CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IN THE WAR
After the arrival and location of the second group of ten workers in September, 1918, the manager of the Committee returned to America, and the Paris office was placed in charge of the two Workers who had established the Depot at Tours. Two women practitioners were also added to the personnel of the office. This was necessitated by the constantly growing demand for Christian Science treatment from the men of the A. E. F. A most important work which had been instituted in the early summer, in the hospitals in and about Paris, was now enlarged. Our women Workers visited them regularly, carrying a large supply of Monitors and other literature.
A Worker says :
“A few moments after distribution, to look back over a long corridor of cots and see almost every soldier reading the Monitor is a sight never to be forgotten.”
Much impersonal healing work was accomplished in the hospitals as the following incident related by one of the Workers will indicate:
“In one of the buildings visited, a boy who had been shot through the lungs, repeated the Lord's Prayer all day and thus overcame ‘the last enemy.’ The supervising nurse had asked the Monitor visitor to talk with the lad. ‘He will probably live but a few hours,’ said she, ‘and he's from your town.’ This boy, who knew nothing of Christian Science (and of course the subject was not mentioned to him), had lost his Bible at Château Thierry. ‘I knew when I did,’ he gasped, ‘that it was all up with me, because I had carried that Bible with me everywhere.’ ‘But you did not lose the Lord's Prayer,’ he was reminded, ‘and you could really use that prayer all day, actually use it for breathing. Just substitute it for breathing if you're a little short of breath. Will you promise to say it all day?’ And he promised.
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