Testimony of Healing May 6, 1922 Issue

Having been in hospital and nursing work for the better...

Sara E. Parsons

Having been in hospital and nursing work for the better part of thirty years, I have been intimately associated with doctors, nurses, and social workers who were struggling to improve the condition of the unfortunate sick, who were often poverty-stricken as well. In fact, it has often seemed that poverty and sin were the cause of the illnesses. During these years it has been borne in upon me that all efforts to alleviate these conditions are vain unless the real love of God can become the motive power of the activities of humanity. The question, How can religion be made effective? became insistent, especially after the outbreak of the world war.

When I came back from overseas, where I had been chief nurse of a base hospital, I found that my sister had become a Christian Scientist while her husband and I had been in service. It had evidently been a great blessing to her; and through reading the Lesson-Sermons with her I became interested myself to the extent of thinking that Christian Science was worth an honest trial. I was not much concerned about my physical condition, because I was not incapacitated and I had become used to my chronic ailments, supposing them inevitable at my time of life. But of course I wanted to be cured if it were possible. I threw away the remedies that I had been in the habit of taking as palliatives, and began reading Mrs. Eddy's works regularly, and also took Christian Science treatments from an authorized Christian Science practitioner.

Gradually my general physical condition improved, until I can truly say that I am better now than I ever remember to have been before. But that is not the reason that I love Christian Science. I love it because I know it to be the revival of primitive Christianity with power to do the healing work that Christ Jesus did, curing sin and disease just in proportion as we understand and live the truths that he taught. It makes life worth living and joyous even while we are struggling towards the true ideal, difficult as the task is. We learn that, as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 222), "Truth regenerates this fleshly mind and feeds thought with the bread of Life."

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