Editorial May 6, 1916 Issue

The Way of Ascent

John B. Willis

Presentation of an exalted ideal may stimulate or it may discourage. If the contrast with present achievement is startling, as is usually the case, and no clear way of gaining the higher plane is disclosed, the outlook can but prove depressing; but if even the beginning of an ascending path is definitely located, and one has an honest disposition to climb, then the struggle into light will have begun. The difficulties of every ascent are essentially vanquished the moment the undertaking is entered upon with vision, with noble purpose, and with good cheer.

One of the greatest weaknesses of Christian believers generally, outside of Christian Science, inheres in the fact that they do not think of the conquest of material sense in the Master's way as a feasible proposition. The annulment of material law through the apprehension of spiritual truth is looked upon as visionary, and the effort to accomplish it as evidence of abnormality. It is this denial of the presence of the saving Christ which has interdicted spiritual progress, and it is just here that the teaching and demonstration of Christian Science become revolutionary, and in so far destructive to the existing status of Christian thought. In elucidating the philosophy of spiritual ascent and in proving the present-day practicability of this philosophy, Christian Science has supplied a vision of that ideal for the realization of which aspiring souls have ever prayed. And only as this vision is gained are men impelled to the heroisms of faith which presage success.

How splendidly this was illustrated in the stirring life of the great apostle to the Gentiles. He had to overcome inherited and educated bias, together with all those difficulties and antagonisms to which he graphically refers in the eleventh chapter of his second letter to the Corinthians. At every turn in the road he had to wrestle with the world, the flesh, and the devil, and yet spiritually illumined sense and dauntless consecration made him, as he was wont to say, more than a conqueror "through Christ."

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