NOWHERE else as in Christian Science, where God is recognized and acknowledged as the absolute source of all supply, do we find such keen appreciation of the law of compensation. We are all familiar with the old adage, "There is no great loss without some small gain," but we often find a variation of this to be true, that there is no small loss without some great gain. The understanding of this law of compensation is a liberal education in itself, for it broadens and deepens our faculties for perceiving the truth of things and leads us to act at critical moments in such a way that we go forward on the "tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." When we come to this comprehension in such a degree that we are able to determine immediately between truth and error, we hesitate more and more seldom to give up, to put from us absolutely, to refuse even to consider, the seeming opportunities for material advancement that have in them the slightest question as to their perfect freedom from dishonorableness, selfishness, or sin, because we then know that by this same law of requital our seeming temporary loss will be more than made up to us.
Often the opening that offers sudden relief from the bondage of poverty has, lurking behind a fair exterior, unseen evils which impose the loss of self-respect, of honor, of all the high virtues, in the fulfilling of the conditions necessary to obtain the promised freedom. To those with clear spiritual sight there is vouchsafed not only a glimpse, but a look within these beckoning portals, and they see through the thin veil within and turn away, saddened for the instant by the half-concealed horrors of the place, but joyful and glad because they have the God-given power to recognize the truth in all things and to discern good from evil. To these the power of wealth as something to be desired for the mere sake of possession, or for the sake of the seeming chains it might break for them, regardless of the means by which it is to be obtained, ceases to be a temptation, because they realize that there is a higher wealth of purity of thought and life, a richness of honor, a prosperity of right doing to which no amount of money or material possessions can be equivalent.
When, to those who walk in spiritually high places, the time comes to choose between diverging paths, they are able to see through the mists which overhang and envelop human consciousness, and to perceive that the. way which seems so fair, which seems to give immediate access to higher altitudes, more often than not leads to a temporary higher ground only to descend again, down through its tortuous windings, to places of darkness and evil; while the footpath that seems to offer less in immediate prospect, leads ever onward and upward, by gradual degrees, to the Horeb heights of Soul, with tender, beautiful flowers blossoming beside it in hidden nooks, with refreshing waters of inspiration springing forth among the rocks over and around which it offers a sure passage.
