Speaker: Our guest is George Langlois, of Chicago, Illinois. He's going to tell you how he overcame the drug habit after many years of slavery. He found freedom and an opportunity for a new life through a spiritual understanding of God.

Please tell us about it now, Mr. Langlois.

Mr. Langlois: I was more or less left on my own at a very early age. My mother died when I was just a year old, and my sisters, one after the other, took care of the house as they grew up. I got mixed up with a bad crowd, and one thing led to another. I knew nothing of God to show me right from wrong. Then I ran away from home. I was arrested and sent to a reform school.

Later on, after my father died, I went to Chicago [Illinois] on my own and got into bad company again. I was only seventeen at the time. That's when I started smoking marijuana. I went on to heroin, to morphine, and to the whole list of habit-forming drugs, and to whiskey on top of them. For eleven years I struggled through all of the tortures of the drug habit. One time I was sent for treatment to a federal hospital in Kentucky for drug addicts.

When I left the hospital I was pronounced cured by the physicians, but I had no sooner got back to Chicago than I was looking for drugs again. For a period of four or five years after that, things got worse than ever.

Then one day I met an acquaintance at the Y [YMCA] in Chicago. I was in pretty bad condition. We got to talking, and he said to drop by his place sometime. So one evening, when I was in his neighborhood, I did stop in to see him. We got to talking about religion. He told me he was a Christian Scientist, and he showed me the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. I started reading the chapter on Prayer and got very interested. I asked him where I could get a copy, and lie told me where the Christian Science Reading Room was. So next day I went to the Reading Room and started reading the book there. Later I bought my own copy.

That was the opening of a new-world to me. Little by little I caught some glimpses of the true meaning of God and of man in His likeness. There w as gradual progress, but I slipped backwards many times.

But one day I was in a downtown office building, and I noticed the office of a Christian Science practitioner and felt the urge to go in. I'd never seen or heard of her before. She could see I really needed help, and she patiently talked to me about God. She explained some of the teachings of Christian Science and how they could help me. She asked me to study from the Christian Science Quarterly the Lesson-Sermon, composed of selections from the Bible and from Science and Health, and to attend church. And I did both.

This practitioner stood by me all the time until I gained my freedom. Sometimes I would talk with her perhaps twice a week or more. I remember sometimes I'd be on a spot somewhere, waiting all day for narcotics, and I'd call her and say, "I can't break away." And she would say, "Yes, you can." She told me God would give me the strength I needed. And then she would help me through prayer.

I learned the meaning, through many bitter struggles, of Mrs. Eddy's words in Science and Health (p. 5): "Sorrow for wrongdoing is but one step towards reform and the very easiest step. The next and great step required by wisdom is the test of our sincerity, —namely, reformation."

At first I didn't have any confidence in my ability to do anything constructive about my life. But gradually I began to see myself in my real being as the son of God, and I made the effort to give up the drugs. The way of dominion began to open up for me. Each day my moral courage increased, and the truths of Christian Science became clearer to me. Finally, after this faithful practitioner had been helping me a couple of years or so, the desire for drugs just left me— left me completely—along with the desire to smoke and drink. I started working at a regular job and began attending night school to improve my education.

My healing took place over eleven years ago, and today I'm a free man. I'm more grateful than I can possibly say for all that Christian Science has done for me.

Speaker: Thank you, Mr. Langlois. Your willingness to tell us your experience is much appreciated. And your complete freedom shows so clearly that bondage of the most serious kind certainly can be ended. It was so encouraging to hear.

Friends, nearly everybody is seeking the way of freedom and dominion over binding conditions of some sort. Maybe it's liquor or tobacco, maybe traits of character or the claims of heredity, maybe fear or frustration. But whatever form bondage seems to take, the fact remains that God made man free. This is no idle statement, but an eternal truth which you can prove for yourself. Healings such as you've just heard show that bondage can be broken through the true understanding of God and wholehearted reliance on God's power alone.

We read in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health (p. 221), "Slavery is not the legitimate state of man." And Mrs. Eddy, its author, continues farther on: "All men should be free. 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Love and Truth make free, but evil and error lead into captivity." Surely the way of freedom from bondage couldn't be put more clearly or more simply.

The great need, then, is to understand the true nature of God; in other words, we need to discover that God is divine Love, Truth, and Spirit. For once we see that God is unchanging Love, filling all space, with nothing but boundless good for His creation, then we find that bondage of any kind is without basis, without power, and actually without reality. When God is understood as Spirit, then we come to realize that man, His offspring, is spiritual, not material, and that he is forever pure and always perfect. Far from being a remote ideal, this is the truth now of man, God's image and likeness.

As we understand God and man in this way, this spiritual understanding replaces the false notion of man as material, condemned to hopeless slavery, or subject to depraved appetites. And this understanding brings freedom from bondage and restores hope and usefulness, as our guest found.

Suppose we take an illustration. Many hundreds of years ago the children of Israel were held in hopeless bondage by the Pharaohs of Egypt. But when Moses brought a clearer concept of God's nearness, His all-power, His willingness to protect and save, the Israelites found the way out of slavery. It was through divine power that they won their freedom.

And so it is with bondage in any form—drugs, alcohol, or binding traits of character. In the measure that we understand God, understand divine power to be supreme and the only power, and understand our true relationship to God, in this measure we find freedom from bondage, freedom from the most desperate cravings. Our Master, Christ Jesus, who understood God as Truth and Love, pointed out the way of freedom in these simple words: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

The musical selection on the program was Hymn No. 83 from the Christian Science Hymnal (God made all His creatures free).