to the year 1897, when...

Jane Kilcrease with contributions from James Marshall

Memory turns back this morning to the year 1897, when everything was very dark to me. I was afraid of death, and felt that I should soon pass on. For years I had been gradually going down, and was in what my physician and friends called the last stage of consumption and heart trouble. I was like a shadow, to mortal sense, and was not expected to live longer than a week, when a distant friend sent me a copy of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy. She wrote me to read it with the Bible, to try to understand what they taught, and then I would see that it was not God's will that I should die. She wrote me that health and life come from God, not sickness and death. When I began to study the wondrous book, Science and Health, I could read only a few lines each day, but I kept on trying daily to understand it, and soon I began to see the truth. At first it came as little flashes of light, and in a moment of time I would get a gleam of something beyond the mortal vision, then for days I would be uplifted. I became hopeful; I would often catch myself trying to sing, and in two or three months I was able to be up. I gained a little each day, in understanding and in strength, from the earnest study of Science and Health, and from the absent treatments of the friend who brought the truth to my attention.

When Christian Science found me I could not walk across my room without holding on to something for support, but in a few months I was able to walk a mile and back without ill results. When I began the study of Science and Health fear would suggest that I had better put that book away and go back to my church, for I could not live long; but I noticed that when I read Science and Health, I would feel better and would be able to sit up. I prayed for light as I never prayed before. If Christian Science was the truth I wanted to know it, and if it was not the truth I wanted to know it. In studying my Bible I found the answer, and realized that Christian Science was true! I was happy, —all doubt had fled. I seemed to be lifted above mortal sense, and caught a little gleam of the joys of Soul. I would often find myself saying over and over the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, and also from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-first verses of the fortieth chapter. I learned their true meaning, and the help and strength they were to me. My healing was slow. It was nearly two years before I was free, before I could say truthfully and with a vim, "I have no consumption, I have no heart disease." For years I had never left the house without a bottle of medicine for the heart. Man-made remedies had failed, but the living God. He never fails!

I am here yet, and have had over six years of wonderful health, after suffering for forty years with lung trouble, which began when I was a small child and lasted until Christian Science healed me. At first there were no Scientists here in this town, and no one to talk to. I often kept my door locked all day, so that I could be alone, as all who knew me held the thought of death over me, while I was trying to overcome it through my own small understanding of Science. The freedom from fear alone is worth all the struggle to obtain it. As time went on, and I did not die, my neighbors began to ask me about Christian Science; some read my books and believed.

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