Testimony of Healing June 1, 1912 Issue

With a deep sense of gratitude to God, to the Discoverer...

Henry James Derbyshire with contributions from John H. Ward

With a deep sense of gratitude to God, to the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, and to the Christian Scientists who brought the light to my notice, I wish to add my testimony to those of many others who have been helped as I have been. After twenty years of indescribable suffering, for which I never found even temporary relief, I landed in Colorado Springs, a physical and mental wreck and unable to earn a living. In this condition I turned to the Union Printers Home, an institution maintained by the Typographical Union, of which I was a member. The physician in charge of the hospital examined me, and after leaving his office I read the report he had made of my condition, which report would permit me to enter the institution. The report read: "Pulmonary tuberculosis, consumption of the bowels, and kidney trouble." The doctor also told me that the lung trouble was well advanced in the second stage. Besides the other troubles mentioned, I was suffering terribly from nervous exhaustion, stomach and liver trouble.

In this institution I was given everything that material methods and means can provide for one in my condition. Every month I was examined by the physician in charge, but he never gave me one ray of hope. When I had been in the institution a year I remarked to the doctor that I was getting worse. He replied, "Yes, you are." When I had been in the hospital two years, I one day put a question to the chief nurse, the answer to which implied more than an answer to my question. I told her that I desired to do some writing which in my condition would require all winter. "Do you think," I asked her, "that I can live through the winter?" She smiled and said, "I hope so."

I had long ceased to be a factor in the world, and looked on people who were busy in mart and trade as children look on ships that go out to sea to distant lands which they cannot comprehend. My condition was such that no human hand could help me and no human voice could comfort me. The magnificent panorama of the Rocky mountains which can be seen from the home had become to me a hazy outline. The beautiful Colorado sky seemed nothing more than a soiled blue rag stretched over my head. The world had become so small that I felt I could leave it with little regret. What education I possessed being along the line of philosophy, necessarily no God or creed had promised me immortality, and as a result no disappointment awaited me. To me death was the end of what I wished had never begun. It was in this state of mind that I uttered my first unconscious prayer. I wrote some verses which I called "The Consumptive's Prayer," and published them in the Typographical Journal for November, 1907. My object in publishing them was to tell the many friends that I had made in the printing world good-bye. Then a remarkable thing happened!

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

Hoping that some one who is similarly afflicted may take...