We may take the words in Isaiah, "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose," as an assurance of the reversal of every troublesome material condition that can befool mankind and hide the spiritual harmony which human beings are unaware is theirs. And we read with increasing encouragement, "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." Here is the promise that the grandeur of the presence of good shall be made manifest in human experience in place of seemingly ubiquitous evil.
To accomplish this reversal, to bring good into evidence in place of evil, human beings must needs attain a scientific, spiritual point of view, whence to demonstrate their true selfhood. By this means, the process of laying aside false selfhood, or the "old man" with the material views of life and existence, and putting on the "new" or spiritual selfhood takes place in each one's consciousness. Christian Science enables its students to glimpse God's spiritual universe and to know themselves as God knows them. Each one must "put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him."
Perhaps as yet there has not been developed enough faith in God and His works to have complete trust in this seemingly "new" creation and the ideas therein. Unconvinced, one still may cling to the familiar and the habitual, though longing to be free from its limitations and its miseries. The student thus finds himself in the state of thought referred to as the "wilderness," defined by Mrs. Eddy in part as "loneliness; doubt; darkness" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 597). But an eager determination to progress in the understanding of real being opens thought to the truth which will penetrate and conquer the wilderness of confused thinking, making the desert to blossom, sometimes bringing a sudden realization of one's spiritual individuality, existing entirely apart from matter and its laws. Then is one convinced that he is mentally standing at a point described in the further definition of "wilderness" as "the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence."
