LIBRAR OF CONGRESS. 
 
 -M 
 
 «iAl4S 
 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 

 -S>a2 
 
 ^2 
 
 "F^ 
 
 -^-^. J?*^r 
 
 "<?>*$ 
 
 ^5 
 
i^v? 
 
 <^V> 
 
 Diamond IE)itst. 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 
 MRS. JENNIE FOWLER WILLING, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THROUGH THE DARK TO THE DAY," ETC. 
 
 my* 
 
 CINCINNATI: 
 HITCHCOCK AND W A L D E N . 
 
 NEW YORK: PHILLIPS & HUNT. 
 1880. 
 
 <Th 
 
4«s 
 
 Copyright by 
 
 HITCHCOCK & WALDEN. 
 
 1880. 
 

 I. Diamond Dust, 7 
 
 II. Thinking, 37 
 
 III. Married People, 77 
 
 IV. Saving the Life, 109 
 
 V. Courteousness, 135 
 
 VI. My Neighbor, 157 
 
 VII. HOW TO GET RID OF " THE BLUES," 178 
 
 VIII. Getting Rich, 193 
 
 IX. Giving by Rule, 207 
 
 X. Growing Old, 222 
 
JISMOKD pt^M. 
 
 THERE are wonderful things to be seen in 
 a watch factory ; plucky little machines that 
 bite off a steel bar with one snap of their jaws, 
 discriminating little machines that handle screws 
 one hundredth of an inch in length, exact little 
 machines that measure the sixteenth of a hair's- 
 breadth. But the one bit of mechanism that 
 may most stir the thought is the tiny tin saw 
 that cuts the jewels of the watch. 
 
 Yes, the delicate and difficult work of shap- 
 ing the garnet and aqua marina, the ruby and 
 sapphire, is done by a piece of tin — that soft, 
 common metal. But notice ! Its edge is charged 
 with diamond dust. 
 
 Only the prince of gems can cut those pre- 
 cious stones. The diamond may not work alone. 
 Its power must be made available through some 
 cheaper agent to which it is joined. Probably 
 the tin holds the diamond dust all the more 
 tenaciously on account of its own weakness. 
 
 7 
 
8 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 Why may not some noble, discouraged worker 
 learn from the little tin saw how the jeweled 
 pivots are cut, upon which turn the wheels of suc- 
 cess in the world's conquest for God? 
 
 We are none of us content, unless we believe 
 ourselves useful to others; and the broader our 
 usefulness, the deeper and surer our peace. This 
 principle sends delicate Christian women out of 
 their snug homes, and sets them stumbling up 
 into wretched attics, and down into dismal cel- 
 lars. It sent scholarly Jesuits across the sea to 
 freeze and starve among the North American In- 
 dians. Sometimes a rich, full life is poured out 
 unstintedly in unselfish service, and with small 
 result. The note of such a failure might almost 
 send a throb of pain through an angel's song. 
 
 We all want to be useful. Children hear in 
 a shell the moan of the sea. If Ave listen well, 
 we can hear in the soul's confidences with itself 
 a ceaseless moan for fellowship with God in his 
 grand schemes of benevolence. 
 
 This universal bent indicates the divine inten- 
 tion. God uses human agents. He would use 
 each of us to the limit of our powers, if we 
 would meet the conditions of his inworking. 
 
 When we see those who are specially useful, 
 we demand of ourselves to know why we are not 
 doing more. Might not we accomplish some- 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 9 
 
 thing if only we could learn the secret of suc- 
 cessful effort? 
 
 The earnest soul asks itself, "Have I found 
 the line of life in which I can do most ?" "Have 
 I strength for any broader work than that which 
 now occupies my time?" 
 
 It is plain that to work successfully we must 
 find first, what we can do best, then satisfy our- 
 selves that our weakness is not a bar to success ; 
 and learn, if we can, how the little tin saw we 
 are set to manage can be charged with the dia- 
 inond dust of divine power. 
 
 First, let us see what God woidd have done. 
 We set our w r atches by the jeweler's chronometer 
 because we want them right. It tells us where 
 the sun is, and only the sun can give us standard 
 time. If we would have right notions of God's 
 work, the Sun of Divine Rightness must give us 
 our standard. We must turn to the true Light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world. 
 
 We can be thoroughly useful only when we 
 work the works of God. And what are they? 
 To the Word and to the Testimony. From 
 God's imperishable Record alone we may learn 
 to what service we are to devote ourselves. Let 
 us read carefully. 
 
 We find the stupendous miracle of creation 
 
10 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 chronicled in a few lines, while chapter after 
 chapter is given to warning, exhortation, and 
 entreaty that wandering souls may be rescued 
 from ultimate loss and death. 
 
 How simple is the story of the genesis of 
 light, that wonderful effluence that makes possi- 
 ble all growth and beauty! Kow marvelous its 
 movements ! It puts its shoulder beneath all liv- 
 ing things and lifts them toward the heavens in 
 spite of the tremendous downward tug of gravi- 
 tation. It brings note of suns so far away that 
 a quarter of the life-time of the globe is needed 
 to transmit the report. It pries into the minutest 
 organism. It shows us the shuttles of life at 
 work, weaving the living tissue; yet, marvelous 
 as it is, the story of its birth is given us in a 
 half-dozen words, though there is ample space to 
 detail the penitence of a crucified thief, or the 
 gratitude of a pardoned Magdalen. 
 
 We can be genuinely useful only when we 
 work in line with the purpose of God. He ren- 
 ders the best service who does most to hasten 
 the coming of the kingdom, be it by the con- 
 quest of an empire or the conversion of a child. 
 
 In seeking broad usefulness many blunder 
 fatally. They mistake Mat for achievement, rep- 
 utation for character, the huzzas of the crowd for 
 the "Well done" of God. And they generally 
 
DIAMOND DUST. II 
 
 find what they seek. "Verily, verily, I say unto 
 you, they have their reward." They climb up 
 where the altitude is more lonely, the landscape 
 more drear, and they become only a better mark 
 for the peltings of the envious. They have a 
 few years of pampered egotism and then an eter- 
 nal stumbling upon the dark mountains of ban- 
 ishment from God. 
 
 Greatness usually comes to the door a prince 
 in disguise. We keep the door closed and wait 
 for the chariot and outriders that never come. 
 
 If we try to build for ourselves a pedestal 
 that shall lift us into consequence, like children 
 making cob palaces, our careless haste is con- 
 stantly throwing down what w r e have set up; 
 while, if we take some simple, humble work, 
 and make of it all we possibly can, God working 
 in us and with us, before we dream of such a 
 thing it has grown to a height that lifts us into 
 consideration. 
 
 In our personal salvation, we are forever 
 stumbling over the simplicity of God's methods. 
 We must have some marvelous revealment of 
 the divine glory, some unbearable ecstasy, in- 
 stead of the peace of Christ, the quiet faith-that 
 believes his Word. Our diamond must blaze 
 forth a Koh-i-noor, a mountain of light, and we 
 push it aside with our foot, because it seems to 
 
12 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 our dull eyes only a common pebble. So our 
 opportunity comes to us, not as a glorifying, but 
 as a plain, unwelcome duty — a cross. 
 
 The line of life marked out for us by infinite 
 wisdom is, of necessity, the very best possible. 
 
 Our weakness is not a bar to successful effort. 
 The statement of the most logical and exact in- 
 spired writer is that God hath chosen the weak 
 things of the world to confound the mighty. 
 Not that he uses them when he can get no 
 others, or when they are thrust in his way and 
 he can not push them aside ; but of all in- 
 struments, they are his choice; and the reason 
 follows, "That no flesh may glory in his pres- 
 ence." He does not choose the weak because 
 the strength of the strong is in his way, for the 
 strongest are weak enough. These things are 
 hid from the wise and prudent and revealed unto 
 babes, because the wise and prudent will not 
 take the attitude so natural and easy for the 
 babes. 
 
 Tin is chosen instead of the richer metals to 
 hold the diamond dust on account of its very 
 poverty. 
 
 God always uses means utterly inadequate to 
 the result to be produced, that it may be thor- 
 oughly understood that the excellency of the 
 power is not of men, but of himself. Then 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 13 
 
 needy souls will know that to him alone they 
 must look as the source of help and strength, 
 and not to the servants that do his bidding. 
 
 God's use of inadequate means may be seen 
 in the material world. 
 
 When he makes an oak, he does not speak it 
 into being by a word of power; he wraps the 
 embryo in an insignificant nut, and drops it upon 
 the ground. A foot presses it into the soil. 
 The frost gnaws at its shell. Life touches the 
 germ and sets the ''bioplasts" at work. They 
 begin to weave an oak, and presently its tiny 
 leaflets push their way through the ground, and 
 up toward the light. The nip of a lambkin 
 might destroy the little vegetable, but, guarded 
 by the law of the survival of the fittest, it climbs 
 away upward till its forehead is among the 
 clouds. That immense, upright column of wood 
 is all from the tiny embryo. 
 
 When God would send a river forth on its 
 mission of power and use and beauty, he does 
 not open one of the earth's great arteries, and 
 pour a mighty flood down the mountain side. 
 A few drops trickle from beneath a stone. A 
 baby's touch might turn the runlet this way or 
 that. It slips away through grass and mosses 
 till it catches a song in its heart, and dances over 
 a pebbly bed, a thing of beauty and of gladness. 
 
14 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Joining hands with kindred rills, it grows in 
 power, gathering in its arms other streams, till 
 at. last it rolls in might toward the ocean, bear- 
 ing on its bosom the inland commerce of a people. 
 
 When a continent is to be made, the Great 
 Architect does not set the Titans hammering the 
 mountains about under the sea, that he may lay- 
 its base-stones. He gives the order to a tiny 
 polyp that lives but a day; and presently the 
 coral reef is thrown across the path of naviga- 
 tion. Then the island lifts its head above the 
 wave, and soon the continent becomes the home 
 of races of living beings. 
 
 The ocean lies still and quiet in its rocky 
 bed, its deep heart unmoved by the tornadoes 
 that thunder across its surface, tossing great 
 navies hither and thither like handfirls of feath- 
 ers. Yet, under the moonbeam's kiss, it lifts 
 tons and tons of its waters from their place and 
 throws them for leagues along the shore. 
 
 Gravitation is a law so delicate that philoso- 
 phers fumbled around it for centuries without 
 being able to find it ; yet it is so mighty that, by 
 it the Creator holds the universe in balance. 
 
 The Master seems to have wrought by this 
 rule of the use of inadequate means in his re- 
 demptive and reformatory work. In his mira- 
 cles he used means looking toward the end de- 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 15 
 
 sired, yet always unequal to the result. His 
 mightiest marvels were wrought by a word or a 
 touch. When the multitude followed him out of 
 their homes, so eager to hear the Word that they 
 lost sight of their physical needs, he told his dis- 
 ciples to give them food. He could have spoken 
 into being a Himalaya of bread; but then the 
 great lesson of the miracle would have been lost. 
 He took the five loaves and the two small fishes, 
 and blessed, and brake, and set the doubters cater- 
 ing for the great rows of hungry people. Each 
 took his pitiful bit of bread, and stumbled toward 
 those whom he was to serve with a thousand 
 keen eyes watching his movements. He broke 
 off each piece in faith, and there was no lessen- 
 ing of the supply, for the creative power of him 
 who issued the command was brought into requi- 
 sition by obedient trust. 
 
