With much gratitude I submit this testimony of my first healing in Christian Science, which took place in 1914. After a childhood of poor health, I became afflicted early in my teens with a nervous disease and stomach trouble which I had been taught were inherited. From that time on I was under medical care. I was enrolled in gymnasium classes to improve my health, and while attending one of these I fell from a swinging apparatus and sustained internal injuries, which the doctors were unable to fully diagnose or relieve.

After three years of semi-invalidism, I became bedridden. Because it was not expected that I would remain on this earth for long, I began to think a great deal about the hereafter, as I had been taught that I would appear before God for judgment after death. This really was a desire to know more about God, and it was answered by a copy of the Sentinel which came in the mail from the literature distribution committee of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in the city in which I then lived. The first article bore the title,

"God Is Love." What comforting thoughts it brought to me: it began to show me that I did not have to die to know God. I had never known any Christian Scientists or anything about their religion except what I had learned from a few references to it in the newspapers. Several months later I learned that an old schoolmate, whom I had not seen for two years, had been healed in Christian Science and had given my name to the distribution committee. She was wholly unaware that I had become an invalid.

For six weeks the Sentinels came. I read them from cover to cover. I learned that there were practitioners upon whom one called for healing, and I was filled with hope of release from suffering. I asked my father to go to the Reading Room address to find a practitioner for me, but to my dismay he refused, feeling that I must remain under medical care. Having read testimonies of people who were healed simply by reading the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, I next asked my father to buy this book for me. He refused to have it in the house. Unable to do anything myself, I finally submitted to a surgical operation which had been pending for some time. Six weeks later I was home again, still unable to walk or even sit up. A consultation was held, and as the doctors left my bedside, I felt I was doomed indeed and there was nothing more they could do for me. So I severed forever my faith in medical aid and came to a decision that night which proved a momentous one in my experience.

Help in Christian Science having been denied me, I asked myself what I could do about it. Immediately the thought came that those who wrote the articles in the Sentinel had studied the textbook and so were writing about the same healing truth. I decided then to read over again those six copies of the Sentinel and prayed I might find healing in them. For three weeks I read nothing but the Sentinels, over and over again. During this time there was no visible change in my condition. Then one morning I awakened feeling refreshed, having slept all night for the first time in several years. It came to me quite suddenly that I could sit up, and I did so to eat my breakfast. As noon approached, the conviction came that I could put my feet out of the bed. I did this and sat in a chair beside the bed. It was the first time I had stood on my feet in seven months. By dinner time I walked across the room and ate at a table. My heart was filled with gratitude and joy. Soon afterward my brother bought me a copy of Science and Health. The healing continued, and in six weeks I was going up and down stairs. Soon thereafter I was visited by the friend who had been instrumental in sending the Sentinels to me. She rejoiced in my progress and brought me a Christian Science Quarterly and started me on the study of the weekly Lesson-Sermon. A little later I was able to attend my first church meeting on a Wednesday evening.

As I look back, I feel that factors in the healing included a childlike faith in God, radical reliance on Truth, and a complete loss of faith in all material means and methods.

This experience has been followed by many years of useful activity, the privilege of membership in The Mother Church and in branch churches, class instruction, and service in the Cause of Christian Science. Many proofs of the healing truth have been manifest through the years, and spiritual understanding continues to unfold daily. I am grateful to God, to Christ Jesus, our Way-shower, and to Mrs. Eddy, to whom Christian Science was revealed, and who labored tirelessly to give us our churches and all the activities of our movement. I am also grateful to all who have helped me along this path.—(Mrs.) Emma B. Hainert, Tamworth, New Hampshire.