Article December 26, 1914 Issue

Spiritual Vision

HELEN HAYDEN HILTON

I would like to speak of the first time I felt the healing touch of the Christ in Christian Science. When a very young girl I was sent away to school because of the lack of educational advantages in the small town where my parents were then living. During that time I was told by physicians and specialists that unless certain impairments of the vision were corrected, I would be totally and hopelessly blind in a few years. Instead of being corrected, however, these difficulties grew worse until my last year in school, when at the age of nineteen the darkness to which I had been doomed began to fall about me so rapidly that much of the time I should have spent in school I was shut away in a darkened room.

My mental condition at this period was most unusual for so young a person, and I wish to speak of it, because the mental state is the only one to be considered. When scarcely more than a child, I had joined a church, because it was according to "the traditions of the elders" to do so. But as soon as I learned to think for myself, I thought my way straight out of it, so that at the age of nineteen I had arrived at a state of complete skepticism regarding every bit of religious doctrine I had ever received. This was specially terrible to me, because I came from a family of churchmen who had been pioneers in founding and building up one of the well-known denominations of our present day, so that by heritage, training, and association I had been thoroughly equipped with religious teaching. I suppose, however, that the independence of thought which caused my forefathers to depart from the prescribed teachings of their day, served me in rejecting the teaching they had built up. At any rate, I did reject it.

I did not, however, lose my belief in God. In fact, the more I rejected current theology, the more I longed to know God and the more I believed I could not see Him. Then the more I believed I could not see God, the more I believed I could not see anything; hence the blindness which the doctors called physical. I was comparatively indifferent to what the doctors said, terrible though it was. The thing which dominated my thought was the longing to know God. Now the beatitude says, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled;" and when I had reached the point where with all my mind and heart I longed to know God, divine Love heard and answered my cry for understanding, and through one of His little ones presented to me for the first time the definition of God in Science and Health.

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