 In the work of grace, the Lord Jesus Christ 
 always wrought by the same rule. He com- 
 mitted the tremendous work of the world's con- 
 quest to a little company of Galilean peasants, 
 though he might have chosen Judean rabbis, 
 Athenian philosophers, or Roman poets and 
 statesmen, or he might have called to his aid 
 legions of angels. He left his work in the 
 hands of a few fisher people, uncouth in man- 
 ners, burry in speech, untrained in thought, with 
 
1 6 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 little to commend them to confidence, except 
 their sterling sense and their faith in his power. 
 
 Indeed, the entire scheme of salvation is 
 based upon a contradiction of common opinions, 
 diametrically opposed to all that the world believes 
 requisite to success. Its vital point is trust in 
 the crucified Nazarene. No wonder that it should 
 be foolishness to the philosophic Greeks and a 
 stumbling-block to the aristocratic, hierarchal 
 Jews. 
 
 In all time the great advance movements of 
 reform have been by the use of means that had, 
 of necessity, to be supplemented by divine power. 
 
 During the dark ages, when a woman was a 
 being to be treated with silly adulation or con- 
 tempt, a plaything or a drudge, altogether unfit 
 to be trusted with a knowledge of books or of 
 affairs, even in those murky days, a woman was 
 used for the evangelization of nearly every coun- 
 try in Europe. 
 
 Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, 
 made Christianity the religion of the Roman 
 Empire, and so of the civilized world. 
 
 The Empress Olga brought Christianity into 
 Russia ; and her grandson, Vladimir the Great, 
 who established it as the religion of the empire, 
 was converted through the agency of his wife, 
 Anna of Constantinople. 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 17 
 
 Hungary was brought to Christ through the 
 efforts of Sarolta, a Christian princess, wife of 
 King Geysa, and mother of St. Stephen. 
 
 The Poles were converted under the reign of 
 Micislas I, through the. influence of his Christian 
 wife, Dambrouska. Olaf the Good, who became 
 the apostle of Scandinavia, carrying the leaven 
 of evangelism even to Iceland and Greenland, 
 was the convert of his wife, Gyda. Our own 
 British ancestors were indebted for the perma- 
 nent establishment of Christianity among them 
 to the efforts of good Queen Bertha. 
 
 In the sixteenth century, a few earnest Ger- 
 mans were praying that the emperor might be 
 aroused to stand for the old spirituality that had 
 been so nearly trampled out by papal aggression, 
 and the answer came in the conversion of a 
 miner's scape-grace son. 
 
 While in the depths of despair the mighty 
 doctrine of justification by faith dawned upon 
 Luther's dark soul; and that belief of an ob- 
 scure monk was God's engine for laying as level 
 as the walls of Jericho the old bastions of papal 
 power in Germany. 
 
 Poor, alone, persecuted, he stood before the 
 potentates of the empire at Worms with the 
 simple, sturdy answ r er to the command to recant: 
 ' 'Hier stehe Ich> Ich kann nicht anders. So hilf 
 
1 8 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 mir Gott. Amen" When he was buried in the 
 Wartburg out of the reach of friend and foe, 
 he wrought the great work of the Reformation, 
 the translation of the Bible into the speech of 
 the people. In that work he gave Germany her 
 language. Lifting a dialect into a speech by- 
 translating into it the Scriptures, he made a vehi- 
 cle of thought that rendered possible the mar- 
 velous German literature that has followed. 
 Greater still, he made permanent the Refor- 
 mation. Always and ever the greatest is evolved 
 from the least. 
 
 The Anglican revival of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury was born in an obscure rectory, where a 
 woman was holding her nineteen children to a 
 regimen as rigorous as that of West Point, and 
 yet so gentle and tender, Dr. Clarke says, they 
 had the reputation of being the most loving fam- 
 ily in the county of Lincoln. 
 
 With a verse-making, wool-gathering husband 
 who had not practical sense enough to keep out 
 of jail for debt, she not only looked well to the 
 ways of her household, but she helped her boys 
 with their classics, and through the intricacies of 
 their religious experience. Little thought she as 
 the days went on, crowded to the last second 
 with infinitesimal cares, that she was laying the 
 foundation of the greatest revival of spiritual 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 19 
 
 godliness that these later centuries have wit- 
 nessed. Little did even the wisest imagine that 
 in that obscure rectory a moral renovation was 
 being planned that was to change the life of 
 millions — possibly even the polity of all civilized 
 nations — piercing with its darts of light the 
 gloom above all races the w r ide world over. Lay 
 preaching has been the driving-wheel of the 
 Wesleyan machinery. When God set it spin- 
 ning, John Wesley's high-church prejudices made 
 him unequal to the test. He came home from 
 one of his itinerant tours, and, finding out what 
 had been set on foot in his absence, he said to 
 his mother, with unusual asperity, "So, Thomas 
 Maxfield has turned preacher!" "Yes, and do 
 you be careful how you lay your hand on that 
 young man. He is just as certainly called of 
 God to preach as you are." She kept him from 
 throwing the band off the driving-wheel. 
 
 When God thrust Wesley out to preach upon 
 the moors and commons to the masses that 
 could not be gathered into the churches to hear 
 the Word, a storm of persecution arose and 
 church doors were slammed in his face. His 
 mother steadied his courage, "Never mind, my 
 son, the work is of God. Go on, and leave re- 
 sults with him." She stood by his side, that 
 gray-haired old mother, when he spoke upon 
 
20 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Kennington Common to twenty thousand people. 
 But for that small and often overlooked factor, 
 the mother's faith, where would have been the 
 great scheme of evangelism? 
 
 The Sabbath-school is unequaled in its power 
 for the spread of the Gospel among the masses. 
 Its beginning was humble enough. In 1769 
 Hannah Ball established a Sunday-school in Wy- 
 combe, England. Twelve years later another 
 young woman, who afterwards became the wife 
 of Samuel Bradburn, a celebrated lay preacher, 
 suggested to Robert Raikes the idea of teaching 
 the children the Word of God, and she walked 
 with him through the streets of Gloucester when 
 he went to the church with his little, ragged 
 company to try the first experiment. The peo- 
 ple hooted at the woman's whim, but "the hand- 
 ful of corn upon the top of the mountains, the 
 fruit thereof shakes like Lebanon." 
 
 At the beginning of this century the Chinese 
 Empire was closed against Christian truth. Its 
 language, the speech of nearly half the people 
 of the world, was without even a touch of Chris- 
 tian literature. A Sunday-school teacher in- 
 duced a street boy to come into her class. She 
 gave him suitable clothing and he came one Sun- 
 day. The next he was missing. She hunted him 
 up, clothed him again, and brought him again to 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 21 
 
 the school. He came only one Sabbath and disap- 
 peared again. She persevered and the third time 
 she succeeded in holding him in her class. A 
 trifling matter, to be sure, but that boy was Rob- 
 ert Morrison, who became the apostle to China, 
 opening that vast empire to the Gospel of Christ. 
 
 The American Board of Commissioners of For- 
 eign Missions, belting the world with its success- 
 ful work, grew out of the talk of some college 
 boys sitting beside a hay-stack one Saturday 
 afternoon, where they had taken refuge from a 
 shower. They talked of the heathen and of the 
 possibility of their conversion, and agreed to 
 meet regularly to pray for the salvation of the 
 pagan world, and out of that prayer-meeting grew 
 the American Board. 
 
 The Methodist Missionary Society, with its 
 broad fields and noble workers, grew out of the 
 effort of a little company of women who banded 
 together and began work by sending a negro to 
 teach the Indians upon the Western Reserve. 
 
 But time would fail to speak of all the great 
 schemes that God has inaugurated through the 
 smallest agencies. Indeed, such a catalogue 
 would cover the greater part of the divine work 
 in the world, as this method is the rule instead 
 of the exception. 
 
 The Jews stumbled to their utter ruin over 
 
2 2 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 the simple, unpretentious coming of their Prince 
 Messiah, the Desire of Nations. The reputed 
 son of a carpenter, unheralded, except by the 
 signs that accompanied his birth, why should 
 they acknowledge his claim ? During his thirty 
 years of waiting he moved about among them 
 simply a thoughtful, young man, with sad, pa- 
 tient eyes, differing from others only in probity, 
 which was any thing but a passport to distinction, 
 saying strange, wise things, but never bringing 
 to pass any thing remarkable. 
 
 He waited in insignificance and obscurity 
 while the great world — His world — known to him 
 in its ultimate atoms, turned silently on its axis, 
 kissed by his sunbeams, touched by his frosts, 
 enriched by the rains that he sent upon the evil 
 and the good, its people filling their cup of con- 
 demnation. 
 
 At last His hour struck, and he stepped to 
 the front, putting his shoulder to the mighty work 
 of redemption. But even then he was unknown 
 to Greek scholarship, unheard of in that magnif- 
 icent city of the Caesars. Probably not a thinker 
 in those superb old Indian and Chinese empires 
 pronounced his name. He lived in a remote Ro- 
 man province, hated and persecuted, and he died 
 at last a felon's death. But Richter says of him, 
 " He who was the holiest among the mighty, and 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 23 
 
 the mightiest among the holy has, with his 
 pierced hand, lifted heathenism off its hinges, and 
 turned the dolorous and accursed centuries into 
 new channels, and now governs the ages." 
 
 Since it appears plainly that our weakness is 
 no bar to successful work for God, how shall we 
 get about it to have our weak human nature 
 charged with the diamond dust of divine power ? 
 
 1. We must understand our own weakness. 
 This is the Sebastopol of the campaign, the key 
 to the position. 
 
 The Master said, "Without me ye can do 
 nothing." He understood our puerile attempts 
 at bolstering our own dignity. He knew how 
 hard we would try to make ourselves and others 
 believe that we were equal to the work in 
 hand. He meant we should begin with a sense 
 of utter inefficiency. Frederic the Great, with 
 a little of the insight of genius, said that the 
 three hardest words to pronounce are, "I was 
 mistaken." 
 
 We may be too polite to trumpet our own 
 doings. We may have more sense than Long- 
 fellow's Iago. 
 
 " Very boastful was Iago. 
 Never heard lie an adventure, 
 But himself had met a greater ; 
 Never any deed of daring, 
 But himself hod done a bolder; 
 
24 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Never any marvelous story, 
 
 But himself could tell a stranger." 
 
 Yet if we watch ourselves we will find that 
 always, if we can, we turn the conversation away 
 from those topics upon which we appear to dis- 
 advantage, and toward those that show off our 
 achievements. It comes so easy to say, ' ' When 
 I was in the university," or, "When we were 
 abroad," or, "When their High Mightinesses, 
 So and So, were at our house." 
 
 While we are filled with a sense of our own 
 importance, we can not be partakers of the di- 
 vine nature so as to be full of power by the 
 Spirit of the Lord. 
 
 We must not only be converted, we must be- 
 come as little children. 
 
 There is an inborn spirit of independence 
 that must be gotten rid of as soon as possible. 
 
 When Thales was asked what is the most 
 difficult thing in the universe, he replied, "To 
 know thyself." So tricky are we, we hide our 
 real motives even from our closest self-scrutiny. 
 We practice hypocrisy upon ourselves even when 
 we are airing our sincerity and ingenuousness. 
 
