Christian Science came to me with the healing of my mother when I was eight years old. Her father and a number of his relatives had passed on around the age of thirty with what was then called quick consumption. My mother was stricken at the same age with that disease. Doctors predicted she only had a month to live, when Christian Science was presented to her. Within that month she was completely restored to health and returned to an active life.

My parents had rejected the traditional religious beliefs of their times. Upon seeing my mother well, my father exclaimed, "This is the religion we have been waiting for."

The family accepted Christian Science wholeheartedly and joined the small local group of Christian Scientists. My parents joined The Mother Church, were class taught, and within a year my mother's name was in The Christian Science Journal as a Christian Science practitioner. Later she became a teacher of Christian Science. She lived to eighty-four years as an active worker.

I joined The Mother Church at the age of twelve and was therefore eligible a few years later to attend the Annual Meeting with my mother in 1903. That was one of the years that Mrs. Eddy invited those who had come from a distance to visit her home in Concord, New Hampshire. As she spoke to us from the balcony, I was filled with a desire to use the wonderful spiritual truths she had discovered and given to us and to spread the glorious message of divine Science.

The way for a better college education opened. I joined with others in establishing Christian Science Organizations at Iowa State College and Stanford University and was able to help many people through prayer.

I have found that it is important to be so familiar with the truth concerning accidents as given by Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health that it becomes a natural part of our thought. Mrs. Eddy says (p. 424), "Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God's unerring direction and thus bring out harmony." If an accident occurs, we must think quickly. Often we do not have time to reason deliberately.

In 1966 my eldest daughter was moving to a new home. I wanted to help. She gave me an armful of heavy wooden coat hangers to carry into the front hall and put on the floor of the coat closet. I entered the hall and, not knowing which of three doors was the coat closet, opened one door. It was pitch black. I stepped forward and found myself falling down the basement stairs. As I was falling, the truths of the above statement filled my thought so completely that, when I reached the bottom of the stairs and saw that the hangers were still perfectly intact in my arms, I almost laughed, although one shoulder, on which I had landed, was extremely painful. Mrs. Eddy says (ibid., p. 397): "When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, 'I am hurt!' Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real."

She continues: "Now reverse the process. Declare that you are not hurt and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to divine metaphysics, confidence in God as All, which the Scriptures declare Him to be." For some days there was a good deal of intermittent pain in the shoulder. I worked with the above-quoted statements. Not once did it occur to me that I might have broken any bones. Before long the pain in the shoulder was gone.

Some months later, after the shoulder was completely healed, I happened to touch my shoulder near the base of the neck and found that there was a ridge on the bone, which would indicate that the bone had been cracked or broken and healed again.

Christian Science has proved to be a great preventive in my experience. My physical problems have been few and of short duration because, at the first suggestion of trouble, I replace the lies of mortal belief with the truth of spiritual being.

What a joyous, full experience I have had. The debt of gratitude I have to Mrs. Eddy is immense.

(Mrs.) Glendora McCord Rollins
Pasadena, California