The year 1927 stands out as a...

Lizzie H. Harvey

The year 1927 stands out as a very important time to me because it was in January of that year that I turned wholeheartedly to Christian Science and was healed of blindness.

All my life, church on Sunday had been the most important event of each week, and early I united with an orthodox church. It meant everything to me, but as time went on questions arose in my mind which were never answered satisfactorily in this church.

Christian Science was brought to my attention by a brother-in-law and I had a few treatments, but the minister's family, with whom I was very friendly, were opposed to Science and I soon dropped it and employed a doctor. Those few Science treatments, however, had given me something that made me know it was right and good and what I wanted; but I did not understand anything about Christian Science and was not ready to read and learn, so it was twenty-five years before I turned to it for healing.

From that early experience I had retained the thought, which comforted me, that if I ever had anything pronounced by the doctors incurable I could turn to Christian Science and be healed; so in 1927, when I was blind in one eye and full of fear of becoming totally blind, I turned wholeheartedly to it. I had not thought of it as a religion, but during my healing I was completely changed. Mrs. Eddy says in "No and Yes" (p. 40), "If a change in the religious views of the patient comes with the change to health, our Father has done this; for the human mind and body are made better only by divine influence." This healing was wonderful, and I was so grateful. The old way of thinking became a closed door. Christian Science was answering all the questions and making clear all the things that had perplexed me for years.

For twenty years God, Truth, has been my only physician. I do not know why I have withheld this testimony for so long.

I wish to relate an experience which meant growth and progress to me. This demonstrated that "trials are proofs of God's care," as Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health (p. 66). For some time I had been much disturbed over an unhappy experience of one close to me, and hurt feelings and resentment had been piling up. Instead of handling the errors and ruling them out as entirely unknown to God, I had allowed them to accumulate, until I suddenly became aware that instead of handling them, they were handling me, and I became seriously ill.

I did not give any name to the difficulty and heard no one else name it, but I needed help and so telephoned to a practitioner, who at once took up work for me. During the next three days I seemed to pass "through the valley of the shadow." One night when I talked with the practitioner she told me to read some statement of Truth and cling to it. Like a flash this thought came to me and I declared, "Every faculty of my real being is eternally proving that I am the image and likeness of God." The consciousness of the truth of this statement and the practitioner's clear, understanding work broke the mesmerism and started me on the way to complete healing.

I am more and more grateful for having had class instruction. From this experience I have learned to be more diligent in my watch, against the mesmerism that would keep me from progressing and from using what I know of this wonderful truth that makes free.

I am grateful to the first practitioner, who improved the small opportunity given her to help me, and to the one who has worked so faithfully and has so lovingly stood by me since; also to my teacher for his wise counsel in times when it was much needed. I am grateful to Christ Jesus, the Way-shower, and to Mary Baker Eddy, whose thought was so pure it enabled her to discover the Christ-healing and give it to the world.—(Mrs.) Lizzie H. Harvey, Rumford, Maine.

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Testimony of Healing

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November 22, 1947

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