 We intone our confession of unworthiness 
 with proper inflections and cadences. We are 
 poor, miserable sinners, but not unfrequently our 
 drawl of humility covers self-assertion as a wet 
 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 25 
 
 cloth covers a dead man's face, making it all the 
 more ghastly to them who have eyes. 
 
 If somebody agrees with us in our declara- 
 tions of incompetency, we catch ourselves sud- 
 denly straightening our vertebral column, and as- 
 serting stiffly that we are probably quite as wise 
 and good as the majority of our neighbors. Much 
 of the discipline of life is meant to make us see 
 this defect of character. 
 
 How plainly we see the independence of the 
 little fellow toddling off on his two uncertain feet. 
 If he can push open the gate he starts out wildly 
 toward any point of the compass in the big out- 
 side world, and how resolutely he resists with 
 kicks and screams every attempt to force him 
 back within safe and proper limits. 
 
 If a mother leaves her little girl in charge of 
 the house she is sure to find that the child forgot 
 to feed the chickens and keep the pigs out of 
 the garden, in her disastrous attempts to show 
 that she can make pies and clean house all by 
 herself. 
 
 Older people dislike to be told to do what 
 they think they understand as well as any body. 
 
 ' ' You had better take your shawl, Mary ; it 
 will be cool coming home." 
 
 " No, mother, I sha' n't need it." 
 
 When we were upon the sidewalk, the young 
 
26 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 lady, who was more thoughtful in her introspec- 
 tion than most people^ asked this question, 
 "Why do you suppose I told mother I didn't 
 need my shawl, when I meant to take it all the 
 time, and should have done so if she had n't 
 spoken about it — just as though I did n't know 
 enough to take care of my health?" 
 
 You are in a street-car that gets into some 
 sort of trouble. "Don't be frightened," says 
 a superior individual with that soothing cadence 
 that is specially provoking. "Just sit still, 
 there's no danger." You are on your feet in a 
 moment. You are no baby. You probably 
 know as well as he how to behave, danger or no 
 danger. 
 
 This personal hauteur is probably a remnant of 
 the original human kingliness. But whatever it 
 is, it is sadly in the way of good work, for be- 
 fore honor is humility. 
 
 Before we can be properly equipped for the 
 divine service, we must know thoroughly that 
 we are utterly helpless for good, except as God 
 becomes the strength of our strengthlessness. 
 
 Only God has power to help souls to a better 
 life. He is jealous for the divine prerogative, 
 not for his own sake, but for ours. 
 
 A jeweler will not let his little boy tamper 
 with a watch, no matter how dear the child may 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 27 
 
 be to his heart. Not because he is afraid that 
 his son may become a rival in business, but 
 because he is afraid the little fellow will ruin 
 the watch, if allowed to get at its wheels and 
 ratchets. 
 
 We know so little of the human spirit we 
 can never be sure of saying or doing the right 
 thing for its helping, except as our Father holds 
 our hand, and speaks through our lips. 
 
 There is an aloneness of grandeur about this 
 awful human soul. It may be trampled in mire 
 like a lost diamond ; it may be built into coarse, 
 common wall like the broken, scattered Greek 
 marbles, but an archangel would stand back 
 abashed from the audacity of laying unbidden so 
 much as the weight of a finger upon the delicate, 
 immense mechanism. 
 
 Shall we be so foolhardy as to attempt any 
 reformatory work, except simply and only as in- 
 struments in the divine hand ? 
 
 When we get out of the swaddling bands 
 of our selfhood, we are brought face to face 
 with the ultimate facts of being, and charac- 
 ter, and destiny, the dignity of the soul and its 
 final future, and we become indifferent to our 
 own apparent success or failure, so that the 
 work in which we are permitted a part moves 
 forward. 
 
28 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 2. We must have a sense of Gods adequacy to 
 the work in hand, 
 
 "For right is right, since God is God, 
 And right the day must win. 
 To doubt would be disloyalty, 
 To falter would be sin. 1 ' 
 
 In the Sacred Record we find that those who 
 asked and received great things of God usually 
 prefaced their prayer with a statement of the di- 
 vine greatness. That, as I understand it, was not 
 that they might propitiate the Deity by an as- 
 cription of praise, for the best human attempts 
 to tell him who and what he is must be to his 
 ear mere limping, childish chirping. They said 
 these things that their own minds might be sat- 
 urated with the thought of his power, and the 
 ease with which he could deliver them from 
 troubles that seemed so great. 
 
 Thus, when Hezekiah was in mortal terror 
 before the coming of Sennacherib's host, he 
 prayed before the Lord, and said: "O Lord of 
 hosts, God of Israel, which dwellest between the 
 cherubim, thou art the God, even thou alone, of 
 all the kingdoms of the earth. Thou hast made 
 heaven and earth." 
 
 After the ascension of the Lord, when the 
 little company of disciples found themselves pre- 
 cipitated by their faith into a most unequal con- 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 29 
 
 test with the authorities, they cried to God for 
 help. With the fires of martyrdom beginning to 
 scorch their faces, they felt intensely the need of 
 a strong refuge; so they began their prayer by 
 saying: "Lord, thou art God, which hast made 
 heaven and earth and the sea and all that in 
 them is," and immediately their faith touched 
 the Divine Hand in the darkness, and the place 
 where they w T ere was shaken by his presence. 
 3. We must commit ourselves to the Divine 
 
 There is such a tangle of paths before us, 
 only one of which can be right, we are often 
 bewildered to know what course to take. No 
 human plummet can sound the abyss of diffi- 
 culty. No human strength can bridge the chasm. 
 
 Like Solomon, when he stood in the presence 
 of the tremendous responsibilities of life, we say: 
 "I am a little child, I know not how to go out 
 or to come in." Our Heavenly Father sees the 
 end from the beginning, and we have his prom- 
 ise, "In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he 
 shall direct thy paths." He will lead us, prob- 
 ably not to that that will bring money or lux- 
 ury, eclat or self-indulgence. If those accidents 
 of life are in the way of a broad usefulness, we 
 renounce them all, and he will save us from their 
 allurements. 
 
30 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 John Wesley, the retiring, poetic, studious 
 Oxonian, was led away from the quiet, scholarly 
 life he would have chosen, to one packed with 
 public cares and burdens and self-denials. For 
 twenty long years he endured that miserable 
 thorn in the flesh, a jealous, unprincipled wife. 
 For half a century his Church bore down upon 
 him with her broadsides of persecution, his 
 brethren in holy orders usually leading the at- 
 tack. When his followers had become so numer- 
 ous that he had to be treated with a little leni- 
 ency, he was afraid something had gone wrong 
 with him, because he missed the mobs. 
 
 The Apostle Paul was also of that fine, gen- 
 tle, scholastic cast of mind that shuns notoriety 
 and enjoys so intensely cloistered leisure with 
 books. He was led of God in journeyings often, 
 in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils 
 by his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, 
 in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, 
 in perils in the sea, in perils among false breth- 
 ren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings 
 often, and, at last, he went to his throne from 
 beneath the headsman's sword. 
 
 The Lord Christ was a man of sorrows and 
 acquainted with grief. He did not of himself 
 choose the suffering, for he cried out during that 
 supreme hour of anguish in Gethsemane, "If it 
 
DIAMOND DUST, 3 1 
 
 be possible, let this cup pass from me; never- 
 theless, not my will but thine be done." 
 
 We can not pierce the awful mystery of that 
 redemptive agony. He staggered through its 
 surges of anguish, grappling with and mastering 
 the powers of evil. He was heard in that he 
 feared, and his dying cry, "It is finished/' was a 
 victor's shout. The cross was his throne of tri- 
 umph and it is our symbol of victory. 
 
 We must drop into the little niche in the divine 
 plan for which we were designed. We can work 
 to advantage only when we move in harmony 
 with the Unerring Will. 
 
 4. We must have faith for results. 
 
 God means at the earliest possible hour to 
 set this wrong old world right. If we are in his 
 hand, under his control, there is no possible 
 chance for us to fail. 
 
 " 111 with his blessing is most good, 
 And unblest good is ill ; 
 And all is right that seems most wrong, 
 If it is liis dear will." 
 
 They of whom the world was not worthy, 
 who subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, 
 obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 
 quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge 
 of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, 
 waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the 
 
32 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 armies of the aliens, wrought all their marvels by- 
 faith. But how can we attain "like precious 
 faith ?" 
 
 The Savior asked, "How can ye believe 
 which receive honor one of another, and seek 
 not the honor that cometh from God only." 
 
 One of the first conditions upon which we 
 may hope for the enlarged faith that is so impor- 
 tant a factor in successful work for God is the 
 renunciation of our desire for the approbation of 
 others. That, however, is but one point of the 
 complete self-surrender that is necessary. There 
 must be a choice of the will of God in all things 
 for all time. This must be as complete as we 
 know how to make. Every suggestion of pos- 
 sible service or suffering must be met with, 
 "Yes, if it be his will, I will do it. I can trust 
 him to keep me out of fanaticism and unneces- 
 sary self-mortification. I simply put the conduct 
 of my life into his hands." 
 
 We must understand that the immanent God 
 has a will in every item of our life, and the only 
 safe and wise thing is for us to choose that will, 
 no matter how our inclination may writhe and 
 struggle and cry out in pain. 
 
 Once when Marshal Ney was going into bat- 
 tle he noticed that his knees were smiting to- 
 gether from fear. Looking down at them, he 
 
DIAMOND DUST, 33 
 
 said: "You may well shake. You 'd shake worse 
 yet if you knew where I am going to take you!" 
 That was Ney holding Ney in the line of duty, 
 in spite of terror that curdled the blood, and it 
 was by that resolute choice of right action that 
 he earned the title of the "bravest of the brave." 
 
 But how may we know that w r e are not cheat- 
 ing ourselves, that we do in all things choose 
 the will of God, that our surrender to him is 
 complete? 
 
 We know whether or not we are honest in 
 our purpose to do this; and when we are re- 
 minded of the depth and deceitfulness of the 
 human heart, we may reply, "I know that the 
 Holy Spirit, to whom I am indebted even for my 
 desire to be wholly under his control, and who 
 knows my motives to their last shade of mean- 
 ing, — is able, and cares to show me, if I fail of 
 a complete surrender. I am so sure of this, I 
 venture to say to my friends, to every body, if 
 need be, I know through my confidence in his 
 helping power that I am wholly given to God." 
 
 After that it is easy to believe that he has 
 you in his hand, and he works in you to will and 
 to do of his good pleasure the condition neces- 
 sarily antecedent to your greatest usefulness. 
 
 You may assert by faith in the blood of the 
 everlasting covenant that he saves from the old 
 
 3 
 
34 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 egotism and fits the soul for the best work for 
 himself. 
 
 The soul " enters into rest, " profound, sweet, 
 holy. There is no further care about the choice 
 of work. God, to whom the life is committed, 
 will lead by his spirit so that all things shall 
 work together for good. The responsibility of 
 result is all with God. There is nothing to do 
 but to go on gladly, trustfully, doing to the best 
 of the ability what he would have done, leaving 
 the outcome with him. 
 
 The suffrage of the world and the "Well 
 done" of God are given finally to those who 
 work by this rule of submission and trust. 
 
