My faith in the healing power of...

Eunice Royce La Duke

My faith in the healing power of prayer, gained from active membership in a Protestant church since childhood, was shaken during my father's last illness. Then a few months later during an influenza epidemic my faith in materia medica as an auxiliary to God's work was questioned when my case was pronounced by the doctor as being beyond medical help.

At that time I could not understand how my husband could seek out and read Science and Health which he had kept since attending Sunday School in The Mother Church. He seemed unconvinced that death was God's will for me, although I was trying to reconcile myself to believe this.

However, I began resisting the doctor's verdict; but at the same time I also declined Christian Science help. Slowly I recovered, but my health was left so shattered by the experience that we moved to a different climate. I spent another year under the care of specialists, but without improvement.

In our new community, I searched in vain for a satisfying church home. I was reluctant to look into Christian Science as a religion until I heard it well spoken of by an ex-minister substituting in the pulpit of an orthodox church. I became willing to have my husband read to me from Science and Health because along with physical debility, I was unable properly to focus my eyes to read or to go out alone.

The logic of this book so amazed me that I soon asked to be taken to a Christian Science practitioner. Without human direction we were led to one whose daughter had been healed of total blindness in Christian Science. This dear one reconciled Christian Science with the Scriptures for me and expressed such confidence in God's power to heal that I realized this was truly the primitive Christianity for which I had been searching.

I asked this practitioner to help me, and after five treatments I realized that I had not been seeing good in anything. Consequently I had not been seeing anything good. Therefore I had not been seeing God's real creation designated in the first chapter of Genesis as "very good." This brought such enlightenment that I felt I had awakened into a new state of being. Soon I realized that my eyes were focusing correctly, and I was seeing normally again.

Within a year I enrolled in a university for additional educational work. For seven years after that I worked without wearing glasses on the books of a building and loan company during the period of the preparation of its annual financial statement. The practitioner continued to encourage progressive steps and to show the importance of church membership and of class instruction, privileges which I later had. Our gratitude for Christian Science and for the consecrated work of practitioners has been unbounded.

Throughout the years the efficacy of the truth has been proved in the meeting of every need, whether physical, financial, or social. Several times, during Christian Science treatment, illnesses which had seemed to reach a climax were quickly healed with practically no period of convalescence when all involved firmly reasserted their decision to rely radically on the truth all the way. One case was that of our daughter, who was manifesting symptoms of pneumonia; another was that of a young nephew who had been rendered helpless by inflammatory rheumatism.

Each year we are increasingly grateful to be enlisted in the Christian Science movement.—(Mrs.) Eunice Royce La Duke, Hollywood, California.

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