Testimony of Healing December 23, 1911 Issue

It is with a heart full of gratitude to God that I send this...

James Wardle

It is with a heart full of gratitude to God that I send this testimony to the healing and regenerative power of Christian Science. It is now a little over two years since I was rescued from the horrible pit of agnosticism. For about twenty years I had been seeking God in active evangelistic work, hoping against hope that the assurance of a future salvation, of which others seemed to speak with such certainty, would one day be mine; but the God I sought to worship seemed to me like the god of the children of Baal, too far off to hear, and yet I read in the Scriptures that He both heard and answered prayer. The doctrine of Calvinism crowned the grave with victory by making death the possible portal to everlasting misery. Later, reason and philosophy took the place of religion, but when I read of the miracles performed by Jesus of Nazareth, and that he came to do the will of his Father, I wondered if God had changed His will, when the Christian churches of today were doing nothing in the way of healing the sick. I had been taught that God was the forgiver of my iniquities, but my diseases had to be entrusted to some other power. Further, I could not get away from the suffering and sin I saw around me, and the assumption that if God was the only cause and creator, He must have created them. It then became impossible for me to reconcile the knowledge of their existence with an all-loving Father, so I soon found myself adrift on the sea of doubt—doubt even of the existence of God.

Such was my condition when Christian Science found me. I had stopped all religious work, had ceased to pray, had even stopped my reading of the Bible, for it now was to me only a book of beautiful thoughts which had proved of no practical value. What a glorious revelation it was to learn through the teachings of Christian Science that "the Lord God omnipotent reigneth," and that He is Love! It put new heart in me. For some time I confined my reading to Science and Health, and when I took up the Bible again it was a new book and I could with difficulty lay it down. I had found the only living and true God, and His Christ.

I saw quite clearly that as Jesus came to do the will of his Father, then the destruction of sin and disease was his Father's will; and as God is changeless in His wisdom, the miracles of Jesus could be repeated today. Christ had not left the earth two thousand years ago, but was ever present, the perfect idea of the perfect Principle, God. The Psalms became a storehouse of beautiful promises, the ninety-first being changed from poetry to a practical possession, "the whole armor of God." The eleventh chapter of Isaiah, which latterly I had looked upon as the limit of poetic fancy, was now to me the demonstrable teaching of Christian Science,—Immanuel, "God with us."

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