 ™ Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes; they were souls that 
 
 stood alone, 
 While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious 
 
 stone, 
 Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline 
 To the side of perfect justice mastered by their faith divine, 
 By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme 
 
 design. 
 
 By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track, 
 Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not 
 
 back. 
 And these mounts of anguish number how each generation 
 
 learned 
 One new word of that grand credo which in prophet-hearts 
 
 hath burned, 
 Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to 
 
 heaven upturned. 
 
DIAMOND DUST. 35 
 
 For humanity sweeps onward : where to-day the martyr stands, 
 On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands, 
 Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots 
 
 burn, 
 While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return 
 To glean up the scattered ashes for history's golden urn." 
 
 A picture of Florence Nightingale represents 
 her by the bedside of a dying soldier in a Cri- 
 mean hospital. In the background a poor, 
 homesick fellow has raised himself in his cot and 
 is passing his hand caressingly, reverently over 
 her shadow on the opposite wall — rendering un- 
 conscious homage to her boundless self-giving. 
 
 A friend wrote her once, asking for some facts 
 of her life for publication. Her reply was about 
 this: "There is nothing worth writing about me. 
 I have done nothing, God has done all. He 
 has been pleased to take a very plain, ordinary 
 woman and use her in his service. I have worked 
 hard, very hard, and I have never denied God 
 any thing." 
 
 Of another of the mighty ones whose weak life 
 was so charged with the diamond dust of divine 
 power that it cut through adamantine mountains 
 of difficulty, the record is, "Abraham believed 
 God, and he counted it to him for righteousness." 
 Stanley says: "Powerful as is the effect of these 
 words when we read them in their first untar- 
 nished freshness, they gain immensely in their 
 
36 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 original language, to which neither Greek nor 
 German, much less Latin or English, can furnish 
 any full equivalent. ' He was supported, he was 
 built up, he reposed as a child in its mother's 
 arms ' [such seems the force of the Hebrew word] 
 in the strength of God." 
 
 And this is the privilege of every believer in 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. That the weapons of our 
 warfare may be so edged and driven by divine 
 power as to be mighty through God to the pull- 
 ing down of strongholds, we must have the sense 
 of utter personal weakness, and of omnipotent 
 help that comes only from complete obedience 
 and restful trust. 
 
THINKING. 37 
 
 THE demand of the time is for trained think- 
 ing. The great need of God's work is con- 
 secrated thought. 
 
 We desire to be broadly useful. We attempt 
 many things in which we fail. Our failures throw 
 us into the deepest humiliation and despondency. 
 We have seasons of resolving to be intensely vig- 
 ilant and active, followed by corresponding lapses 
 into unprofitableness. We never are, but always 
 are to be, of some use in the world. Unless 
 something changes the current and character of 
 our effort, the chances are that old age or death 
 will find us like some convocations of well mean- 
 ing people, resolving and resolving, "only that 
 and nothing more." 
 
 Perhaps the clew that will lead us out of this 
 labyrinth of failures may be found to be a habit 
 of direct, sure thought under God's guidance. 
 
 An item of advice given by the London ad- 
 miralty to its seamen in regard to the manage- 
 ment of a ship in a hurricane begins with this 
 sentence; "Stand erect and look in the wind's 
 eye." It may be well for us to stand erect and 
 
38 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 look in the eye the difficulties that hold us from 
 our best possible achievement. If we find the 
 trouble to lie in our slipshod, zigzag methods of 
 thought, let us do our best to amend. 
 
 An earnest glance at the world's affairs will 
 convince us that thinking pays. It increases the 
 mental volume. The more we do in any line, 
 the more we can do. It is the arm that works 
 that has muscle and vigor. It is the brain that 
 thinks that has power to think to good purpose. 
 
 Thinking has a market value. Deft fingers are 
 worth far more in a business than clumsy ones 
 are; and even in what seems simply to depend 
 on physical skill, success hinges upon the quick- 
 ness and sureness of the thought. There is no 
 appreciable difference in the quality of the mus- 
 cle, or blood, or nerve in the cunning or the 
 awkward hand. The difference is in the mind 
 that directs the movements of each. Success in 
 any avocation is not usually a matter of special 
 endowment, but of disciplined thought. 
 
 What makes the difference in the w r ages of 
 those who go out to service? You have a serv- 
 ant whom you have to tell but once how you 
 want a thing done. She understands and re- 
 members. Her work is worth a dollar a week 
 more than that of another who brings to you as 
 pleasant ways, larger experience, and more mus- 
 
THINKING, 39 
 
 cle, but who is forever forgetting or neglecting 
 some important item of home comfort. You can 
 well afford to pay the thoughtful housekeeper 
 all she chooses to ask for her services. Her 
 planning, " executive force," as we sometimes 
 call it, adds at least one-half to her availability. 
 Her thoughtfulness is of no small value to you, 
 if it leaves you free to use your thought upon 
 other and possibly more important matters, 
 though it is not easy to believe that any business 
 can be more important than that the home be 
 kept as it ought to be. Many a failure is due to 
 the ill -temper and the nervous unhingement 
 caused by a smoky breakfast-room, burnt steak, 
 or cold cakes. 
 
 In mechanical operations the question of 
 financial success hinges upon the formula, the 
 more thought, the better pay. If one thinks 
 nimbly and strongly enough to keep the muscles 
 of two others at work, he becomes three men. 
 If a hundred, he multiplies his producing force 
 a hundred times ; and in just so far as he can 
 think out the work of others better than they 
 can do it for themselves, he is entitled to profit 
 on their work. That is the way in which honest 
 men get rich. If one can plan so that the 
 strength of another is worth as much again as it 
 would be without his thought, he is entitled to 
 
40 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 a share of the extra gains. That is fair. The 
 thought field is open to all. If one wants the 
 better paying position, let him learn also to think 
 rapidly and reliably. 
 
 It is hard work to learn thinking, but it ren- 
 ders the best returns to all classes of workers, 
 from the bootblack trying to establish his re- 
 spectability by presenting a clean face in the Mis- 
 sion school, up to Bismarck and Disraeli playing 
 their cosmopolitan game, with kings and em- 
 perors for chessmen. 
 
 Great achievements are not accidental. They 
 are the result of tireless thought. 
 
 It was not the genius of a demi-god that so 
 nearly laid Europe at the feet of the great Na- 
 poleon. It was the ceaseless energy of a hercu- 
 lean thinker. While other men slept, he would 
 sit by the hour bending over his maps, and 
 planning his campaigns. With colored pins he 
 represented the forces in the contest. The green 
 pins were Russians, the blue pins Prussians, the 
 red pins the British, and the white pins his own 
 soldiers. If the allied armies were to move upon 
 a certain point, he would bring up his men by 
 forced marches to its relief. If they crossed the 
 river here, he would fall back so and so. Thus 
 through the livelong night in that great, tough 
 brain, armies were marching and counter-march- 
 
THINKING. 41 
 
 ing, and those plans were wrought out that 
 astonished the world with the brilliancy of their 
 success. 
 
 It holds true of every enterprise, whether it 
 be for Satan, or self, or God; its success, other 
 things being equal, depends upon the amount of 
 clear, definite, co?itimimis thought that is given to 
 its planning and execution. If one would work 
 well, he must learn to think well. 
 
 Few people study their mental movements 
 carefully enough to understand their lack of 
 ability for sustained thought. 
 
 One may test himself by watching his at- 
 tempts at listening to a lecture. He seats him- 
 self with a determination to give his very best 
 attention to the subject in hand. After two or 
 three minutes some word of the speaker reminds 
 him of a teacher of his, and in a twinkling he is 
 in the old New England school-house, with the 
 boys buzzing and shuffling and playing sly tricks. 
 John Smith used to sit by him. Poor John ! He 
 was killed in that Ashtabula disaster. What a ter- 
 ble thing that was, to be sure. He would have 
 been in it if he had n't lain over in Rochester. 
 That trip to San Francisco was lucky all the way 
 through. What a set those Chinese are that he 
 saw there. How queer it would seem to be in 
 China where all the people look like those odd 
 
42 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 specimens. He is called home from the Celestial 
 Empire, not by the subject under discussion, but 
 by a bustling step at his side — Doctor Dosem ! 
 Wonder if he is as busy as he tries to make out! 
 He has lost a good slice of the lecture by com- 
 ing so late. The lecture ! Shades of the Greeks ! 
 If that lecturer has not reached his thirdly, and 
 not a word of secondly has caught the erratic 
 attention of this average listener! 
 
 Let him test himself in another way. Let 
 him resolve to think steadily for ten minutes 
 upon any given subject, whether it be the care 
 of his health, the salvation of his soul, or any 
 other vital matter. He will find his thought 
 wandering like the eyes of a fool to the ends of 
 the earth. If so much as a fly buzzes near, it 
 will snap the gossamer thread of his thought and 
 set it flying a thousand leagues from the subject 
 in hand. 
 
 How can we learn to tliink continuously and 
 rapidly? How can this rickety, lumbering, un- 
 reliable thinking-machine be put in such repair 
 that it can be depended upon to do a given 
 amount of work in a given time, and not waste 
 nine-tenths of its force in dawdling? 
 
 We learn thinking by thinking. Practice 
 makes perfect. A little girl can not learn to 
 make the thread go directly through the eye of 
 
THINKING. 43 
 
 her needle till she has thrust it this side and that 
 at least a thousand times. She can not learn to 
 take up the proper amount of cloth at each 
 stitch, and set each stitch beside the one nearest 
 to which it belongs, till she has pricked her 
 finger to roughness in false passes. 
 
 A boy does not learn skating from lectures 
 on that pastime, but by buckling on the skates 
 and testing his ability to retain the perpendicular. 
 He learns to let the center of gravity fall within 
 the base from the penalty attending an infraction 
 of that law, in the way of an emphatic bump on 
 the ice now and then. 
 
 We send our boys and girls to school, and 
 they are crowded through declensions and para- 
 digms day after day, not that by and by they 
 are to earn a livelihood by repeating those in- 
 tricate and bewildering linguistic differences, but 
 they will need in any business the steady, straight 
 thinking that can be developed only by these and 
 similar exercises. 
 
 When they venture out upon the glare ice 
 of their lyceum argumentations and other wit 
 contests, we clap hands and cry, " Bravo!" We 
 know that they are learning the use of their 
 metaphysical skates as certainly while their feet 
 are gyrating through the air, and they are meas- 
 uring their length in an intellectual tumble, as 
 
44 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 when they astonish lookers-on with wonderful 
 evolutions in the mental rink. 
 
 How can we train ourselves to direct thinking f 
 Shall we choose a subject and sit down with a 
 determination to lash ourselves over a given line 
 for a given time, till we learn to go through the 
 exercise properly? By no means. Our minds 
 would resent such treatment and play us any 
 number of shabby tricks, rather than submit to 
 the arbitrary discipline. They would be as in- 
 tractable as little girls whom antiquated maidens 
 oblige to sew seams of infinite length and tedi- 
 ousness by flourishing homilies over their heads, 
 instead of beguiling the tiresome monotony by 
 some pretty story or sentiment. We would re- 
 bel so resolutely against the exercise that a nerv- 
 ous fever or something worse would be the result. 
 
