EMERGENCE INTO LIGHT

The trend of human life was too eventful to leave me undisturbed in the illusion that this so-called life could be a real and abiding rest.  All things earthly must ultimately yield to the irony of fate, or else be merged into the one infinite Love.

As these pungent lessons became clearer, they grew sterner.  Previously the cloud of mortal mind seemed to have a silver lining; but now it was not even fringed with light.  Matter was no longer spanned with its rainbow of promise.  The world was dark.  The oncoming hours were indicated by no floral dial.  The senses could not prophesy sunrise or starlight.

Thus it was when the moment arrived of the heart’s bridal to more spiritual existence.  When the door opened, I was waiting and watching; and, lo, the bridegroom came!  The character of the Christ was illuminated by the midnight torches of Spirit.  My heart knew its Redeemer.  He whom my affections had diligently sought was as the One “altogether lovely,” as “the chiefest,” the only, “among ten thousand.”  Soulless famine had fled.  Agnosticism, pantheism, and theosophy were void.  Being was beautiful, its substance, cause, and currents were God and His idea.  I had touched the hem of Christian Science.

THE GREAT DISCOVERY

It was in Massachusetts, in February, 1866, and after the death of the magnetic doctor, Mr. P.P.  Quimby, whom spiritualists would associate therewith, but who was in no wise connected with this event, that I discovered the Science of divine metaphysical healing which I afterwards named Christian Science.  The discovery came to pass in this way.  During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.

My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself, and how to make others so.

Even to the homoeopathic physician who attended me, and rejoiced in my recovery, I could not then explain the modus of my relief.  I could only assure him that the divine Spirit had wrought the miracle—­a miracle which later I found to be in perfect scientific accord with divine law.

I then withdrew from society about three years,—­to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle,—­Deity.

The Bible was my textbook.  It answered my questions as to how I was healed; but the Scriptures had to me a new meaning, a new tongue.  Their spiritual signification appeared; and I apprehended for the first time, in their spiritual meaning, Jesus’ teaching and demonstration, and the Principle and rule of spiritual Science and metaphysical healing,—­in a word, Christian Science.