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meetings recently one of our workers, whose busi
ness it is to handle money, dealing with people in
the handling of accounts, etc., made this request:
“I want you to pray for me that I may have the
grace of Christian patience in dealing with people
about accounts.” I could not help commenting on
that. I said then what I say now. It takes more
of the grace of God to handle accounts than to do
anything else that I know anything about —to
handle them in the right way; to handle them with
proper firmness, to be honest and true, teaching
everybody else by example to do the same thing,
and yet to handle them in the spirit of patience.
How we need the grace of patience I
Then, too, He wants to give us help by imparting
the grace of His sympathy. I do not think that
there is any grace in the world that we can use to
greater advantage than the grace of sympathy—not
the sympathy that w 7 e pump up ourselves, but the
sympathy that Jesus imparts. How the world needs
it! How t the sad hearts longed for it! In our cities
there are hundreds and thousands of people who
are just famishing for it. They do not need your
money, perhaps. They do not need your help in
any material line, but they just need your warm,
loving, heartfelt sympathy; they need the grip of
a tender, loving hand. They need that you shall go
to them and say, “I believe in you.” All over
the world today that condition is existing. All
over the world humanity is dying for Christian
sympathy.
Then Jesus wants to give us help by imparting
the grace of sacrifice. I read a story the other
day —to me one of the sw’eetest that I have ever
read. The title was “Life by Way of Death.”
It w 7 as the story of a young woman who had been
reared in the lap of luxury, and -who had learned
to trust in her happy and delightful environments
for peace and for joy. But as she grew up, she
became impressed with the fact that those things
did not give peace —and the more she tried to find
peace, the more she found that it was not there.
She tried every sort of worldliness, but found no
peace. She even went so far as to engage in sinful
things, and of course that did not bring peace.
When she was about twenty-four years of age she
had a vision—a vision that for a long time she was
not able to understand. She seemed to be wander
ing in a great desert, famishing for water. Now 7
and then she would see an oasis, but when she
would start out to find it she would find that it was
nothing but a mirage. Finally she saw one that
looked to be most promising, but before she
reached the place someone came out and informed
her that she could not enter there, nor obtain drink,
because it was the law of the place that nobody
could drink at that fountain who did not bring with
them a companion. She had no companion, there
fore she could not enter in.
THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE.
The vision passed away. For weeks and months
she wondered what it means, but in the meantime
she was still searching for peace among the
mirages of the world. She finally decided that
there was no peace for her in the world, and so
decided to spend the remainder of her ill spent life
in trying to keep other people from wandering in
the paths which she had chosen. She left that
luxurious home and went to a hospital, becoming a
nurse. The first patient that she was assigned to
was a poor, ragged, dirty woman and she was
told to bathe her. She had scarcely had to bathe
herself before, having had all the maids one could
need. She put her basin down beside the bed
side and began stroking the forehead of the
woman before her. The old woman opened her
eyes, and saw her standing there and felt the tender
stroke of her hand, and the hardened old eyes
filled with tears as she said, “Oh, madam, your
hands are so soft!” From that day to the close
of that nurse’s life was a constant stream of
blessing. She found life byway of death. She
gave her life for others, and.in losing her life she
found it. Oh, that that were true of every one of
us today! Oh, that every aching, suffering, sorrow 7 -
ing, despondent, discouraged heart could have a
touch of sympathy and tenderness! Oh, that the
Lord will give us His grace nf sympathy!
The Golden Age for January 16, 1908.
HINTS IRON HISTORY:
Ry A. H. Lllett.
AID the Hail-stone: “Speaking of
Naaman, makes me think of hydropathy.
Any one who has lived as long as we
have, and who has kept his eyes open
will have observed that a great many
boasted new things are in reality very
old. Now here was Priessnitz, the Sile
sian peasant, claiming to be the orig
inator of the treatment in 1829. This,
S
too, with the case of Naaman, that occurred 2,700
years before, staring him in the face. Besides
there was Antonins Musa, w 7 ho cured the great Au
gustus by the same plan 1,800 years before Priess
nitz was born. You know Augustus had given it
up, and had called together his magistrates and
senators and mighty men generally, and in
their presence had turned the seal of the
government over to Agrippa. Why, it sounds
just like I heard somewhere last week “w 7 hen
all the doctors had given him up,” here
came along a remedy and cured him. You will re
member that Horace wrote flatteringly of Musa,
and Virgil forgot the pious Aeneas long enough to
write, “Oh, Musa, no one may flatter himself that
he will ever surpass thee in science.” We had no
objections to being for a while in the blood of Au
gustus, but when a century later we happened to be
loafing around Rome and Charmis recommended us
to Nero, we were sorry we stayed. We’ve been
through the hearts of a good many kings in our
time, but we have found few blacker than Nero’s
was.
But I did not intend to pluck any plumes from
the prestige of Priessnitz, nor indeed, from that
of Dr. Wesselhoeft, who at Brattleboro, Va., estab
lished the first sanitarium of the kind in the
United States.
