Testimony of Healing April 19, 1919 Issue

Christian Science has been a constant guide, comfort,...

F. R. Hardie

Christian Science has been a constant guide, comfort, and friend to me for some six years, and especially during the war. August, 1914, found me commissioned in a cavalry regiment, saddled with responsibilities which were none too easy for a youth of nineteen to bear. Experience followed experience, but I feel now that through every one Christian Science was a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, though I did not always realize this at the time. Trials at times seemed to be somewhat severe, but what a store of helpful thoughts do the teachings of Christian Science give us on the subject of trials. I was always too ready to take responsibility overseriously, always too inclined to think that the work in hand depended entirely on my own personal effort, and consequently always only too willing to lapse into the last stages of self-condemnation.

In July, 1915, while in France, I transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and during my second period of service at the front was wounded. My observer and I were completely surprised one morning, while on an artillery patrol, by three enemy scouts. The first indication was a burst of machine gun bullets which sounded too close to leave anything to the imagination. Under the circumstances, my machine being of an extremely slow and almost obsolete type, I had to get away somehow. I remember heaving the machine about and the observer firing a few bursts as best he could. My thoughts turned to the one Mind, with a confidence that therein alone was our salvation. The hostile machines left us after having riddles ours to pieces. I received a very slight flesh wound near my right elbow, but my observer was not hit. I managed to get the machine back to the aerodrome, though there were hardly any means of control left, and have since been told that it was always a matter of wonder to those on the ground how the machine stayed in the air at all.

After returning from hospital to the squadron the stress of work, coupled with the worrying tendencies referred to, proved too much for me, and I became the victim of a nervous breakdown. I went through four months of hell, during which I found myself in a hospital for the mentally afflicted. I became so depressed that for a long time I suffered from strong suicidal tendencies, but am thankful to say that in spite of all the terrible contemplations the conviction that Christian Science was the truth never left me; in fact, it was a source of agony to me that I felt my mental condition was one of disloyalty to Christian Science. I asked for help from a practitioner and in August, 1917, I was discharged from the hospital—healed. Ever since I have enjoyed the most wonderful freedom. The attacks of false responsibility, overconscientiousness, and depression, which before seemed so real and a decided part of my nature, have never returned. It all seems to have been the birth of a new sense of life.

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