Testimony of Healing November 27, 1920 Issue

I wish to express my gratitude for Christian Science and...

E. Alice Taylor

I wish to express my gratitude for Christian Science and for the Christian Science periodicals. My appreciation of them began with the first Sentinel that was given to me. As I read it I saw that the writers of the articles had found what I had been seeking all my life,—an explanation of life, and answers to many of the questions I often asked myself, such as: What is God? What is the being I call myself? Where is heaven? Through the study of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, together with her other works, and with much help from the Christian Science periodicals, I, too, have found answers to my questions, and whereas I once believed in God, now I am beginning to know Him.

Although I appreciated the periodicals from the first, it was some time before I felt that I could afford to buy them, and when I did so it looked as if I should have to do without many things that seemed necessary, but by putting first things first and sending the twelve months' subscription, all needful things were added. I had been reading the periodicals for three years before I began to understand what they really are, and I then saw that it was not so much a question whether I had money to subscribe for them, as whether I read and understood them. I began to see that the Christian Science periodicals are the highest human concepts of divine ideas, emanating from God, Spirit; that they are in and of Spirit, and so need to be understood, apprehended, and received spiritually. I also understood for the first time what Jesus meant when he said, "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." I knew that as I learned to understand, to apprehend, and to receive God's ideas, that I already had them, they were mine,—and more would be given, and that these ideas would take away, or replace, the false beliefs which I had seemed to have.

In the Church Manual (Art. VIII, Sect. 14) Mrs. Eddy says, "It shall be the privilege and duty of every member, who can afford it, to subscribe for the periodicals which are the organs of this Church." In reading these words recently, the word "duty" seemed to stand out above the rest, and I wondered why Mrs. Eddy used the word duty, which means, according to the dictionary, "that which one person owes to another." I had often thought of the "privilege" of subscribing, but never of the "duty." In order to understand what Mrs. Eddy meant I turned to "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 353) and read and pondered over the purpose and the mission of the different periodicals. Then I no longer wondered why Mrs. Eddy saw that it was a "duty." I was reminded also of what Mrs. Eddy has to say in Article VIII, Sect. 6, of the Manual: "It shall be the duty of every member of this Church to defend himself daily against aggressive mental suggestion, and not be made to forget nor to neglect his duty to God, to his Leader, and to mankind."

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