In gratitude to God, and with...

Percie Stella Matlock

In gratitude to God, and with the sincere desire that my experience may help others struggling with a similar problem, I give this testimony.

In the Christian Science textbook. Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, we find this question (p. 266): "Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank?" For many years after I began the study of Christian Science I avoided answering this question. I even avoided reading it, for it seemed to me that existence would indeed be a blank to me without my dear ones. But as I grew in the understanding of this Science, I began to realize that I was not doing right. I knew that Science and Health was written through inspiration; that all of it was to be read, studied, lived, and loved; and that I had no right to avoid reading any part of it. So I began to face that question, and I realized that the answer was "No": that existence could never be a blank while I had God and some understanding of Christian Science. Later came the testing time, when one very dear to me passed on after a brief illness.

Constantly there was with me the thought, "Loose him, and let him go." I felt that I must not let my grief and sorrow hinder his progress, but must show my true love for him by loosing him and letting him go. I endeavored to realize that the qualities I so loved in him—honesty, unselfishness, purity, kindness, and love—are immortal, deathless, and compose the real man, who can never die; that divine Love which holds me, holds him; that as ideas dwelling in the same Mind, we could not be separated, regardless of the testimony of the material senses to the contrary; and that the material body never had any life and therefore could not die.

What our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, says in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (pp. 296, 297) of the experience we call death was a very great help to me, as was a Christian Science lecture, and a poem published in the Christian Science Sentinel.

I am deeply grateful for Christian Science. It is indeed the Comforter which Jesus, t he Way-shower, promised would come. I am grateful to our dear Leader for her life of purity and love for mankind and for that priceless treasure, the Christian Science textbook.—(Mrs.) Percie Stella Matlock, Portland, Oregon.

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June 22, 1946

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