 There must be something about which we 
 think while we are learning to think that seems, 
 for the time at least, to be worth the effort. 
 There needs to be usually the social element 
 enabling us to compare our work and progress 
 with that of others, and receive stimulus from 
 emulation and appreciation. Few are earnest 
 and patient enough to work their way alone 
 through the memorizing of the terminology of a 
 science or language. It can be done, however, 
 and it must be held as a dernier ressoil in case 
 
THINKING, 45 
 
 one is deprived of the helps of teachers and class 
 drill that are found in college study. 
 
 If one is young enough the best thing is to 
 take a collegiate course. Poverty is no excuse in 
 this land where colleges are so numerous and 
 democratic. If we set out upon a course of 
 mental drill we will find it takes all the energy 
 of the faculty with their " honors" and " stand- 
 ing" and every motive they can bring to bear 
 upon us to keep us at work. So lawless are we 
 by nature, it will seem the supreme happiness to 
 escape from the grinding machinery and turn 
 Modoc or Arab or any body who does not have 
 to study. The more our school work annoys 
 us, the more certainly do we need it, and the 
 more resolutely must we determine to drive or 
 wheedle or coax ourselves through its drudgery. 
 
 But suppose we are too old or too heavy- 
 laden to go to school? What then? Let us set 
 before us the example of the learned blacksmith 
 and others who have done wonders in this line, 
 even while earning their living at hard labor. 
 Let us remember that all things are possible, 
 
 " Heart within and God o'erhead." 
 
 Let us mark out an easy line of study that we 
 can hold evenly, and then let us not turn aside 
 for any thing. 
 
46 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 I knew a woman who had the care of her 
 house, doing all its work without help, and aid- 
 ing her husband in his ministerial duties as far as 
 she could, yet she managed to acquire the equiv- 
 alent of a college course, and much besides. 
 She swept her house to the rhythm of Tennyson 
 and Longfellow. She bent over her ironing- 
 board with a German grammar open beside her 
 work, and repeated, Ich bin, dn bist y er ist, while 
 she smoothed the sheets and pillow-cases. She 
 crowded her house care into the closest possible 
 compass — without robbing the home of its com- 
 fort — that she might get time to study. That 
 of itself was an excellent exercise. Along at 
 first she gave only fifteen minutes a day to the 
 language or science she was busy upon ; but she 
 kept a close account with -herself, and if, by 
 any chance, she lost the fifteen minutes, she 
 made up the time ab* soon as the company was 
 gone or the obstacle removed. By thus obliging 
 herself to perform a given amount of work each 
 day she was preparing herself for heavier duties 
 in the future; and by saving the fragments of 
 time she was acquiring the means for the better 
 discipline and enrichment of her mind. 
 
 In learning to think, What shall we study ? We 
 may answer in general terms, Just what we do 
 not want to study. Each line of mental exer- 
 
THINKING. 47 
 
 cise is meant to develop the powers in a certain 
 direction. If a given line is easy and agreeable, 
 it is quite certain that one has already the devel- 
 opment that would be the result of that disci- 
 pline. For instance, linguistic drill gives quick- 
 ness, nimbleness of thought. If one translates 
 readily from one language into another, he is 
 obliged to spring from one to the other with the 
 utmost rapidity. You are talking to a German. 
 You think "house," but, before you can recall 
 its German equivalent, the French "maison" that 
 you learned in your childhood thrusts itself for- 
 ward impertinently and almost drops from your 
 tongue tip. You dart back and rummage a 
 drawer full of Greek and Latin odds and ends. 
 Something suggests the kinship between the En- 
 glish and German, and, the ear getting a chance 
 to give a hint, you bring out the word you are 
 looking for — "/iaus." That portion of duration 
 called time has been gliding along all this while, 
 and, as in a beginner's practice upon the piano, 
 there are such long pauses between the objective 
 points, your speaking is any thing but concise 
 and correct. 
 
 When the student of music learns^ to think 
 rapidly enough to get his perception of the note 
 in the printed lesson telegraphed to his hand, 
 bringing his finger down upon the right key, 
 
48 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 with no appreciable loss of time or style, we vote 
 him accomplished. So when one is able to 
 change the thought that comes to him in his ver- 
 nacular into another language without waiting to 
 hunt up the word he needs to use, we know that 
 his mind acts readily, his thought is nimble. If 
 one is specially fond of the study of languages, 
 so that all that work is easy for him, he has 
 already what he would acquire from such drill. 
 
 As nimbleness is not usually compatible with 
 strength and steadiness, one who can translate 
 readily may decide that his mind needs a disci- 
 pline that will give it the ability for sustained 
 effort. That discipline is usually found in math- 
 ematical study. 
 
 Not that there is any thing in mental contact 
 with numbers that specially stimulates or strength- 
 ens the mind, but success in mathematical work 
 depends largely upon continuous attention. In 
 general study you can continue the mechanical 
 effort while your mind is prancing about leagues 
 away from the subject in hand. It is difficult to 
 detect its erratic movements; but in mathemat- 
 ical study, when one is trying to solve a difficult 
 problem, if he looks aside from the mark for 
 even thirty seconds, the chances are he will have 
 to go back and go over all the ground again 
 to find the clew he has dropped. He is like one 
 
THINKING. 49 
 
 drawing up a bucket of water with a rope hand 
 over hand. If he lets the rope go for half a mitr 
 lite, the bucket will fall and all his labor be 
 wasted. 
 
 Study, like that of mathematics, that enables 
 one to know whether or not he is holding his 
 attention steadily upon the matter before him, 
 is the best exercise to give a habit of going 
 straight through the mental work in hand. Lord 
 Bacon says: " There is no stand or impediment 
 in the wit but may be wrought out by fit studies. 
 If a man's wit be wandering let him study math- 
 ematics ; for in demonstrations, if his wit be 
 called away never so little, he must begin again ; 
 so every defect of mind may have a special 
 receipt." 
 
 In the ordinary avocations of life we have lit- 
 tle use for any mathematical knowledge beyond 
 the simple rules of arithmetic, yet we need in 
 every thing the habit of thinking steadily and 
 continuously. 
 
 For instance, one is buying a home. He is 
 making up his mind upon the merits of a certain 
 piece of property. He must consider the econ- 
 omy of the purchase, his ability to meet the 
 payments, the health of the place, its neighbor- 
 hood, schools, society, growth, and a dozen other 
 items that are vital to the plan. 
 
 4 
 
50 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Other things being equal, the man or woman 
 who can go straight through the details of a busi- 
 ness transaction, as he would have to do through 
 a difficult mathematical problem to find its solu- 
 tion, is the one who can manage his affairs with 
 skill and success. The one who lacks this ability 
 to think abstractly and consecutively will get his 
 attention caught on some pleasant feature of the 
 bargain, and will lose sight of a disadvantage 
 that the one with whom he is dealing may 
 spare no pains to hide. 
 
 In buying even a piece of furniture a woman 
 goes through the same mental processes that are 
 necessary to the solution of a difficult problem 
 in calculus. The main difference is, if she loses 
 her way in the problem she knows it at once, 
 and goes back to find the path again, but in the 
 business of settling the domestic and social details 
 of her home she may lose her way in the rea- 
 soning and fail of the right conclusions, and not 
 know it until her affairs are in a hopeless tangle, 
 and an interest of priceless worth has made 
 shipwreck. A slight error in nautical calcula- 
 tion sent the Atlantic upon the rocks with its 
 hundreds of human lives. Many a well-freighted 
 home craft has gone down in a sullen sea, be- 
 cause the one at the helm failed to think steadily 
 and surely through the problem of its management. 
 
THINKING. 5 1 
 
 In a saloon fray in the canons of Colorado, 
 the vital question, which of the ruffians shall go 
 out upon his feet and which shall be carried out 
 upon a shutter, depends upon the quickness with 
 which the muscle of the trigger finger obeys the 
 will. We may be sure the men who live that 
 desperate life keep themselves well up in pistol 
 practice. We come to places where every thing 
 depends upon our thought going as swift and 
 sure as a minie-ball through the problem of des- 
 tiny. There is no time for practice, no room for 
 bungling. In an instant the chance has flashed 
 by — the doom is sealed. 
 
 The young man who clung to a capsized skiff, 
 while the waves of Lake Michigan tossed him 
 hither and thither the livelong night, found that 
 his life depended upon the reserve power of his 
 muscle, his ability to hold on amid the beating 
 of the surges where others would have let go and 
 sunk in death. 
 
 That friend of mine who held her nerves quiet 
 w r hile she cowed a fierce dog with her eye, and 
 backed slowly out of his reach, found that every 
 thing depended upon her ability to keep all her 
 powers in steady action through what seemed 
 an age. 
 
 We come to places where not only human 
 lives, but the salvation of souls, may hinge upon 
 
52 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 our ability to hold ourselves to close, continuous 
 attention. To look off for a moment means to 
 fail utterly and lose the vital point. Well for us 
 if our school mathematics, or some equivalent 
 discipline has taught us to hold our thought in a 
 given line. 
 
 There is an analogy between physical and men- 
 tal hygiene. The body is kept healthy and its 
 vigor increased by proper food as well as due ex- 
 ercise. It is impossible for the muscle to be 
 firm and reliable unless the aliment is strong and 
 nutritious. Neither can the mind be vigorous if 
 it is fed on trash. 
 
 The racer in the Olympic games held himself 
 to the closest diet during his preparatory drill. 
 We are in training for mental and spiritual con- 
 tests, upon the result of which are hinged the 
 interests of eternity. "For we wrestle not 
 against flesh and blood, but against principalities, 
 against powers, against the rulers of the darkness 
 of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high 
 places." We must avoid all mental food that 
 can impair our powers, for not the olive wreath 
 nor the applause of the excited multitude will 
 reward our success, but a crown of glory and the 
 -Well done" of God. 
 
 What shall be our mental pabulum? Cer- 
 tainly not the cheap hash of events that is 
 
THINKING. S3 
 
 chopped up for us and sensationally seasoned by 
 reporters and daily editors. If we desire to learn 
 the art of forgetting, and surely the years will 
 teach us that, let us cram our minds with what 
 we have no wish to carry twenty-four hours. If 
 we go through the reports of scandal suits, mur- 
 ders, domestic embroglios, and the like, it will 
 be well for us if we are able to forget the bulk 
 of what we read. There can be very little food 
 for the mind in tons of such material. 
 
 Foul air, decaying vegetables, and diseased 
 meats fatten for the maw of the pestilence the 
 unwashed masses that fester in the alleys and 
 dens of great cities. Dime novels and similar 
 fulsome, sensual, vile publications poison the 
 unthinking people, and fit them to be carried 
 off by the pest winds of Mormonism, Spiritism, 
 free-lovism, diabolism. 
 
 We will find healthy mental food in history, 
 art, science, poetry and, above all, as a staple, 
 in God's Book, that fountain and aggregate of all 
 truth. We may indulge now then and in a little 
 of the best -made fictional sweetmeats, but our 
 minds can gain solid strength only from solid 
 aliment. 
 
 We will not grow strong by devouring books. 
 
 Seneca said, " Read much, but read few books." 
 
