Testimony of Healing December 5, 1914 Issue

I was born and live the greater part of my life in a New England...

Edith M. Short

I was born and live the greater part of my life in a New England city within an hour's ride of Boston, and was in urgent need of the healing truth revealed in Christian Science; yet not until I had made my home in California did I sufficiently lose the antagonism for what I believed Christian Science to be, to allow myself to make an investigation of its teachings. At that time I had nearly lost faith in everything. I was suffering from a so-called incurable organic trouble of fifteen years' standing, from the effects of a nervous breakdown, and from many minor ills. I was also much discouraged, since the medicine which I took for one ailment seemed to aggravate another. For eight years I had been obliged to wear glasses for a structural defect of the eye, and I was told by the oculist that I would never be able to get along without them. For many years I had been without faith in God as being of any use to humanity, and circumstances had been such that my faith in human nature was nearly destroyed. I was unhappy and without any object in life.

Christian Science has completely reversed all these conditions. I have been healed of the organic disorder, of the eye trouble, and of many other physical ailments. I have learned that God is divine Love, and that He, as Mrs. Eddy says, "always has met and always will meet every human need" (Science and Health, p. 494). I have found that it is not necessary for me to have faith in human nature, but that I must have faith in man as God made him, or I prove that I have no faith in God, since man has no being which is underived from God. I am no longer without an object in life, for I have the same aim which every Christian Scientist has,—to prove the omnipotence of good and the unreality of evil through the overcoming of evil.

I am indeed grateful for this revolution in my thought and for its attendant results, but I find that some of the most helpful experiences which I have had in Christian Science have been along the line of my work. These have been the experiences which have done the most to change my standpoint of thinking from a material to a spiritual basis, to teach me that God is the only self-existence and that man has no separate existence of his own. I remember that when I first became interested in Christian Science, whenever I heard any one mention how much this teaching helped him in his work, I had a feeling of disappointment to think that I did not need the help along that line. I am grateful, therefore, that in this very direction where I least realized my need, where I had the greatest feeling of self-confidence and the least feeling of dependence on God, I have been obliged to prove over and over again that although "with God all things are possible," yet without Him we "can do nothing."

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