It was about Easter time last year that through the...

Gertrude M. Bradley

It was about Easter time last year that through the kindness of a friend I learned of Christian Science. She lent me her Science and Health to read, and since then I have been gradually "coming to Life." Not straight off, without a relapse, but with much the same movement that brings a cork ashore bit by bit on the incoming tide, and it may be of use to other beginners to know the causes of one or two of these despairing relapses.

For some time after having treatment from a Scientist friend and being healed, I was very happy and well. Then, unaccountably, I began again to get almost crippled with rheumatic gout. In despair I wrote again for treatment, but felt utterly hopeless of ever being safe.

She began absent treatment, but this time I got no relief, and told her so. Then she wrote and most lovingly pointed out the reason of my non-recovery. Truth had shown her — First, that I was letting resentment for some injury abide in my thoughts and so was shutting out Love. Secondly, that I was giving my affections to some human person rather than to God. He was not first in my thought; therefore I was shutting out omnipotence.

This letter was rather a shock, because both these things were become so much a part of me that I did not realize their existence, and even had I done so, I should, in my own unenlightened thought, have felt justified, for the resentment was over some unjust treatment from an acquaintance, and the affection was given to a friend who deserved it in every way. I knew the error had been uncovered by Truth indeed, for both things were known only to myself.

I wrote and told her she was right, and that I would guard thought and struggle with those two things, and I tried, but until I tried, I had not realized how much those two faults had become, as it were, part of my every breath. But help came each time as I struggled, and with the surrender of those things to God came physical healing and a great uplifting and enlightening of spirit.

This taught me how hidden are the errors that drag us down from the freedom of Truth. Sometimes it may be some half-suspected thing one does not want to see, to which one is clinging with an unconfessed hope that perhaps such a little thing won't matter. Sometimes, one really doesn't know what the hindrance is. Then one must turn his mentality inside out, shake out all the crinkles, as one shakes a moth-eaten garment in the sunshine, and the light will kill the moth and disclose the bad places.

Gertrude M. Bradley, Brockton, Eng.

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I have been in Christian Science since August, 1902

July 11, 1903

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