Testimony of Healing March 29, 1913 Issue

Five years ago I was believed to be a helpless victim of...

Mabel Mary Henderson

Five years ago I was believed to be a helpless victim of mental and physical suffering. After the family doctor had given me a thorough examination and had pronounced me incurable from an attack of rheumatism, heart trouble, and other internal disorders, he told my mother that I would never get well, though he left me a bountiful supply of medicine. I decided, however, that I would not take the medicine, for if I was going to die I would prefer to die easy. My mother and sister were then members of a Christian church, and I attended the services with them; but when I heard the preacher talk about God sending affliction and death, instead of being a God of love, and when I saw the selfishness of some professed Christians, I could hardly stand it. I would come home almost starved, hungering in a way that I then could not account for.

The concept of divine Love that I should have gained from the Bible and the church, I found not; so, tired and sick of this seeming mortal life, I became an atheist. I longed to die, that I might be relieved from my suffering; but in the darkest hour a white-winged messenger came, when a friend told me about Christian Science, of this wonderful saving truth. He let my mother have a copy of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, to read, but knowing nothing of the book, it was not read for some time. My father believed in hypnotism and studied "New Thought," and my mother supposed that Science and Health was another book on that subject, and did not care to search its pages.

One morning, about three months after I heard of Christian Science, in my great distress I told my mother that if there was any truth in that book, I was going to find it. I was then about sixteen years old, but could scarcely read in the third reader, as I had been unable to attend school, and the first words which I tried to read from Science and Health were on page 18: "Atonement is the exemplification of man's unity with God, whereby man reflects divine Truth, Life, and Love." I got a dictionary and found the meaning of every word I did not know, and in one week's time I fully realized that I was drinking of "the water of life." My father and mother also began to read the book, my father then being a victim of so-called "Bright's disease" and dropsy, while my mother suffered from gall-stone, also kidney and female troubles. All three of us had been pronounced incurable by the doctors.

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