Testimony of Healing September 5, 1908 ISSUE

I did not come to Christian Science for the physical healing...

Antoinette W. Stephens

I did not come to Christian Science for the physical healing, although I was anything but a strong woman at the time; it was from mental unrest—a feeling of stagnation—an intense longing to know more of God. I had been a working church member since childhood. but I found as time went on that I knew no more about God than I did thirty years before, and understood no better about man and all the sorrows and mysteries that seemed to surround him. I could not understand why an omnipotent, all-loving Father should make His children with such imperfect bodies and senses that while they had them they could not see Him,—why He made them subject to sickness and death. If it was God's will that people should be sick and die, why, I questioned, did Jesus go contrary to God's plan and heal their diseases and raise them from the dead, and say he was fulfilling God's will.

I had been taught that we must be resigned to God's will,—wait patiently until we died and reached heaven, when all these things would be made clear to us; but I could not see that the Bible taught this. Jesus said that to know God is eternal life. He did not say that we had to die to know God, but that if we knew Him we should never die. It seemed strange that in the midst of so many wonderful material discoveries so little should be known of God and of man,—His highest creation,—and that the science of man's being should remain such a mystery. I was prejudiced against Christian Science, but when finally I was led to read Science and Health I found in it an answer to the above questions and to many others that had been puzzling me. I found that the revelations of Christ Jesus, spiritually interpreted, appealed to me as the most consistent theory of God and man that I had ever heard. Although the Bible meant so much more to me, now that I had a "Key" to unlock its mysteries, still I clung to the Church of my youth, which I loved very dearly, hoping to remain where I was and also to enjoy the blessings that come from Christian Science. But how could I, when the Church taught directly or indirectly the reality of evil and that God used it, or permitted it, to perfect His creation? The blessings of Christian Science come from knowing that God is All and that evil is not real.

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