Article September 21, 1935 Issue

"Wilt thou climb?"

ALICE D. WESTON

All nature, as seen through the mist of human vision, raises and answers questions. The unfolding rosebud expands in the soft air and sunshine. The tempest importunes the young birch tree, which gives its resilient reply. The slender sapling, bending before the elements, is a type of meek obedience and right endurance, and serves to strengthen one's patient steadfastness in the truth. The questionings of mortals sometimes demand, What of the seeker after Truth, stirred by an impulse to leave old ways in quest of new, who looks up and asks, "What must I do to be saved?" The answer is that the blessings of divine Love and goodness, gently leading thought onward, expand in the honest heart and fulfill human hope.

In "An Allegory" in "Miscellaneous Writings," beginning on page 323, Mary Baker Eddy has presented the situation of mortals, driven by calamities out of all satisfaction in worldly living. One of them is pictured as having arrived at the point of meekly and hopefully seeking heavenly guidance. "The Stranger," who had entered the valley where a few were watching for his coming, and who at length found the penitent one, gently commended him for having chosen the blessings of the upward path.

To the plea of the penitent one "the Stranger" made answer by asking a question so comprehensive and consummate in its penetration that those who would lift their lives above the destructive level of materiality cannot give it too much thought and attention (ibid., p. 327): "Wilt thou climb the mountain, and take nothing of thine own with thee?" As there comes a time in the life of everyone when Truth asks this question, let us consider it and see if we may answer in the affirmative, as did the desolate one who had voluntarily withdrawn from the pleasures and pains of material sense to seek that which is spiritual and enduring.

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