Approximately twenty-five years...

Frederick Forster Starkey

Approximately twenty-five years ago I purchased a copy of the Christian Science textbook. "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. As a result of what I learned from Studying this book I was freed from the tobacco habit. This healing took place in the unpropitious environment of a military camp, where I was faced with the temptation to continue doing that which, over the years, I had grown thoroughly accustomed to doing, and which had reached the stage where I was saying, "I cannot do without it."

I recall waking one night and reaching for the pipe. Instead of using the match I found myself saying: "Either you are master of the pipe or the pipe is master of you. Which is it?" At that the pipe was put down and taken up again first thing next morning only to be cast into the fire.

This does not mean that the desire to smoke was straightway obliterated; for some months it showed fight. But who could be anything but grateful for an experience that brought to light the value of moral courage and self-discipline as comrades-in-arms to the winning of other and greater battles? Such discipline begets courage. The fact that the pipe was destroyed for good was due to the glimpse I had had of the kind of thinker Mrs. Eddy refers to in the Preface to Science and Health, where she says (p vii). "The time for thinkers has come." There are no halfway houses for easy-goers in Science. One either looks to God for solace and contentment or, among other things, to a pipe.

Good though it is to be free from the petty personal details and untidiness that accompany the smoking habit, still better is the positive understanding of God, and of man made in His image and likeness, that naturally results from the elimination of unworthy thoughts and habits. I am extremely grateful to Christian Science for having absolved me from setting a bad example to young people.

The proof, here recorded, that Christian Science can and does permanently destroy the educated assumption that there can be pleasure in and profit from unworthy habits, is the basis upon which much good is coming to mankind. I am grateful to be able to see the good work going steadily forward.—Frederick Forster Starkey, Studland, Dorset, England.

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Testimony of Healing

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures"...

September 22, 1945

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