Throughout the ages mankind has been daily and hourly choosing, and acting upon the choice made; and throughout the ages, whether men realized it or not, this choice has always been between thoughts and desires which led toward spirituality—true happiness, life, and harmony—and those which led away from it into materiality, error, and discord. Moses said to the Israelites, "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." Whenever the choice of this people was governed by willing obedience to divine Principle and the rule of the divine law which Moses so patiently taught them, they were, without fully realizing it, choosing life, peace, and abundant supply of all good.
When Solomon was asked what God should give him, he chose wisdom,—a higher understanding of God; and, in consequence, he was granted not only a wise and understanding heart, but "both riches, and honour;" and, added to this, the promise of long life. Elisha's spiritual choice, voiced in his words to the prophet Elijah, "Let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me," was rewarded by the power to part the waters of Jordan, to increase the supply of the widow's oil through a scientific understanding of the never failing law of compensation, and by the spiritual ability to raise the stricken child of the Shunammite woman, as well as by other demonstrations of divine power.
Jesus made his choice between matter and Spirit at the early age of twelve years, when, in answer to his mother's question as to why he had tarried behind in Jerusalem, he replied, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" Later, in his unwavering rejection of the temptations to believe in the power and pleasure of matter, which came to him in the wilderness, he proved the inability of evil to entice or to assail the mind thus continuously trained in choosing the best. Jesus told his disciples that men could not serve God and mammon,—that they must choose whom they would serve, and that their choice must be a radical one, one which would many times bring them into disfavor with the popular thought.
