Through Christian Science I was instantaneously healed...

Maurice McC. Church

Through Christian Science I was instantaneously healed of a severe attack of poisoning. The attack came on one Sunday evening in a Christian Science church, and at the end of the service I was feeling very ill. I had to hold on to the chair in front of me in order to stand up, and could not see sufficiently clearly to read the hymn numbers a few yards away from me. After the church service I managed to reach my motor bicycle, and stood holding on to this and wondering how I was going to proceed, for I felt entirely unable to ride.

Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 393), "Man is never sick, for Mind is not sick and matter cannot be." I had been trying to know, and had declared, that man in God's image and likeness was not liable to suffer in this manner, but I seemed to lack the effort necessary to claim my healing. At that moment I saw walking out of church a man from the naval barracks at which I was then serving. This was the first time I had seen interest taken in Christian Science by any of the men at this barracks, and I felt I must go over to him and speak a word of encouragement. As I let go of my bicycle with this intention I ceased thinking sick thoughts about myself and the truth I had declared became realized. Every evidence of poisoning left me and I was absolutely well. Remembrance of the immediate relief from all pain which I experienced at the moment of turning my thought away from myself towards helping another in Christian Science has always been a great help and encouragement to me.

Some years later I was again stationed in a large barracks, containing some four thousand seamen, when an epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis (spotted fever) broke out. Some of the early cases proved fatal; and the barrack rooms where the new contacts lived were placed in strictest quarantine. As each new case occurred after perhaps a fortnight's lull, a wave of disturbance and fear would be felt. This state of affairs continued for a number of weeks.

I was myself in charge of the living block in which some eighteen hundred men were quartered, and which contained most of the cases, and it became clear to me that it was necessary to do more than use Christian Science to protect myself. A practitioner told me how in his experience he had seen an epidemic of scarlet fever arrested in a boys' preparatory school through the work of Christian Science; and so, together with another member of the barracks who was interested in Christian Science, I daily worked to realize "the unity and the reality of good, the unreality, the nothingness, of evil" (Science and Health, p. 269), and of this disease in particular. No cases occurred after this and the whole plague died away, soon to be forgotten.

A week or two afterwards I met the principal medical officer concerned and expressed my pleasure at the happy state of affairs prevailing. He agreed with me, and added that the more recent cases had turned out not to be this particular disease at all, in spite of the fact that in each case the early diagnosis had been that of the disease.

I felt very grateful, knowing that when Christian Science is applied we may always expect the evidence of disease to lose its "reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light" (ibid., Pref., p. xi).

I am continually grateful for the ideal which Christian Science makes a practical aim in our daily affairs, and I am most deeply grateful to our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, and to all those endeavoring to follow her.—Lieut. Comdr. Maurice McC. Church, R. N., Dublin, Ireland.

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Testimony of Healing

With a grateful heart I offer my testimony regarding...

July 11, 1936

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