In these days of the age-old conflict...

Gertrude E. Shriver

In these days of the age-old conflict between the so-called forces of personal domination and the recognition and proof of the Christ-healing, I give my testimony of healing in Christian Science, hoping that it will encourage those who are seeking to be loosed from personal domination and human bondage.

Doctors gave me up to die of a dread disease when I was a very young girl. One doctor said that it was possible for me to live only if I would stop worrying. I felt that I was being held in bondage, because I was not allowed to think for myself. My worry began when my father would not let me go to college. I asked him for money to go to another city, where I might obtain employment and work my way through college, but he refused.

I continued to seek a way to release myself from bondage. I presented my problem to a neighbor who was a Quaker, and asked him if it would be right for me to leave home. His reply was, "If it is right for thee to leave thy father, thee will succeed; God will guide thee; but if it is not right, then thee can return to thy father again." The man was blind, so I read to him for some months and earned sufficient money to go to another city, where I obtained a position teaching children in a Christian Science home. They employed me because they saw that I needed help. The family expressed so much consideration and kindness that I was encouraged to stay on with them.

One morning I was unable to raise my head from the pillow. The mother sent the youngest child to my room. The child came in with a radiant smile and said, "You are God's perfect child, and God's perfect child cannot be sick." How those words impressed me! I was God's child instead of being the child of a mortal. I arose from that bed as if a stone had been lifted from my body.

The mother came to my room offering me "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. I would not accept it at that time because I felt that students of Christian Science idolized Mrs. Eddy. However, she used wisdom and asked me to read the eighth chapter of Romans. I read that chapter each day for a month and felt that I was healed. Then I collapsed again. They tried to help me, but I did not respond and returned to materia medica, which, however, failed to help me. I did not want to die, so I turned again to Christian Science. The mother said the Science and Health would open my thought to the understanding of my true being as a child of God and would help me.

I was willing to be obedient. I opened Science and Health to page 558 and read: "This angel or message which comes from God, clothed with a cloud, prefigures divine Science. To mortal sense Science seems at first obscure, abstract, and dark; but a bright promise crowns its brow. When understood, it is Truth's prism and praise. When you look it fairly in the face, you can heal by its means, and it has for you a light above the sun, for God 'is the light thereof.'"

It had indeed a light for me. I was healed physically. I have proved that Life is not governed by physical sense. What seemed to be parental opposition had turned me to my heavenly Father and to divine Science. I shall never cease to be grateful for this.

This experience came to me over thirty years ago, and I have not been tempted to yield to material remedies of any kind since then. I learned the meaning of the words of Christ Jesus (Matt. 23:9), "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." My father accepted Christian Science after I saw the light.

Science and Health is certainly the key that opens the Scriptures and provides the solution to every human problem, and it is available to all. In the words of one of the hymns in the Christian Science Hymnal (No. 64):

From sense to Soul my pathway lies before me,
From mist and shadow into Truth's clear day;
The dawn of all things real is breaking o'er me,
My heart is singing: I have found the way.

—(Miss) Gertrude E. Shriver, Chicago, Illinois.

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