Testimony of Healing January 22, 1921 Issue

It is a wonderful thing after years of weakness, unrest,...

Ethel Adele Denny

It is a wonderful thing after years of weakness, unrest, and struggle to find that God takes "no pleasure in the death of him that dieth," that it is not God who makes our hearts sad, and that we need never struggle in vain for health, joy, or prosperity. This wonderful thing has come to me through the study of Christian Science.

Like many another, I searched in my childhood for God. He seemed to be in the flowers and hills, but not with men. Never did I hear Him referred to as present, nor did His name enter into common conversation and daily action. I sought Him in Sunday school and church, but the ignoring of the command to heal and the power given to matter seemed illogical and inconsistent with the Bible. There was nothing that taught me how to pray the prayer that "availeth much." Later, when in the university, I sought the power of mind in the study of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel; but the end of every course left man with doubtful immortality, and reason limited by time and decay. All this while I was battling against general weakness, overwhelming fatigue, sore throat, or some other ailment. I never felt well. Doctors told me repeatedly that I was working too hard, and that a breakdown was inevitable. Then my sister contracted tuberculosis of the lungs. Everything that medicine could offer was tried, but to no purpose. For her sake I began to study Christian Science. Another sister fell ill of the same disease. The two passed away within three months of each other. In the meantime my trouble had been diagnosed by two physicians, one a noted specialist, to be the same disease. I was told that it would be fatal for me to go back to work. A Christian Science practitioner told me that God is my Life. Clinging to this, I went back to work. Though often the sense testimony seemed terrifying, I never stopped working, and at last the belief of sickness was replaced by the fact of health, and I knew that I was well.

It is not for the physical ease that one is grateful. It is for the reversal of the sense testimony, the new birth of thinking in terms of ideas, not things. It is to find God as law and Principle in His own infinite Science of Mind, proved beyond shadow of doubt by the overcoming of so-called laws of matter in countless lesser ways that prove the inevitability of the complete demonstration. It is to find man, not as a feeble creature dependent on sleep, circumstance, matter, but as the idea of God, acknowledging only an infinite capacity. For this, I would sing to all the world my gratitude for Christian Science, humbly realizing that I understand only so much as I prove.

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