 The mental exercises of some students are sim- 
 
54 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 ply mnemonic. Their knowledge is cyclopaedic — 
 all in quotation points. Such people are exceed- 
 ingly convenient to save the time of thinkers. 
 They can give you what you need on demand, 
 with no rummaging of books, but when they 
 need to put forth a personal intellectual effort, 
 they are as weak and helpless as children. We 
 are always wondering why they do not amount 
 to more, and we conclude that being able to rat- 
 tle other men's words from the pen's point or 
 tongue's tip, may make a clever quotationist, but 
 never a strong, rich thinker. 
 
 We must digest what we eat if we would ap- 
 propriate to ourselves its strength. So we must 
 make what we read our own by taking it to 
 pieces and absorbing its substance. 
 
 To get the -best intellectual strength let us 
 learn first our own language, as Lowell calls it — 
 "that wonderful composite known as English, 
 the best result of the confusion of tongues." It 
 is the speech in which we pray and praise, make 
 our bargains and win our friends. It is certainly 
 of prime importance that we should know the 
 use and meaning of its words and phrases and 
 sentences, so that when we intend to say one 
 thing we may not give utterance to quite another, 
 that, though like what we would say, does not 
 convey its actual meaning. How much bitter- 
 
THINKING, 55 
 
 ness and heart-burning, how many quarrels would 
 have been saved if they whose vernacular is En- 
 glish had so learned their native tongue as to be 
 able to speak it intelligibly, saying simply and 
 only what they mean. 
 
 How much more thought we could get time 
 for, if we were not so busy with trying to find 
 the exact meaning of what others have written 
 and said. How much more actual Christian 
 achievement there would be if the talking folk 
 gave us their meaning in plain, exact language. 
 
 It is difficult to understand English without 
 a knowledge of the wise, motherly, old Latin 
 and also of French and German, for we must 
 know that "phonetic decay and dialectic regen- 
 eration," as Max Muller would say, have so 
 changed the face of many of our words, that we 
 can get their exact significance only by going 
 back to their early home and associations. 
 
 Linguistic study not only disciplines to readi- 
 ness, it enriches and ennobles our thought. As 
 the fertility of Egypt depends upon the overflow 
 of the Nile, and each inundation leaves an allu- 
 vial deposit, so every stream of new thought 
 that flows over the mind leaves upon it some- 
 thing of its own richness and strength. Whether 
 it be the copious, resonant Latin, the imagina- 
 tive German, the dignified Spanish, the musical 
 
56 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Italian, the polished Greek, the poetic Hebrew, 
 or that wonderful Sanskrit, — a language mas- 
 tered adds to the intellectual volume. 
 
 And this is true also of an author. If he 
 has the verdict of the thoughtful and far-seeing, 
 it will pay to read carefully what he has taken 
 pains to write. We must not read along skim- 
 mingly, page after page, hoping to come to an 
 understanding with him, and get at his meaning 
 after a while. Let us read word by word, line 
 by line, sentence by sentence, till we are satis- 
 fied that we take in the substance of his thought 
 as far as we are able to apprehend its force. A 
 few pages plodded through in this laborious 
 manner, and our fine thinker is conquered. He 
 can but tell us what he means to say. 
 
 A certain reading of Dante's "Divina Corn- 
 media" will serve to illustrate this point. A 
 trio of friends, resting in the woods, took up the 
 work of the mighty Italian, and read it in an 
 easy, sauntering way, after the day's merry- 
 making or study. They usually left the poor 
 victims of Dante's punitive genius to boil, or 
 broil, and dropped off to sleep in the midst 
 of the infernal terrors, with a peaceful sense 
 of having done their duty by la creme de la 
 creme of polite literature. Neither dared say to 
 the others " Dante is certainly stupid, in spite 
 
THINKING, 57 
 
 of the eulogiums of the critics, and Longfellow's 
 translation is wretched English." After a while 
 it occurred to them to study this poet of whom 
 so many fine things had been written and said. 
 Then they found that each line was replete with 
 poetic power, each sentence held some figure of 
 speech all aglow w T ith the fire of genius. They 
 learned wisdom from their foolish w r aste of op- 
 portunity. 
 
 If one would go easily through a study, he 
 must master its axioms at the outset. My friend 
 has been supposed to have special power over 
 the scraggy mathematical quantities that are such 
 a terror to ordinary students. The secret of her 
 success cropped out one day when she told me 
 that her mother never permitted her to learn a 
 new rule or theorem in arithmetic or algebra, till 
 she had wrought some of the examples, study- 
 ing out for herself the principle which was in- 
 volved, and making for her own understanding 
 a formula. 
 
 She learned also from the same wise teacher 
 that a few hours of extra time given to the 
 first chapters of a book where its principles are 
 being laid down, will save days of lumbering, 
 crippled attempts to w T ade through its later prob- 
 lems. "It is the first step that counts" in more 
 senses than one. 
 
58 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Our Hebrew professor holds us for hours upon 
 the first paragraphs of the Bible. "Get those 
 words perfectly," he says, as he picks them to 
 pieces, one by one; "know them in all their rela- 
 tions, and you will have passed through the gate 
 that admits you to this wonderful revelation of 
 God." He tell us that when he was a student in 
 the Vatican University in Rome, his father, spend- 
 ing a few days with him, noticed a fault in his 
 general reading. His grandfather had given him 
 a hundred ducats with which to buy books, and 
 he was quite proud of his little library. His 
 father observed, however, that during the fifteen 
 minutes between lecture hours, he glanced over 
 the pages of a half dozen books, and before he 
 had selected one into which he might dip, the 
 time was up, and he had to go back to his pro- 
 fessor. When he came from the lecture room, 
 his father told him that during the three years 
 that he was to remain in the university he could 
 be permitted to read nothing but Dante, Pe- 
 trarch, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Milton, be- 
 cause, if he kept up his studies as he ought, he 
 would have only these fragments of time for 
 general reading. It would not do for him to 
 lose half his time deciding what to read, and the 
 other half in getting hold of the thread of the 
 author's thought. The writers chosen have an 
 
THINKING. 59 
 
 idea in every sentence. Their works may be 
 opened anywhere, and there is something di- 
 rectly under the eye well w T orth the reading. 
 They ennoble our minds by holding before them 
 the finest imagery, the sublimest soaring of im- 
 agination, or the most subtle analysis of human 
 character. 
 
 There is a double lesson in this rule of the 
 thoughtful father: What we read must be of the 
 very best, that that gives a full, rounded idea in 
 the fewest words, and so is most provocative of 
 thought, and also that we must use to the best 
 advantage the odds and ends of time. The 
 ordinary way of getting rich is by saving the 
 small sums — economy in little expenditures. To 
 get much knowledge one must use the scraps of 
 time. Any avocation usually makes a demand 
 that covers the whole of one's time. If he does 
 his work well he has only minutes left for read- 
 ing. Now, the one who crowds up to a better 
 place where he may have firmer standing-room, 
 and a broader outlook, is the one who thinks so 
 carefully through the details of his work that he 
 can do it more rapidly, and so save a little time ; 
 then he uses every moment to push his ability 
 toward that to which he aspires. In this way, 
 to him that hath more is given. 
 
 Some excuse themselves from reading on the 
 
60 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 score of their being pressed with care, driven by 
 business. We notice, however, that those same 
 overburdened people manage to wade through 
 any amount of matter in the daily papers, with 
 now and then a cheap story that takes hours for 
 the working up of its wonderful matrimonial 
 denouement. 
 
 Wesley not only studied philosophy, Biblical 
 criticism, and philology on horseback, but he 
 wrote excellent works on those subjects. We 
 might, any of us, find time for a great deal of 
 good reading if we would use the hours that are 
 spent in driving to market, going upon visits, 
 riding to and from business. We see in the 
 street-cars whole rows of women who are gossip- 
 ing with eye or tongue upon the cut of chil- 
 dren's sacques, the style of ladies' cloaks, etc., 
 and tiers of men who are intrenched behind a 
 hastily written and badly printed sheet engaged 
 upon a more expensive order of gossip, and one 
 not always as innocent; but only once in a 
 dozen rides do we see one — excepting always 
 the students who are driven to use this time to 
 keep up with their classes — who is busy upon 
 some work that will give scope and breadth and 
 grasp of thought. 
 
 Perhaps at most one can give only minutes 
 to reading. Then let him read the best. If he 
 
THINKING. 6 1 
 
 will study with Shakespeare the modes of thought 
 and expression, and the life of those old Eliza- 
 bethan days, he will find that he has a gallery 
 of antiquated English art next door to his shop 
 or office, sewing-room or kitchen. If he has 
 only ten minutes to spare, instead of gossiping 
 with a neighbor about some ephemeral excite- 
 ment, some nine days' wonder, or with tout le 
 monde through the daily press about some larger 
 item of astonishment, he steps into his gallery, 
 shuts out the work-a-day world, and laughs or 
 cries with the mighty magician over his Portias, 
 Desdemonas, and Hamlets. Somehow he finds 
 an interpretation of many of the little events of 
 life, lifting them out of the commonplace, and 
 showing how they bear, like the minor points in 
 the plot of a story or play, upon the tremendous 
 whole of being. 
 
 Men and women of genius interpret us to 
 ourselves. If we listen to them, we may find 
 the grand harmony of which even the discords 
 are a necessary part. They will certainly give 
 us to see through the shallow pretenses of the 
 strutting, small people, and we will learn to seek 
 the grand, ultimate good, even though it be by 
 the way of Gethsemane and Calvary. The rev- 
 elations of genius supplement and emphasize 
 those of the Book of God. They are the out- 
 
62 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 lying fringes of the meanings of the Infinite. 
 Though they must never supplant the divine 
 teaching, they may help to an apprehension of 
 its fullness of thought. 
 
 Our thinking, to be right, must be from the 
 right motive. Much fine thinking is in the in- 
 terest of selfishness, mammon, sin, and so is all 
 wrong. It may move men mightily, but it is 
 down the inclined plane toward perdition. Such 
 thinkers may be gifted with 
 
 " The art Napoleon 
 Of wooing, winning, wielding, fettering, banding 
 The hearts of millions till they move as one," 
 
 yet they are doomed to ultimate defeat. God's 
 purpose is the only power that moves to sure, 
 final victory. 
 
 Emerson says, "Hitch your wagon to a star." 
 We would say, rather, Bring your tiny purpose 
 into harmony with Him who made and manages 
 the stars, and you can not fail of right results. 
 
 That our thinking may be successful, as well 
 as right and strong, we must consecrate our 
 mental powers to God. 
 
 Some well-meaning people mistake at this 
 point. They take the service of God as some- 
 thing that is required, and must be gone through, 
 like working on the road, or doing military duty; 
 or they regard it a somewhat unpleasant neces- 
 
 
THINKING, 63 
 
 sity, like carrying a life insurance, to guard 
 against a possible exigency. They mean to 
 escape hell and get to heaven, but they intend 
 to have money, place, and power on the way. 
 
 Now-, let them devote their mental ability to 
 the service of Him who claims all, and they will 
 find that the primal use of consecrated thinking is 
 the working out of a clearly cut crystalline 
 character. 
 
 Others, who recognize more fully the Lord's 
 right to the best of the life, mistake in this: 
 they regard religion as an affair of the emotions, 
 and having very little to do with the intellect. 
 
 They watch their sensibilities as carefully as 
 a physician notes the symptoms of his patient. 
 They keep diaries in which they note just how 
 they felt at such a time, and under such and 
 such circumstances, as if the condition of the 
 feelings were a sure exponent of the state of 
 grace. 
 
