Testimony of Healing March 17, 1980 Issue

Years of sporadic mental depression brought me...

BAYARD C. AUCHINCLOSS

Years of sporadic mental depression brought me to utter despair. Despite my religious upbringing, I searched and searched for satisfactory answers to life's problems. Theories of diet, exercise, psychoanalysis, medically prescribed drugs, abundant liquor, and many material comforts, all failed to bring any insight. Faced with three diagnoses of malignant disease, an inability to raise my arms above the shoulder without great pain, and seemingly insuperable personal problems, I saw the future as totally hopeless.

I knew little of Christian Science, but as a last resort I decided to visit a practitioner of this Science. I poured out my woes to her as she patiently listened. Then she began to talk. I understood little of what she said. After a while I heard her say, "You have never been unkind." A flash of spiritual recognition came. It was never "I," or my true spiritual self, that had been unkind. The belief that the real man could be unkind is an imposition of mortal mind, because anything unlike good is foreign to man's origin in God. At that moment I felt as if a great weight slipped off my shoulders. I found myself completely free of the overwhelming misery I had labored under! It was something I'd never felt before in my whole life. I went home rejoicing inside me, "I am healed, I am healed!" One question became irresistible. "What happened to cause this regeneration?" Both the depression and the disease had been permanently healed.

Today, with membership in The Mother Church and one of its branches, and the blessing of class instruction in Christian Science, I know the answer. I was touched by the Christ that day. This saving presence dispelled the illusions of mortal thought that had perpetuated my mental darkness and claimed to dominate my life. The truth of the spiritual perfection of man came naturally to me as pure reality, and the years of fruitless struggle suddenly seemed nothing. The inevitable failures had come because my searching had turned to matter instead of Spirit for relief and comfort. Mary Baker Eddy explains this fundamental point in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 468): "Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal."

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