Our Master, Christ Jesus, frequently led his disciples away from the curious, watching, perhaps carping throngs that followed them, and retired with them to the "wilderness," the open, uninhabited land by the sea or among the hills, where, unchecked by scribe and Pharisee, he could freely open up the treasures of the Father's love to those whom he had chosen for himself from among the simple and lowly. Through Christian Science we come to understand what this wilderness means: "Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule wherein a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence" (Science and Health, p. 597). After the crowded temple gates and porches, thronged with every abomination of sense and matter, how sweet must have been the freshness of the dewy land, the quiet of the groves between the rich growing fields where everything proclaimed the love Jesus had come to teach to man; the golden wheat, the luscious fruits, the white star-flower, the lily of the fields, all served to illustrate the Master's words and impress his hearers with the sense of Love's bounty.
Christian Science teaches us that every one possesses his own wilderness, "the vestibule wherein a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence," and that here is opened for us the Gate Beautiful into the kingdom of heaven which is within us, "the realm of unerring, eternal, and omnipotent Mind; the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme" (Science and Health, pp. 597, 590). This fact of possession seems difficult to realize both by busy people and by those of more leisure. The belief is often voiced that there is no wilderness at hand in which to rest, and if there were, the time to do so would be lacking. "It would look fine, wouldn't it," said a laboring man, "if I should throw down my pick and spade and rest a while in the middle of my work? Who would employ me if I did?" He thought the question unanswerable. So, too, the busy house-mother with her cares, and the business man with his many interests,— the prevailing belief governing all is the lack of time, the lack of place. Said one weary woman, "Do you realize that I have not a spot in this whole world, in which I can shut myself in for an instant's seclusion and privacy? How can I refresh my soul with any of the 'deep things of God,' when I hardly have the time in which to eat and drink? If you know, I wish you would tell me." This belief of lack of time in which to rest in the sense of Love's omnipresence, to feast upon Love's constant gift of the water and the bread of Life, this belief of the lack of a spot in which to realize these blessings, must be met, that the multitudes may be saved, who to-day, as in the day of the Wayshower, wander about without a shepherd, fainting by the way for lack of bread, the bread from heaven.
To these sufferers Jesus' experience shows the way. We do not find in the Scriptures that he secluded himself in hermit grot or monkish cell; we do not find that he threw off his disciples like troublesome children from whose ignorance and forgetfulness he would rest in solitude. He took them with him into the wilderness, the open country where they might lose sight of the material cares and labors of men, and thus more freely receive the thought of Love's bestowals.
