One hears so many happy testimonies of quick and instantaneous...

One hears so many happy testimonies of quick and instantaneous healings that it may help somebody to read the experience of one, like myself, who has had a slow healing, both mentally and physically, and who thanks God for that very slowness because it has taught so many lessons and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Christian Science can never fail. It is only human beings who fail, and when the healing seems slow and difficult we need never look outside our own thinking for the cause. Eleven years ago I was so crippled with rheumatic inflammation of the joints that I thought I would never be able to walk again. I knew nothing whatever of Christian Science, but I had heard it laughed at, and I only turned to it for the relief of one very dear to me because it seemed absolutely the only thing left untried. I can thank God now that, perhaps because of all those years of suffering and disappointed hopes in doctors, when the true meaning of Christian Science was explained to us it struck us at once as the explanation of everything,—the truth about Life, God, and the Bible.

We hear constantly of cases that are healed through simply reading the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, but I remember, to my wonder, that when I read it for the first time it had no more meaning to me than if it had been a railroad guide, and yet I was so glad to have found a demonstrable teaching about God that in a few weeks I cast aside all my medicines and decided, with the help of an ever patient and kind practitioner, to trust my healing to God. Within the first six months I was healed of chronic insomnia, acute gouty inflammation of the eyes, and several minor troubles, one of which I had had all my life; but at the end of three years I seemed as lame as ever, and I only began to get over that when my own understanding of Science was clear enough for me to see that I was making a reality of the pain, as if God had made it; I was afraid of it, and I saw that if I was believing in evil I did not believe in God. From the day that I decided to resist evil by exercising the limb in spite of the pain and inflammation, I began to improve so steadily that to-day I have almost forgotten what rheumatism is like, and rejoice in renewed activity. I did not get through those three years without many tussles with discouragement but one day I read in the Monitor that "discouragement is disappointed egotism," and the truth of that statement struck me so forcibly that I think it healed me of it then and there, and of its twin, self-pity. I think that was my first glimpse of what I have seen more and more clearly every year since: that it is only egotism, self-will, self-importance, self-righteousness, that can ever come between ourselves and our healing, or that can even seem to come between God and His image and likeness,—the real self.

I remember being very much struck years ago by a story I read about Holman Hunt's picture entitled "The Light of the World." I think almost everybody knows it: the picture of the Savior standing with a lantern, beside a closed door. Somebody wrote to the artist to point out that he had made a mistake; there was no handle on the door. He wrote back to say there was no mistake; that door must be opened from the inside. I think that very few of us are willfully barring the door to the truth, the healing Christ, but I do think that with many of us it is so blocked inside with rubbish that it is difficult to get it open. In my own case I know the rubbish was just selfishness in all its forms and disguises; and I suppose our first bit of healing comes with the discovery that the false sense of self is rubbish and must be got rid of.