Testimony of Healing May 20, 1911 Issue

Gratitude may be defined as the conscious capacity to...

Clarke McCue

Gratitude may be defined as the conscious capacity to give thanks. Once the capacity is realized, its expression increases by arithmetical progression; for to possess that which once we knew not, is to give heed to the voice of Love, and to give hourly and daily heed to the voice of divine Love is to take on some understanding of the infinite. The Master said, "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and so I would speak of my own personal gratitude.

For sixteen years I was a slave to the use of liquor, and as such I endured all the hideous dreams of an awful servitude. One of the dreams that deceived me was the thought that whisky was a necessity to my existence, that it added virility to my work (that of a newspaper man), stimulus to my energy, and life to my nerves, overwrought by what I then thought was labor. Indeed, the bottle was the panacea for all fancied ills, and in the end stole my intellect, my time, my manhood, my friends, and worst of all, my self-respect. At last the time came when the lie could deceive no longer. I had reached the ultimate. My means were gone, regular employment was an impossibility, for no one would trust me, and my noble wife was suffering untold agony, wavering between loyalty to her husband and duty to herself. I was tottering on the brink of the gutter, the future bearing no hope, the present naught but damnation, the past unutterable.

About two weeks before the climax came, I met an acquaintance of my youth who I knew had been formerly a drinker. He was sober, prosperous, and his countenance was one of peace and content. If my own case was a characteristic one,—and I have every reason to believe that it was, for whisky tells the same lies to each of its victims,—I had long had an ambition to be a sober man, but could never accomplish the first step toward the attainment of that ambition. I reasoned, Surely if he has found a way to rid himself of whisky, why may not I? At any rate he told me, and gave me the name of his practitioner, and somehow or other the expression "Christian Science" did not then seem to be laden with the repugnance it once had.

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