Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1898).djvu/137

Rh I knew a woman who, when quite a child, adopted the Graham system to cure dyspepsia. She ate bread and

vegetables only, and drank nothing but water, for many years. Her dyspepsia increasing, she decided that her diet should be more rigid; and thereafter she partook of but one meal in twenty-four hours, this meal consisting of only a thin slice of bread, without water. Her physician also recommended that she should not wet her parched throat until three hours after eating. She passed many weary years in hunger and weakness, almost in starvation, and then made up her mind to die, having exhausted the skill of the doctors, who kindly informed her that death was indeed her only alternative. At this point Christian Science saved her; and she is now in perfect health, without a vestige of the old complaint.

She learned that suffering and disease are the self-imposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of Being; that God never decreed disease, — never ordained a law that fasting should be a means of health. Hence semi-starvation is not acceptable to wisdom; and it is equally far from Science, in which Being is sustained by God. These truths, opening this woman's eyes, relieved also her stomach, and she ate without suffering, “giving God thanks;” but she never again enjoyed her food as she had expected to, when she was still the slave of matter, — thinking of the fleshpots of Egypt, feeling childhood's hunger, and undisciplined by self-denial and Science. Her new-born understanding, that neither food nor

the stomach, without the consent of mortal mind, could make her suffer, brought with it another lesson, — that gustatory pleasure is a