Testimony of Healing November 7, 1925 Issue

A few years ago I was working in the exchange department...

Oscar C. Zilisch

A few years ago I was working in the exchange department of a large daily newspaper in the Middle West. The Christian Science Monitor was very often put on my desk, marked at some article the editor had decided to reprint. I did my duty, as outlined, but felt a great dislike and prejudice for anything that had to do with Christian Science. I had returned from Europe only a few months before, after completing government service abroad, and remarked to a friend in the exchange department that the foreign news in the American newspapers was so lifeless, inadequate, and lacking in conviction. "Why not read The Christian Science Monitor?" he suggested. "It has the best foreign news, by far, of any newspaper in this country." (He was not then, and is not to-day, so far as I know, a student of Christian Science.) All the prejudice I had felt for Christian Science, along with memory of the fun we had made of it as boys in a small city of the Middle West, came to the surface, and I rebelled.

In the course of my duties, however, day after day, I remembered my friend's suggestion, and I read one or two of the editorials in the Monitors passed to me for clipping. I read the articles very much out of curiosity. Keen interest, however, was awakened within a few days; prejudices began to disappear. And, most wonderful of all, my desire for tobacco suddenly left me. I had been an inveterate smoker, having begun to smoke at the age of five and a half years; and I was thirty when this healing occurred. In other words, I had smoked for twenty-four and a half years. I did not know or realize then that God, through Christian Science, was responsible for this healing. In fact, I did not know what to make of it. How often I had tried to stop of my own accord, and failed!

Later on my wife and I came to New York city. Day after day I tried to obtain employment, with no success. I would secure a position here and there, but nothing substantial could be found. My wife did her best to aid me in my effort, and got work which helped to tide things over for a few months at a time. Our savings disappeared, and I suffered greatly from severe attacks of acute indigestion and kidney trouble. A doctor examined me and said that if I ever ate certain stipulated foods again I might just as well prepare to pass on. I was almost overcome with fear; and in that state I wandered into a Christian Science church. It was the last resort; and I was weighed down with a deep sense of shame that I should have to turn to religion like a coward and not face the issue squarely and fight it out.

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