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The Golden Age
rabMaMl Bvevy TkiH*»y by The OeMea Ace
Febliehlac Cempaay (lac.)
•nTCBS: 1* MOOBB BUILDING, ATLANTA. GA.
WILLIAM D. UPSHAW Editor
MRS. WILLIAM D. UPSHAW Aetociate Editor
MRS. G. B. LINDSEY . . . Managing Editor
LBN G. BROUGHTON, London, Eng. Pulpit Editor
M. P. FITCH Field Editor
Price : $1.50 a Year.
la eaeee es fereiyn address fifty cents should be
added te cover additional postage.
■aterod in the Posteffiee in Atlanta. Gs, as socend-eSaes
Matter.
HENRY M. FLAGLER DEAD.
When Henry M. Flagler, the great railroad
builder and philanthropist, died last week in
Florida
Mourns Her
Greatest
Commercial
Benefactor.
the world w’hen a boy of only fourteen and
fighting his way up by hard work and re
markable business vision, it pleased him not
to be merely a spender and a millionaire sadist,
but rather a constructive friend of substan
tial development. Fortunately for the East
Coast of Florida, he was attracted to the great
untouched resources and possibilities of that
wonderful section.
All the world knows the story—and it seem
ed indeed a good providence of God that the
great old man was allowed to live to see the
completion of the greatest feat of railroad
building in the world—the trans-ocean railway
from the mainland of Florida to the Island
of Key West. During Mr. Flagler’s early
years in business when, as he expressed it, “it
was considered eminently respectable to make
whiskey and sell it,” he gave up a money
making distillery in Ohio which he conduct
ed in connection with a grain business “be
cause he had scruples,” he said, about its be
ing right. We honor his memory for being
thus true to his conscience, and we would
wish that he had thrown the whole of his
mighty influence against the legalized saloon
in Florida. His word, we believe, would have
turned the tide in the recent state election.
But Mr. Flagler was a man of many gener
ous impulses, and he and Mrs. Flagler were
counted the generous friends of suffering hu
manity. In the monsoleum of the Flagler Me
morial Presbyterian church, which he built in
honor of his daughter at St. Augustine, his
tired, patriarchal body rests —a new mecca of
pilgrimage for Florida and the world.
B. SANDERS WALKER, JR.
The sorrow of it all can never be put into
words —the pain that pierced the heart of the
A Tragedy
That Shocked
America.
mercury, thinking it headache medicine, and
that he was calmly facing the death that must
inevitably come.
The story of the plight of the beloved young
banker and real estate man who was known
as the friend of God and the unselfish friend
of man, was flashed all over America and for
a full week of unspeakable anxiety, countless
thousands all over the country hung over his
bedside hoping against hope and praying that
<a life-giving miracle might be performed. Tele-
his cottage on the breaker-dash
ed shore at Palm Beach, Florida
stood, as she still stands with
head uncovered before the bier
of her greatest developer and
commercial benefactor.
Starting to make his way in
editor of The Golden Age when
he read in St. Louis last week
that B. Sanders Walker, Jr., of
Macon, Ga., had swallowed by
mistake a tablet of bichloride of
The Golden Age for May 29, 1913
THE CROWN WHICH VIRTUE WEARS
All the young heroes in this world do not
live in books. Something happened last Fri-
Heroic
Cuban
Student
Wins High
Honor at
G. M. A.
vice and military honors, Col. J. C.
Woodward, the courtly president of the insti
tution, announced an agreeable surprise for
the student body and the audience, by read
ing a note from a prominent business man in
Atlanta, who, having heard of the heroic rec
ord for Christian morality made by Mr. Geo.
T. Towns, of Holguin, Cuba, had decided to
present to him a special medal for “moral ex
cellence.”
It developed that investigation had reveal
ed the fact to this business man that young
Towns did not smoke, nor chew, nor drink,
nor swear, and that, after he was elected pres
ident of the College Y. M. C. A., he had fought
it out between his own conscience and God,
and had given up dancing and card playing,
and had so devoted himself to his church and
Sunday school work that he had won a spe
cial medal on examination in the Baraca class
of the College Park Baptist church, where he
was in wholesome competition with more than
thirty of his fellow students..
This sterling young student, who graduat
ed at the G. M. A. this year, had not neglect
ed his class studies, but had stood right around
the top, deserving honorable mention in ev
erything.