But, my, my, how the doctors have wrangled
over us; some saying we could, some saying we
could not. Have you noticed that people are more
emphatic about something they do not know, than
about something they do know? I suppose the
reason of it is they feel insecure and they want
to deter every one from looking too closely into the
situation. We have been in many a man’s liver
that was as white as a mushroom, while his mouth
was making all sorts of a boastful noise.
Did you know that we cover at least three-fourths
of the earth’s surface and the larger part of the
area under the surface, and that notwithstanding
this, men have been fighting each other for a mo
nopoly of our possession ever since the Philistines
filled up the wells that Abraham dug.
My, my, what a grave yard it would make if you
should bury side by side all the people who have
been killed fighting for the possession of us. No
matter how we lived, whether in the oceans, in the
seas, or lakes, or gulfs, or bays, or rivers, or springs,
or w 7 ells, or wherever it w’as, men have fought
each other to the death for the possession of us.
Commence with the last big war —the one between
Japan and Russia —and trace them back to Abra
ham, and you will be surprised to find the im
portant part we’ve borne in them. So much so
that if you w’anted to sum it all up in one word you
might write it “Water.”
And in diplomacy, too. Why, in your United
States you have not bought land, you have bought
w’ater. It was not the territory Eagland and
France wanted in 1754, it was the water routes.
They wanted the St. Lawrence route, and the Great
Lakes route, and the Champlain route, and the Ohio
and Mississippi river routes. That’s what they
were fighting that war for. Mr. Jefferson did not
need the land west of the Mississippi river in 1803;
he paid that $15,000,000 for the Mississippi. Mr.
Monroe did not need Florida; he wanted the Gulf
of Mexico. Mr. Polk did not especially need the
land obtained from Mexico; he wanted the Rio
Grande river and the Pacific ocean. Same for Ha
waii and the Philippines, and Guam and Wahe, and
Tutuila an Porto Rico.
Do you know what every state in Europe wants
more than anything else in the world ? If every
one of them, from Russia down to the littlest one
of them, should hang up their stocking this Christ
mas, do you know what they would rather old
Santa would put in? Why, they’d rather he’d put
in the Straits of Bosphorus! Why, Russia would
rather have them than all the thrones in her famous
throne-room. England would give a bushel of
Kohinoors for them. If poor old Spain had them,
and nobody should take them away from her, she
would soon regain her lost glory.
What do you think Egypt .would take for the
Nile? How much would you give for Egypt with
out the Nile? You remember Chicago suffered from
a great fire once, but the burnt district is now the
best district. You can’t burn up Chicago. But
you dry up Lake Michigan and you can buy real
estate in Chicago cheap enough. Dry up the Hud
son and New York Bay and the assessment of Man
hattan Island will soon be headed back in the di
rection of the $24 that was originally paid for it.
Do you remember that little cloud the servant of
Elijah saw the seventh time he went to look? We
were in that cloud. We pushed Ahab into Jezreel
that evening.
But I shall not go into the monstrous oppression
and the miseries of those days. I rather choose to
contemplate the work of men like Arago—his well
at Grenelle. Can you tell me w 7 hy it is that many
people who can name you the kings of France have
never heard of Arago? Why, sir, he’s worth all
the Henry’s and Phillips, and Louises-Merovingian,
Austrasian, Captain, Valois or Bourbon you could
dig up out of —why, I started to name the place
where they were buried, but I find I do not know
where it was. It doesn’t matter. Nay, all did more
harm than good while they were living, and they
would not be worth digging for if you knew where
to dig. But Arago and his well at Grenelle —they
amount to something. Next time you want to read
of a hero of France, suppose you take Arago, who
gave the people water, instead of Charlemagne, who
shed the people’s blood.
Well, we must be going. We have work to do.
The river wants us, and the rose petal, the ocean
and the dewdrop, the turbine and the piston, the
steel trust and the copper trust, and the paper
trust, and the meat trust, and the milk trust; —
yea, the milk trust —and the railroad corporations,
and all other stock companies, they need us every
hour.
We must be going. Glad to have spent a moment
with you, but there’s an old man dying and his
lips are dry. There’s a fever demon kindling his
fire with baby flesh. There’s the preacher in his
study; there’s the ploughman in the furrow; there’s
the lawyer over his brief; there’s the teacher deal
ing with immortal destinies; there’s the editor in
his sanctum, and the printer at his case with his
type —and his towel!!
We must be going—
“Onw 7 ard the voices of duty call —
Onward to toil and be mixed w r ith the main,
The dry fields burn and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o’er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.”
* M
A Colonial Landmark.
(Continued from Page One.)
some men do not know —he knows how to apply
that necessary article to the use of modern meth
ods in meeting the soul-cry of modern men.
Best of all perhaps, Mrs. Hoge is a preacher’s
wife among a thousand, and she will be the “good
angel” who will plant roses and reap them amid the
waste places of Zion.
It will prove, we believe, and epoch-making event
in the religious life of Charleston, of the Palmetto
State—indeed, of the South—when two such lives
blend their all in the “Old First Church,” which
has been the mother of so many leaders in the
Kingdom of God W. D. U.
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