"Occupy till I Come"

PREPARATION means opportunity. Not one minute need be wasted in waiting. The truth is always soliciting servitors, and he who is idle must lack either desire for work or qualification for it. "Aspiration is not inspiration," some one has said, and certain it is, aspiration is not fitness.

From the aspiring mother of Zebedee's sons down to the earnest, enthusiastic claimant for woman's suffrage, the element of qualification has been too often neglected.

The first step toward achievement is not to lay claim to position or to recognition, but to prepare conscientiously for possible demands.

During the last half century we have seen the destruction of the walls of personal prejudice and cowardly conservatism which rendered the medical profession, the ministry, the college curriculum and faculty, and the law inaccessible to women. They fell, not because of the blatant argument of the ambitious, but in response to the unanswerable logic of thorough equipment on the part of a few untiring, prayerful girls, who were brave enough to get ready for their work in the by-ways of obscurity, despite the shrugs of conventionality and the supercilious smiles of assumed superiority.

We hear much of unappreciated ability, much of unrecognized worth, and we are apt to nurse a self-justifying, self-stultifying sense of our own merit which the world cannot understand and will not admit; but experience and observation force the concession that these conditions are largely imaginary.

The world needs honest, earnest, qualified workers, and the question it asks is not, "What do you wish to do?" but, "What can you do?"

The world stops not to question Rosa Bonheur's right to the reputation she has won, nor would it recall the immortelles with which it crowned Charlotte Cushman.

"There is room at the top" is an old and hackneyed proverb, and just as true as ever; and the "room at the top" is reached by untiring effort to be fitted for the heights.

Nowhere does this warrant of efficiency and discipline obtain with so great significance as in our work in Christian Science. The children of men, wise in their generation, are saying: "By their fruits ye shall know them." And Christian Science through demonstrable truth is responding: "Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works."

No! The Christian Scientist has not a moment for idle waiting and wondering why work does not come. The seeming interims must be regarded as precious opportunities. They must be devoted, not to repinings, not to restless concern and crippling self-condemnation, but to prayer, to praise, to communion with the Most High God, so that when the faithful disciple is appealed to, he descends from the mount with a shining countenance,—a consciousness so radiant with goodness that the mists of doubt and despair, sin and sorrow, pride and poverty disappear as darkness before the day.

Christ speaks again: "Occupy till I come!" Occupy by earnest unremitting effort to realize a clearer reflection of intelligence, a warmer pulsation of love, a higher sense of purity, a more consecrated loyalty, a more active purpose to help humanity.

Can such preparation, think you, fail of opportunity? "Where the fountain is pure, there will the thirsty come to drink." There are but two steps from one's present occupation to the coveted field of enlarged opportunity; first, present duty well and abundantly done; second, manifest fitness for something higher.

Truly, waiting moments should never be wasted moments.

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