SOME years ago a woman went to see a famous physician. She was a nervous and excitable woman, and had worried and fretted about her problems to such an extent that she began to fear that her mind was giving way. So she went to the doctor with a long list of her problems. After she had described them all and answered his questions she was astonished at his brief prescription: "What you need is to read your Bible."
"But, doctor—!" began the bewildered patient.
"Go home and read your Bible an hour each day," the doctor repeated with authority. "Then come back to me a month from today." He dismissed her without a chance of further protest.
At first his patient was angry. Then she thought that, at least, the prescription was not an expensive one. Besides, it certainly had been a long time since she had read the Bible regularly. Her many worries had crowded out prayer and Bible study for years, and, although she would have resented being called an irreligious woman, she had undoubtedly become a most careless Christian. She set herself conscientiously to try the physician's remedy. In one month she went back to his office.
The doctor smiled as he looked at her face, "I see you are an obedient patient and have taken my prescription faithfully. Do you feel as if you need any other medicine now?"
"No, doctor, I don't," she said honestly. "I feel like a different person. But how did you know that was just what I needed?"
For answer, the doctor turned to his desk. There, worn and marked, lay an open Bible.
Earnestly he said, "If I were to omit my daily reading of this Book, I should lose my greatest source of strength and skill. I never go to an operation without reading my Bible. I never attend a distressing case without finding help in its pages. Your case called not for medicine, but for sources of peace and strength and comfort outside your own mind, and I showed you my own prescription. I knew it would cure."
"Yet I confess, doctor," said his patient, "that I came very near to not taking it."
"Very few are willing to try it, I find," said the doctor sadly, "but there are many, many cases in my practice where it would work wonders if they only would take it."