The big-hearted and far-seeing business man
who presented this medal, because he dislikes
publicity, refused to let his name be known,
but declared that he was so anxious to crown
such a spirit of Christian manhood in a mili
tary school like the G. M. A., that he had
determined to offer the medal as a perma
nent incentive to Christian morality, calling
it the “George Towns Medal for Excellence
in Christian Morality.”
The presentation of this medal to young Mr.
Towns brought a storm of applause and mr
grams of sympathy and suggestion poured in
from every part of this country and even from
across the seas.
We stand dumb before the part of law that
brought this young nobleman in the kingdom
of God to an untimely grave. As Spurgeon
said: “Where comprehension stops, we let faith
take hold. ’ ’
We remember how, a short while after The
Golden Age was launched, there came to the of
fice from Sanders Walker a letter of congrat
ulation concerning the make-up and ideals of
the paper, but making the suggestion that a pa
per for the home would be more nearly com
plete if an exposition of the Sunday school
lesson were carried every week. That sugges
tion and the spirit in which it was made, com
ing from a young man of consecrated culture
just starting in business, made such an impres
sion that it weighed in every plan for the bet
terment of the paper and was finally adopted.
It has not been long since that golden-hearted
young philanthropist gave a liberal check to
the editor of The Golden Age, saying: “Send
the paper to as many families as that check
will pay for.”
day night at the closing exercises
of the famous Georgia Military
Academy at College Park which
should be an inspiration to every
American youth. When the time
came to award the medals won for
scholarship, orations, campus ser-
merous words of approval from his fellow stu
dents —and naturally enough, tears of gladness
and gratitude to the eyes of the mother and
grandmother, who had come all the way from
Cuba to see him graduate.
Young Towns was born in this country, and
has not yet reached his majority. When he
was two or three years old, his father moved
to Cuba, where he has become a wealthy fruit
grower. It is a sign of great promise in the
life of any young man, who, reared in a land
where the “liberalities” of a continental Sab
bath have undisputed sway, has been so true
to himself, and to the things of God and the
right, as to have won, with gentleness and
firmness, such splendid recognition for himself
on the part of his fellow students, the faculty
and the on-looking world.
We heartily hope that the example of this
unknown business man in endowing this medal
for excellence in Christian morality at the
G. M. A. will be followed by the friends of sim
ilar institutions all over the land. We would
love to see such a medal offered in every school
and college, but, especially, in the military in
stitutions—because there is a foolish idea
abroad that a military man is expected to be
“liberal” in his ideals and loose in his habits.
After all, why should not men like Robert
E. Lee and ‘Stonewall Jackson, at once the
greatest Christian heroes in military life that
America has ever seen, be the ideal of ambi
tious students everywhere?
We believe that this manly lad of Cuba and
the far-seeing business man who has endowed
the George Towns medal have made history at
the Georgia Military Academy. It is a great
thing in this day of reforms for any school
to be considered worthy of such a legacy as
being known to the future with its immeasur
able harvest, as the first to offer such a Christ
honoring incentive to young men to make Him
first in their lives. Let the good work spread
until every student body in America shall feel
the throb and thrill of fearless Christian man
hood, and be so stirred always toward the nob
lest chivalry of spotless living and high and
heroic action, that Christ formed in the heart
and not punishment shall solve the vexing prob
lem of discipline.
Verily, Sanders Walker was “one who gath
ered bliss; to see his fellows blest.”
Blessed by religion, enriched by culture, un
spoiled by wealth and social position and look
ing right and left for places to invest his love
and money where they would do the greatest
possible good, Sanders Walker has left to his
stricken young wife and bright little son, his
sorrowing parents sisters and brother, the
shining legacy of a spotless Christian name;
and although we look at his tragic going now
through the “mellowed mist of tears,” some
how we believe that God will overrule it all
for the spiritual good of thousands who might
never have been reached if Sanders Walker
had lived to a normal old age and died a nat
ural death.
Farewell, brave knight of Faith and Love —
we’ll trust through the shadows until with you
at last, we shall “know and understand.”
Remember—reading The Golden Age is the
only way to keep up with Dr. Broughton every
week—Send $1.50 to pay for a full year’e vis
its. Golden Age Pub. Co., 13 Moore Bldg,,
Atlanta, Ga.
