---
title: Improvement Era
description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930.
authors:
  - Kohlberg, William J.
collections:
  - periodicals
tags:
  - magazine
  - improvement-era
periodical: Improvement Era
volume: 13
number: 3
published: 1910-01
publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations
publisher_place: Salt Lake City
language: en
type: magazine
reference: 'Kohlberg, William J., "Keep Groping," *Improvement Era* 13, no. 3 (January 1910): 213.'
source:
  url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1303unse
  transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers.
  identifier: improvementera1303unse
start_page: 213
end_page: 213
rights:
  status: public-domain
  basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1910-01)
  source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1303unse
  publication_year: 1910
  note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1910, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright.
---

# Keep Groping


<!-- page:213 -->

—

THE CROWN OF INDIVIDUALITY.                            213

about them.      It is   unjust to ourselves and unjust to others.     Some
people treat their faults as though they were flaws in the Portland
vase of a noble nature, and as if      — pointing them out were practi-
cally banishing   them forever.
—
Nature is constantly giving us new turns of the road. It
may be a birthday or some general anniversary in the cycle of the
year.    It may be some red-letter day in the private calendar of

our emotions, or some date eloquent to us as telling of some joyous
"first'' or some pathetic      "last" time    in   the sacred    diary of the
heart.    It   may be a supreme sorrow, an agonizing sense of           loss,

the coming of a great joy, the closing of some epoch in our lives,
the proving of the actuality of something too awful for us even to
have feared, some exultant half -hour that changes irrevocably all
our living.     These and numberless other days, hours or single
moments, may bring us alone to        — the turn of the road.
Then may come one of those rare moments of life, of fine
spiritual discernment, of luminous revelation, of coming to one's
highest self, when the sordid, the mean, the temporary, the selfish
are stripped in an instant of their garish shams and tinsel. Then
the real, the true, the eternal stand out in their majesty, bathed
in the   splendor and glow of the revealing of          truth.     In such a
spirit the very tingle of the inspiration of the infinite fills us.      We
seem born again to new, better and greater things, for we have
seen the divine vision     — at the turn of the road.
(The next article in this series, "Facing the Mistakes of Life," will
appear in the February Era.)

Keep Groping.
{For the Improvement Era.)

A dreamer in thought's vastness cries:
"Alight! alight! for my blind eyes,
Bring forth a light— God hear my sighs
Before my soul in darkness dies!"

A voice then answers mild and low:
"Be still, my child, and you shall know
Great light doth from great efforts flow,
Keep groping, and thy soul shall glow!"
Salt Lake City, Utah.                              William J. Kohlberg.