Testimony of Healing September 25, 1909 Issue

I feel that I should, through the Sentinel, give public expression...

Ada M. H. Mills

I feel that I should, through the Sentinel, give public expression to my gratitude for what Christian Science has done for me and my family. Two and a half years ago I was an active and faithful church-member, but for some time I had gradually been losing interest in the church. I had gone to the services partly from a sense of duty, and partly because I was hungering for spiritual truth, for which I looked in vain. As I went about my home duties day after day, the thought would come to me, What is this life for, anyway? Why did God place us here to go through with so much trouble, sorrow, and pain? I questioned most seriously the meaning of it all, and like a flash it seemed as if a curtain in front of me had parted, but only for an instant, to give me a glimpse of something of which I longed inexpressibly to see more. I prayed most earnestly to God to lead me, and to make me and all my family what we ought to be.

Soon after my daughter, who was attending school in Chicago, wrote me concerning a friend who had been greatly benefited by Christian Science treatment after the doctors had failed to cure her. I happened to have in the house a pamphlet published by a chemical company, containing some lectures by a well-known clergyman against Christian Science. From this pamphlet I made several quatations in my reply to my daughter, who I feared was being misled. My husband, who was a medical practitioner at that time, proposed that we bring the younger daughter home, to save her from the false views evidently held by her older sister, but this I was really unwilling to do. Then came the thought that the older daughter had received enough training at home to help her to distinguish between what was right and wrong according to the Bible teaching, but in her next letter she asked, "If we can accept some of the sayings of Jesus, why cannot we accept all?" Then came a sharp realization of the fact that I had not been accepting all of Jesus' sayings, but that I had been considering some of them as applicable only to centuries long past, and without any right reason for so thinking.

The pamphlet referred to above had spoken of the "vague meaning and generally unsatisfactory wording" of Mrs. Eddy's writings. This expression, coming from a minister, aroused my curiosity at once, and I resolved, if I had a chance, to read Science and Health for myself. Far sooner than I could have expected, the chance came, My husband had been troubled with rheumatism for some time, and one day on his way home from town he stopped in at a neighbor's to rest. On arising to go home he complained of his trouble, and the lady told him he did not need to suffer that way. She then explained Christian Science to him for a while, told him she would give him treatment (for he had no faith in material remedies for his trouble), and loaned him her copy of Science and Health and some Sentinels and Journals. He was helped in a short time. The disease left and has never returned, although he has been exposed to wet and cold even worse than before,—the very conditions which he had in the past considered the cause of his trouble.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

I have been studying Christian Science over two years,...