 Conspicuous among those who live by senti- 
 ment rather than by faith (which is another 
 name for religious common sense) are the old 
 Romish saints and recluses, who regarded pious 
 meditations and introspection the sum of relig- 
 ious duty. They kept that most subtle and 
 variable and uncertain part of the nature, the 
 emotional, forever under the microscope. No 
 
64 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 wonder that they grew morbid and erratic, see- 
 ing visions and dreaming dreams. 
 
 It would have saved a deal of trouble if they 
 had given their logic a chance to straighten out 
 their spiritual kinks. And there are not wanting 
 among Protestants those who are quite as foolish. 
 There are consecrated men and women who are 
 ready to pray and praise indefinitely, and to do 
 any thing that will give a good, active tone to 
 their feelings^ but who seem to think it cold and 
 heartless to pay any attention to the spiritual 
 use of the intellect. They believe as surely 
 as do Romanists that ignorance is the mother 
 of devotion. They feel their way through the 
 adjustment of their relations to God and men 
 instead of permitting their reason to bear a 
 proper part in the work. They bring their 
 emotions to the happiest condition, but leave 
 their power to think upon the tremendous ques- 
 tions pertaining to the spiritual life all unused 
 and weedy, like a fallow field. The result is a 
 character, one-sided, weak, superstitious, bigoted, 
 liable at any hour to be warped out of all form 
 and comeliness by the archenemy, and always 
 unfit for the heaviest, strongest work. 
 
 As soon as one has attained a completeness 
 of consecration that sets him entirely at rest 
 about his own spiritual condition, he begins to 
 
THINKING. 65 
 
 obey the leadings of the Holy Spirit in caring 
 for the souls of others. And just here there is 
 the greatest need of sure, steady thinking. No 
 work is more worthy of the best intellectual 
 vigor than the work of God. In any thing else 
 we may better be mechanical and blundering 
 than in this, the most vital. 
 
 In every department of God's work there is 
 need of a re-enforcement of strong, sure thinking. 
 Many a good cause suffers, and some perish, for 
 the lack of good management. That sad utter- 
 ance of the Savior sounds like a dirge above the 
 wrecks of good enterprises that lie along the 
 path of the years, "The children of this world 
 are wiser in their generation than the children 
 of light." Diplomatists, politicians, business 
 men study directness, polish, nice address, every 
 art that has power over mind, to help them 
 carry out their schemes, while the Lord's work- 
 ers blunder through their duties in any sort 
 of way. 
 
 We need to think more carefully how to lead 
 others to the Savior. We will learn more for that 
 work in the study of human mind, than in all 
 good books. 
 
 We must not stumble in upon people, re- 
 gardless of their modes of thought and action. 
 We can not force a way into their territory just 
 
 S 
 
66 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 where we please to demand entrance. Every 
 one has beaten routes through his spiritual do- 
 main — the tramways over which he carries his 
 exports and imports. We must strike into them 
 with our artillery and supply-trains, if we would 
 conquer him for God. Some people have faith- 
 force enough to construct military roads wherever 
 they choose to go, yet we can not help thinking 
 that the same zeal would accomplish infinitely 
 more if the laws of mind were regarded. 
 
 For instance, see how cautiously a man "ap- 
 proaches" you, if he wants to insure your life. 
 No rhetorician was ever more careful to assure 
 an audience of his good principle, good sense, 
 and good-will. If he began and carried his work 
 as abruptly and unbendingly as some Christians 
 set about leading a soul to the Redeemer, he 
 would die in the poor-house. 
 
 There is a world of unnecessary lumber block- 
 ing up the way to the cross. Penitents are 
 dragged through it by the force of conviction 
 and the faith of the Church. When they find 
 themselves rejoicing within the "wicket gate," 
 hardly one in ten can tell by what process he 
 reached that point. How much better it would 
 be if seekers of Christ's salvation could be so 
 instructed in regard to the way of faith as to 
 know the principles that underlie the new life, 
 
THINKING. 67 
 
 being shown them as they take the steps by 
 which it is made possible for God to change their 
 relation to himself. They would then be like 
 sailors who know something about the managing 
 of a ship before they go to sea. When the 
 storms of temptation strike them, they would 
 know how to keep steadily on their course. 
 
 The newly converted ought to be cared for a 
 great deal more thoughtfully than they are under 
 the present regime. They are usually left to 
 themselves when their names are fairly on the 
 Church record. They need more help than ever 
 when they really set about establishing a new 
 character, and begin to understand how much 
 there is to overcome. The Church is exceed- 
 ingly remiss in this matter. 
 
 As if one should gather up fifty or a hun- 
 dred little orphans and range them in rows of 
 cribs with a table well furnished with meats and 
 vegetables before each, and then lock them in 
 and go on his way, rejoicing over his wonderful 
 orphan house, and the grand men and women 
 that were to be the outgrowth of his scheme; 
 the ordinary methods of caring for Christ's little 
 ones are not much less absurd. No wonder 
 that such numbers are weak and sickly, and so 
 many die. 
 
 Suppose some Sabbath day one should sue- 
 
68 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 ceed in getting a dozen drunkards to take the 
 pledge; then he should leave them — making 
 no effort to help them find employment, better 
 associations, and decent homes. They may go 
 back to their old haunts among the whisky 
 stenches, and fight the devils single handed till 
 they shall chance to hear again the eloquence 
 that roused them to a sense of danger. A 
 thousand wonders if every one of them is not 
 back again in the ditch by Saturday night. 
 
 We ought to use our very best thought 
 upon this work of helping to assured, estab- 
 lished Christian life the "babes" of Christ's 
 household. If we know one of them to be 
 staggering under temptation, we ought to take 
 up his case as we would a difficult problem, one 
 upon which were pending tremendous issues. 
 If need be, we should spend hours in close, 
 prayerful study, measure his infirmities, his pe- 
 culiarities; think how he could be reached, how 
 held. Trusting the Savior's help, ten to one, we 
 could get him again out of Satan's clutches. 
 If, through our lack of care, he is permitted to 
 go back to his sins, his state will be infinitely 
 worse than at first, for he will take to himself 
 seven other spirits more wicked than himself. 
 Thought given to this work pays abundantly. 
 Did not the salvation of souls cost Christ his 
 
THINKING. 69 
 
 life? Heaven is eternal growth and glory, hell 
 a fathomless horror. 
 
 Family religion gives ample scope for the 
 best thinking. Family piety is one of the most 
 potent agencies for the perpetuity of the Chris- 
 tian Church, yet how little do good people 
 understand and use its power. In many fam- 
 ilies religious instruction is left altogether to the 
 Sunday-school teacher and the pastor. If, from 
 force of habit, the parents take the duties that 
 belong to the heads of families, recognizing 
 God at the table, and worshiping him once or 
 twice a day as a household, it is in such a me- 
 chanical, meaningless way, that it were better 
 left undone. A long chapter with never a ques- 
 tion or a word of explanation or illustration, 
 and a longer prayer. Little feet fidget upon 
 chair rounds till they are nervous enough to 
 fly in spite of the most dignified propriety, 
 Big boys and girls rebel. The father scolds 
 and tightens the rein for awhile, and ends in 
 letting them do as they please. The mother 
 protests in a meek way, and comforts herself 
 with a determination to ask prayers for them, 
 and to get the minister to come and talk to 
 them, hoping that they will be ' ' converted this 
 Winter." Oh, what blunders! The power of 
 music untried, the teaching of Scriptural truth 
 
70 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 with note and anecdote — giving Hebrew eyes 
 with which to see into this wonderful Hebrew 
 Book, that alone contains the way of salva- 
 tion — all warm, genial, earnest means of home 
 grace unused, and the children growing up to 
 vote "prayers" an unmitigated bore, and the 
 Bible the most stupid of books — driven to hate 
 the faith of their fathers by the cold, formal 
 attempts at family worship. How unlike God's 
 plan for home piety and instruction. 
 
 11 Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one 
 Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 with all thy might. And these words, which I 
 command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 
 and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy 
 children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest 
 in thine house, and when thou walkest by the 
 way, and when thou liest down, and when thou 
 risest up." Even with this divine injunction as 
 a model, there is need of the closest, strongest 
 thinking, if one would train his family to earnest 
 religious life. 
 
 Sabbath-school workers need to bring to their 
 most important work well-disciplined, consecrated 
 thought. In our public - schools, teaching is 
 studied most carefully. Hours are given each 
 week by each teacher to learning the best 
 
THINKING. 7 1 
 
 methods of imparting instruction. It is not 
 enough that one is thoroughly versed in the 
 study, she must know the best way of drawing 
 out the young mind, and bringing it to exercise 
 its powers upon the text-book in hand. She 
 must understand how, with object lessons, pic- 
 tures, blackboards, to make truth simple and 
 tangible. 
 
 Sabbath-school teaching has undergone a 
 change for the better, and yet it is only the 
 specialists, the pioneer thinkers, who bring the 
 same acumen to this work that is so useful in 
 the public-schools. Their modes, that seem so 
 wonderful by contrast with the old, humdrum 
 ways of Bible teaching, do not come from the 
 intuitions of genius, nor from a religious ecstasy. 
 The love of Christ constrains them to put forth 
 effort, common sense holds them to close 
 thought, and thus they work out the plans that 
 make the world-wide changes in Sunday-school 
 teaching, just as thinking wrought Robert Ful- 
 ton's crude notions of steam navigation into the 
 Great Eastern — a floating city. Any one who 
 knows enough to be intrusted with the care of a 
 school or a class may accomplish similar results 
 if he will give time and earnest, prayerful study 
 to this question: "How can I give my scholars 
 the most Biblical truth in the least time?" 
 
72 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Of all people Christian pastors have the greatest 
 need of strong, steady thinking. There is room 
 for improvement in every department of their 
 labor, Take the prayer-meeting, for instance. 
 Its outer mechanism is generally left to adjust 
 itself. The shallow and bold are often allowed 
 to crowd out the talented and timid. The 
 prayers may be as long and mechanical, the 
 hymns as wretchedly sung and tedious, the ex- 
 hortations as prosy and tiresome as dullness and 
 formality could desire. One needs a good de- 
 gree of piety to carry him safely through some 
 Church prayer-meetings week after week. 
 
 The young and moderately religious, the very 
 ones who most need such means of grace, will 
 not go, and there is no use in scolding. The 
 only thing is to set about making the meetings 
 better. They can be made as attractive as a 
 social gathering, if one will take pains to pray 
 and think out a plan for their proper manage- 
 ment. The people hunger for spiritual food. 
 There will be no trouble about the attendance 
 upon the social meetings of the Church, if they 
 are conducted in a sensible manner, and with 
 the presence and help of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Some ministers run in deeply worn grooves, 
 round and round, year in and year out, doing 
 exactly as they did a quarter of a century ago, 
 
THINKING. 73 
 
 though mechanics, art, science, teaching, every 
 thing is constantly advancing. 
 
