Moreover, she had good reason to know that there is much reckless use of medicine and much needless surgery. She had memories of years in which she suffered many things of many physicians and was nothing better, but rather worse. She saw, in war and in peace, much use of the knife that seemed to her bloody and cruel. She saw women hurrying to the operating-table, sometimes, as she believed, for no better reason than to escape the risk of motherhood, and she scorned them. She expressed herself to me in terms anything but gentle concerning married women who willingly deprive themselves of the perilous privilege of motherhood by resort to surgery. She believed that people who take medicine usually take too much; and that cheerful and wholesome living is better than medicine. Moreover, she was always ready for a thing that was new. Her delight in the discovery of something hidden and now revealed was intense. For all these reasons she was disposed to give Christian Science a fair hearing. In Dr. Epler’s excellent biography, free use is made of Miss Barton’s correspondence with Mr. and Mrs. Schoppe, in which she expressed her interest in their new faith. My own conviction is, that while Clara Barton was thus deeply interested, those letters tend to enlarge the degree of her permanent interest. I am confident that she was less near to being a Christian Scientist than the letters themselves would indicate if taken alone. Indeed, Mr. Schoppe himself gives what I think is a wholly truthful statement, as recorded by Mr. Epler, under date of December 17, 1914: Clara Barton’s connecting point with Christian Science was on the positives it accented--not from its negative philosophy. She welcomed its doctrine of the Divine presence of God working with us and in us and working upon her own life--present to help. She was exceedingly grateful to Christian Science for bringing out this point of the Divine absoluteness. Further than that she could not understand it; she could not go. She did not deny, but she believed (unlike the Christian Science negativism) in a perfectly vast realm of material and human progress. She traced it in the wonders of geological ages and historical evolution. She saw God’s handiwork in a colossal complex material creation. She never could bring herself to believe the material or human creation a mortal error! I regard this as wholly correct. She read “Science and Health” and endeavored to use the “absent treatment” of the Schoppes. The first night it seemed to do good, and the next night the effect was gone. Her effort to obtain whatever was good in Christian Science was sincere; but her experiments did not make her a Christian Scientist. She employed physicians till the day of her death, and took medicine. But she believed that spiritual things are the real things, and that man is more than body.