Article November 1, 1913 Issue

Power of the Word

EDYTHE M. ELWELL

During the study of one of our Lesson-Sermons in which the parable of the sower was most helpfully explained and illumined by passages from Science and Health, the writer felt impelled to relate the following experience in proof of the power of the Word of God to "guide to the divine Principle of all good" (Science and Health, p. 299).

When I was a young girl, my mother took me to a Christian Science practitioner to be treated for neuralgic pains in the head. Neither my mother nor I knew anything about Christian Science, but because I had received no relief from medicine, and believing that this new religion, of which we had just heard in our city, was a form of faith-cure, she felt that at least I could not be harmed by the experiment. In a very few treatments I was healed. The practitioner very kindly explained to me what Christian Science teaches, and among other things she drew my attention to the last verse of the first chapter of Genesis, and told me that Christian Science enabled us to demonstrate the great spiritual truth contained therein.

The seed of truth was thus sown in my consciousness; but it fell upon stony ground, for an enemy—the arguments of error that I was too young to think for myself, and that I must not entertain the thought of leaving the church of my family for a new religion—came immediately and took away the word which had been sown in my heart. Then followed a few years of much mental disquietude and unrest; but later I went alone to New York city, and one day, as I sat pondering over my disturbed mental state and longing for inward peace, as clearly as though a voice had spoken to me, the words of that last verse of the first chapter of Genesis came to me, "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Instantly I said to myself, It is the word of God, and immediately I thought of the practitioner at home, and I purposed at once to attend the Christian Science services; which I did, and was greatly helped thereby.

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