Article January 3, 1901 Issue

Obstructions Removed

BY MARY B. TREVETT.

I Had a forcible illustration recently, of how weeds grow apace when let alone. About ten years ago we built a log cabin near the Columbia River and paid two men twenty-five dollars for making a short path to the river through the woods. We went there regularly for several summers, but for the last three years no one has been near it, and this summer, when trying to take some friends to it, it was so overgrown with brakes, ferns, and briers, and so stopped up with fallen trees that I could not find the way and had to get an experienced woodsman—a pioneer—to show us. He took his axe and removed some of the obstructions, and he had no difficulty in finding the way, because he knew it.

Some of the obstructions were very beautiful, and it hurt me to see them go. Lovely ferns and brakes in tropical luxuriance, moss-grown logs and incipient forest trees,—it disturbed me to see them hacked and slashed away,—but the experience has given me much food for thought. It has shown me how the errors of the centuries, which have been allowed to grow, have obstructed our path heavenward. But now has come a Way-shower, a guide out of this tangled thicket, and we are thankful we live in this age of great opportunities and great responsibilities, and we rejoice to have our long-cherished errors of opinion—our false gods—demolished, even though it seems to leave us somewhat denuded for a time.

May we all prove faithful, worthy to follow our Leader even though we be called to suffer persecution. Jesus said, "If ye suffer with me, ye shall also reign with me."

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