Testimony of Healing August 17, 1940 Issue

For many years I held myself aloof from Christian Science

Thelma A. Farison

For many years I held myself aloof from Christian Science. I owned a copy of the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, and I occasionally went to church and to the lectures, but with that "stubborn will" of which Mrs. Eddy speaks in one of her poems (Poems, p. 14), I refused to accept the truth as I saw it demonstrated in my home and among my friends.

Reared in an orthodox church, I had, in common with many other young people coming out of our colleges today, repudiated the God of whom I had been taught, preferring to drop all religion and live by what I called my philosophy. I was both unhappy and unhealthy, and in the winter of 1934 I seemed to reach my extremity.

Prior to this time, I had been a hospital patient twelve times in as many years, and I had spent much of my living on physicians and was not healed. My capital had vanished through unwise investments, my home was broken up, I had a small daughter to rear, and I was unable to find a position. In the early part of the winter I was very ill with pneumonia, which left me with severe pleurisy. The doctor told me that there was nothing he could do about it—that it would go on and on, sometimes better, sometimes worse. It went on for some time, most of the time rather worse than better. One night, although the pain was particularly bad, I went to a Christian Science lecture with a friend, who said that I might find healing there. I laughed at her; but before the lecture was half over, I had lost all consciousness of the pain, and it has never returned. More important, when I left the church I was healed of all doubts and criticism of Christian Science. Within a few days I discovered that I had also been instantly and permanently healed of the habit of taking a daily cathartic, which I had done for more than ten years, and also of my belief in the necessity for social drinking and smoking. Very soon after I had begun to study daily and earnestly, there dropped away from me, without specific work on the problem, two obsessive fears which had tortured me from girlhood.

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