Testimony of Healing March 1, 1919 Issue

Christian Science has proved to me the truth of the Bible...

Elizabeth A. M. Cowan

Christian Science has proved to me the truth of the Bible statement, "He satisfieth the longing soul." I always had a great longing to know the truth, to be well and do my part in life, and a longing for many things, I did not know what. In the understanding of God which Mrs. Eddy has given to the world I have found the answer to all my needs.

For the sake of those who may read this testimony and who perhaps feel opposed to Christian Science, or what they conceive it to be, I may say that when I first read the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, I had no expectation of ever finding satisfaction in its teachings. I was divided in my thought between the fear that it might turn out to be a provable truth, which must therefore be followed whithersoever it might lead, and the hope that it might indeed be able to do what it claimed for the healing of the world. As the only way to find out was to prove it for one's self, I went to the Christian Science reading rooms in Edinburgh and asked a practitioner whom I found there to give me a treatment. She talked to me for a long time and I disliked nearly everything she said, but in order to give the system a fair trial I agreed to have treatment. At my next visit, four days later, while the practitioner was explaining to me that all is Mind, I got my first glimpse of the real meaning of Christian Science, and with that glimpse was instantaneously healed of doubt, of the sense of being a semi-invalid, of sleeplessness, and of extreme brain exhaustion after reading or thinking. These conditions were largely the result of an accident five years earlier, also of trouble in my lungs three years before I heard of Christian Science.

It is no slight thing to be healed of the burden of physical and mental weariness after struggling against both for years, but to know that the perception of a fact has healed you, is to know with a certainty that can never be taken away that the fact is truth. After this I knew that Christian Science seen from the inside is as different from what it seems as viewed from the outside as love or joy or peace would be to one who had never known these from experience. Everything the practitioner said to me, and all that I read on this subject, became of the greatest interest; and I found that this teaching, being based on divine Principle, is the highest possible system of ethics. Although I seemed at that moment to enter upon a new life, I had nevertheless many difficulties thereafter, both physical and mental. Nothing, I think, had helped my progress in Christian Science more than the understanding that "divine Principle is the Life of man" (Science and Health, p. 304), that genuine, unselfed goodness is the heart of Christian Science. I am especially grateful for the understanding that all that is good is true and that to see evil aright is to see it as unreal; for in these facts lies the salvation of the world.

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