Testimony of Healing January 29, 1938 Issue

It has been more than thirty-five years since Christian Science...

Bertha A. Detrick

It has been more than thirty-five years since Christian Science was first introduced in my home. At that time a sister married and went West to live, where she learned of this wonderful truth. We had never heard the term "Christian Science," and knew nothing about it, but she sent us a copy of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, and a subscription to the Christian Science Sentinel. Coincident with this, a brother was just entering medical college, while I was planning to take a nurse's training course in a medical hospital. My parents became very much interested in this new teaching, but I was quite indifferent to it.

However, shortly after this I broke down under a nervous strain, which terminated in what was pronounced typhoid pneumonia. It was left for me to decide whether to seek help through Christian Science or materia medica. I decided for Christian Science, and a practitioner was called. She sat by my bed throughout the night in quiet meditation, and with the morning light the fever broke and I was healed; that is, I was healed physically, but mentally I was not awakened. I slept on for ten years and was as "a pendulum, swinging between evil and good, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, life and death" (Science and Health, p. 246).

During this ten-year period my brother had become a successful physician, while my sister had become a registered practitioner of Christian Science. Under the stress of circumstances my mother, torn with the conflict between Science and medicine and burdened with the human sense of love for her children, passed on. "And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand" (Mark 3:25). This awakened me from my lethargy, and I saw that I must again choose between Christian Science and materia medica. Knowing that no drug could heal grief, I turned to Truth, and at once began an earnest and systematic study of Christian Science, from which course I have not deviated, and for which I have been amply rewarded.

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