Editorial October 31, 1914 Issue

True Possession

John B. Willis

The whilom city farmer was made glad, and withal very thoughtful, as he looked out through the trees to the glowing sunset and listened for the approaching stillness of the night. Here and there a cricket pierced the quiet with his hurried greeting, and now and then a lonesome whip-poor-will addressed his strongly inflected queries to the pine woods that hedged the western sky. These familiar sounds served, however, but to punctuate and render more impressive the silences of that vast shadow which pursued the retreating day. His domain was not large, but it ministered to his satisfaction in many ways. The trees were ever saying, "Be true and strong," as he neighbored with them; the fields offered their fragrance as incense for a perpetual service of praise; the brook that laughed its way through his stony pasture was constantly rebuking him into cheery content; while just now the woods and hedgerows were speaking in wondrous tones of all the glories of light.

Sometimes he had been tempted to think it fine that he could call such an acreage his very own, but as a student of Christian Science he could never rid himself of the feeling that this sense of possession was after all rather narrow, exclusive, and unworthy; that the chaining of material things to one's chariot is subtly belittling. This came upon him the more strongly just now, as the splendors before him led him to think upon those larger things that belong to every responsive life, and he felt how gladly he would share with every friend and fellow man the joy and exhilaration they brought him.

With the nobler sense of gain and of giving which the knowledge of Christian Science awakens, the conviction must come to every one, as it came to him, that we cannot truly possess anything that we do not continuously give away; that we can rightly be said to have only that which we spiritually perceive, realize, and bestow; that one's true wealth is determined by his escape from the material sense of possession, and his ability to delight himself in the good that is limitless and universal, the truth and beauty and love that no one ever thinks of holding in reserve or of trying to hoard, because they are as infinite as their source, and because the individual store of them is increased under the rule laid down by the Master when he said, "Give, and it shall be given unto you." As one apprehends this philosophy of the higher life, he finds himself free from the envy of material opulence as well as that fear of poverty which ofttimes robs even the rich of all peace. He has begun to see that contentment with fenced enclosures, all measurable possessions, is not in consonance with that immeasurable life for which, when at his best, he has always longed.

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