Article January 18, 1919 Issue

Waking Hours

LOUISE KNIGHT WHEATLEY

Our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote so tenderly of "each waiting hour," held in the keeping of Life divine, wrote also of those other hours, when we should "wake to know a world more bright" (Poems, pp. 4, 12). Because the only thing we can seem to do, sometimes, is just to fold our hands and wait patiently on God, it does not necessarily follow that we are to wait on forever. There must be a time when even patience ceases to be a virtue, a time when a sense of divine unrest indicates that patience has had her perfect work, and the hour of release has come. Let us see to it that we do not get so absorbed in waiting that it merges into dull self-mesmerism. If there is "a time to every purpose under the heaven," as the Bible says, there is not only a time to wait but a time to get up and do something. Paul's counsel, "Having done all, to stand," is very good advice, and yet it is the experience of most of us that when we really have done all, we seldom have to stand very long thereafter. Activity is an attribute of divine Mind, and being such, man ever expresses it, since man is Mind's reflection; hence it follows that if we have to wait for what seems an unreasonable time, we may be pretty sure that all we need to do has not as yet been done. Mind's processes are simple, natural, quick, efficacious. When human will, pride, self-justification, and specific outlining are eliminated, we may rely upon it that we shall soon see the solution of our problem, which has been at hand all the time.

What seems to be one of the favorite devices of the adversary is to keep us waiting, in the stupefying belief that we must wait indefinitely; yet never has the world had greater need to rouse itself from its long sleep of materiality than now. Indeed, this waking up process is what is taking place among the nations of the earth to-day, as many already know. The carnal mind, which is ever enmity to God, to good, has been disturbed in its slumbers, and is resenting the intrusion bitterly. It had been sleeping on for so many centuries, undisturbed in its absorbing, self-satisfied belief of life in matter, that it struck out fiercely right and left when a firm hand was laid upon its shoulder, and the voice of Truth was heared saying amidst its dreams, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead." The hour has come when its open and secret ways of accomplishing evil purposes have been so mercilessly exposed that all the world may see. It is only those who having eyes see not that are dismayed because error is fighting back with the stubborn, desperate resistance of that which knows its time is short.

The true metaphysician is not disturbed by the turmoil of these latter days; for he sees in it only what Elijah saw, some thousands of years ago, when the priests of Baal sought to establish the supremacy of their god by a sign from heaven. In I Kings we read that there were four hundred and fifty of these "prophets," and all day long they shouted and clamored and "cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them;" and all day long Elijah, the one day only prophet of the true God, stood aside and watched them with the patience of the man who knows. Then, when noise and bluster and braggadocio and numerical supremacy had done all it could and had accomplished nothing, he stepped forward, and with quietness and confidence offered a brief, simple prayer to the God of Israel, which received its immediate answer.

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