 As one of many points in which Church 
 management is a failure for lack of sure, definite 
 thought and purpose, we can but notice the sing- 
 ing. It has been proved in these latter days 
 that more truth can be sung into the hearts of 
 the people than they will take from sermon or 
 exhortation. Yet, with all its power for good, 
 Church singing is often useless if not positively 
 harmful. It is left to shamble along subject to 
 the caprice or vanity of thoughtless, irreverent 
 people. Worship is suspended while the choir 
 sings. If its antics are not amusing, they are 
 immeasurably tedious. And this is not because 
 singers are more troublesome or less manageable 
 than other people. They are quite like others in 
 doing a thing as it pleases them, when they are 
 left to choose their own mode. 
 
 To remedy this mischief random shots from 
 the pulpit will hardly answer in place of well-ma- 
 tured plans, upon which kind, common sense can 
 bring all parties to agree. 
 
 In selecting the officiary of the Church the 
 most careful thought is necessary. It would be 
 a saving of time and strength to think and plan 
 a whole day over filling an important office, 
 rather than to let the matter drift, and then have 
 
74 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 to manage an unruly incumbent, or piece out 
 one that is inefficient. 
 
 Any Christian to whom the Lord has intrusted 
 a responsibility in his work ought to think what 
 is the most possible to be accomplished in that 
 line, and how the best can be done for the cause 
 he is set to serve. With his power to think con- 
 secrated to Christ, " leaning not to his own un- 
 derstanding," but trusting for divine guidance and 
 wisdom, let him study his material and arrange 
 and dispose of it to the best advantage, mak- 
 ing the very most possible of every opportunity, 
 be it small or great. Then having done all, let 
 him trust for the blessing of God without which 
 nothing can succeed. 
 
 Some who come to understand that their fail- 
 ure in Christian work is owing to a lack of con- 
 secrated thinking, hope for a better life some 
 time,, but they do not comprehend their own re- 
 sponsibility in the matter, and the need that they 
 bring themselves to a broader efficiency. They 
 wait for God to send upon them an immense 
 passional force that shall bear them up to a 
 higher plane, suddenly changing the life to what 
 it ought to be. They forgot that all human 
 character is hinged upon human effort, that God 
 supplies the grace and demands that we use it, 
 we determining by our choice the direction and 
 
THINKING. 75 
 
 the extent of the divine work. Otherwise, the 
 Lord, and not we ourselves, would be responsi- 
 ble for our condition. 
 
 True Christian passivity is intensely active, and 
 while we meet his requirement God never fails to 
 do his part. When one chooses that all his life 
 shall be used in Christ's service, he will find that 
 God works in him to will and to do of his own 
 good pleasure. He will prove ultimately that 
 the powers he was at such pains to wrench from 
 their old selfish bias and turn toward God are 
 by the Divine Father developed to their best 
 strength. The Savior makes infinitively more of 
 him than he could make of himself; and thus is 
 demonstrated that word of the Master, " He that 
 will lose his life for my sake shall save it." 
 
 Each talent given into the Redeemer's hand 
 is by his power and providence brought to its 
 best polish and strength and put to the very 
 best use. 
 
 The Lord of the service sees to it that no 
 work done with a brave, single-eyed purpose for 
 himself shall fail of result. His word must ac- 
 complish that whereunto he hath sent it. 
 
 The scattered thought may lie for a thousand 
 years like the grains of wheat in the mummy's 
 hand, yet if it has in it the vitality of God's 
 truth, it must spring up when the hour comes for 
 
76 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 it to have light and warmth and room, bearing 
 a plenteous harvest of good. 
 
 Let Christian thought be thoroughly cultured 
 and completely consecrated to the divine service, 
 and the time will not be far distant when the 
 Church shall move forth, " bright as the sun, fair 
 as the moon, and terrible as an army with 
 banners." 
 
 Then will dawn the golden day of peace, when 
 
 ' 'The last man shall stand God-conquered, 
 With his face to heaven upturned." 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 77 
 
 CONSECRATED thinking may yet master 
 all problems of destiny. 
 
 Thought has already wrought marvels in the 
 material world. Phenomena that used to set 
 men shivering and cowering because they were 
 believed to be the work of demons, have been 
 found to be only the result of natural law. 
 
 In the older, more ignorant days, if an eclipse 
 darkened the sun, or a tornado slipped its leash, 
 or an earthquake moved forth in deadly might, 
 the scared people imagined that dragons were 
 devouring the worlds. 
 
 In this braver time science springs into the 
 path of ruin wrought by the cataclysm, gathers 
 its facts, finds its law, and guards against its 
 return. 
 
 In the thinker's laboratory has been wrought 
 out the wondrous mechanism that whispers from 
 continent to continent, that makes patient draft- 
 horses of fire and flood, that thrusts famine and 
 pestilence and war back to their dens. In that 
 
78 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 same laboratory, by God's blessing, must order 
 and well-being be evolved from the moral chaos. 
 
 As the problem of bringing erratic physical 
 forces into harmonious action has lost much of 
 its ruggedness and difficulty, so the inscrutable 
 ethical questions that have loomed so hope- 
 lessly in the path of all who have wrought for 
 the world's bettering, are giving way before ear- 
 nest thinking, patient toiling, and steady faith 
 for divine aid. 
 
 Evils that seemed as inscrutable and inexor- 
 able as destiny, grinding to powder the heart 
 and hope of millions, have been analyzed by 
 philosophic thought. The mischievous principle 
 has been discovered and its elimination made 
 possible. 
 
 In reformatory, as well as in mechanical en- 
 deavor, thinkers have stumbled over the sim- 
 plicity of the right formula. 
 
 The old Greeks, of whom Plotinus said, 
 "They used to get out of their bodies to think," 
 wrought their best upon the questions of moral 
 renovation. They move our pity — those men of 
 peerless intellect standing, as Dante saw them 
 in his dream, "with calm, slow eyes" fixed on 
 the unyielding problem. They failed always in 
 their studies of art, letters, and law touching the 
 moral and social life. They fumbled in vain for 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 79 
 
 the mainspring of the regenerated civilization. 
 It is revealed by Christianity alone. It is noth- 
 ing more and nothing less than honor and integ- 
 rity in the liouies of the people. 
 
 Aristotle was within touch of the secret. He 
 declared the family to be the type of the state, 
 thus almost guessing its tremendous import. If 
 the mighty Stagyrite had taken another step and 
 taught that the purity of the family is the power 
 of the state, if he had found the divine method 
 of cleansing that fountain of social activities, 
 making clean the homes of the race, and if his 
 dicta had been accepted in morals, as in logic, 
 the gloomiest, bloodiest pages of history would 
 have been spared. 
 
 Pliny said there would be no state if there 
 were no family ; an utterance that touches like the 
 flicker of a taper the dense darkness that en- 
 shrouded his magnificent Rome. 
 
 Wolsey says that Rome rose by the sanctity 
 of the family life and fell when that sanctity was 
 undermined. 
 
 In the purifying of the home sanctuary is 
 found the solution of that problem of the ages — 
 the bringing into right lines of the immense eth- 
 ical forces that have run riot, working such hope- 
 less, reckless ruin, such boundless wrong and 
 outrage. 
 
80 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 The family can not be pure unless it is per- 
 manent, and its permanence depends upon the 
 permanence of marriage. 
 
 Christianity alone makes provision for the per- 
 manence of marriage, because of all religions it 
 alone teaches the inherent dignity of humanity > 
 and the sacredness of inalienable human rights. 
 
 Marriage is of God. Jehovah united the first 
 pair. He put to sleep his masterpiece, the won- 
 derful complex being he had made in his own 
 image, and wakened them to the happiness of 
 shared work and joy; as if he had made tangi- 
 ble the gentler and more enduring part of human 
 nature, clothing it in separate flesh that it might 
 stand forth helping and helped, bone of man's 
 bones, life of his life. 
 
 In the writings of the great apostle we find 
 an amplification of the divine idea. "He that 
 loveth his wife loveth himself; for no man ever 
 yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cher- 
 isheth it, even as the Lord the Church." 
 
 The Gospel rule of domestic life is above crit- 
 icism. "Husbands, love your wives even as 
 Christ also loved the Church and gave himself 
 for it. So ought men to love their wives as their 
 own bodies. For this cause shall a man leave 
 his father and mother and shall be joined unto 
 his, wife, and th<fy two shall be one flesh. 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 8 1 
 
 Let every one of you in particular so love his 
 wife even as himself, and the wife see that she 
 reverence her husband." 
 
 In all lands where the Bible has Httle or no 
 power, the permanence and purity of the home 
 are hardly known. Wherever Jehovah's will is 
 not recognized as law, the marriage tie is a mere 
 financial adjustment; men and women join them- 
 selves to each other from impulse ; and separate 
 by caprice. 
 
 No doubt there is a constant infringement of 
 the husband's claim to reverence and love. 
 Probably he is cheated out of all those delicate, 
 refining attentions that go to make the best of 
 life — that that we live when the public eye is not 
 upon us, and we are simply and only ourselves. 
 Yet, as the condition of the woman is the more 
 gross and appreciable exponent of the wrong, 
 of that we usually speak. 
 
 Among pagans the zvife is bought and sold — 
 the slave of man's lust or of his greed. Men 
 hold themselves above moral restraint, and re- 
 gard women as existing simply for their service 
 and comfort. 
 
 Among the Greeks and Romans, even when 
 those peoples were at their best, the woman 
 might not have a thought above her distaff. 
 She was the true woman who waited only upon 
 
 6 
 
82 DIAMOND DUST 
 
 the pleasure of her lord, holding her love sacred 
 to him, living or dead, as did Penelope while the 
 vagrant Ulysses wandered, heart and foot, at his 
 own sweet will. 
 
 Csesar's wife must be above suspicion, though 
 the private morals of that same Caesar, "the 
 foremost man of all the world," were too scan- 
 dalous for record. A married woman must sac- 
 rifice herself in utter disconsolateness at her hus- 
 band's death, though he had given a dozen other 
 women a full share of his love. 
 
 Christianity alone gives a woman the right to 
 demand honor for honor, purity for purity. 
 
 Only the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 places the woman, where Margaret Fuller said 
 she must stand to give her hand with dignity, 
 "fairly upon her feet." You look in vain 
 among the golden thoughts of the "Divine 
 Plato" for one syllable that helps a woman to- 
 ward the starting-point that the Hebrew Bible 
 gave her — "a helpmeet for man." 
 
 When Socrates w r as turning his steady eyes 
 upon death, and giving forth some of the finest 
 utterances that ever fell from his lips, in that 
 supreme hour when his heart ought to have been 
 most tender, he turned from his weeping wife 
 with a contemptuous fling at the weakness and 
 silliness of women. 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 83 
 
 Hebrew women towered like desert palms 
 above those of the heathen nations by whom 
 they were surrounded — Sarah, empress-like in her 
 beauty and strength; Rachel, whose life was so 
 pure it stood the test of a seven years' courtship, 
 "and it seemed to Jacob but a few days for the 
 love he had for her;" Miriam, who made the 
 songs of her people while her brothers were 
 getting its laws from God; Jael, who delivered 
 her nation by killing the generalissimo of the 
 enemy's forces; Deborah, who administered law 
 and led armies ; Esther, the beautiful diplomate, 
 who saved her race from the impending doom. 
 Solomon, that pioneer of Jewish literati, gives us 
 the Biblical model of feminine character. The 
 picture is drawn with Rembrandt strokes. Com- 
 pare it with those in the Vedas and Shasters. 
 They teach that a woman is inherently vile. 
 She was so bad a man in some past statt of 
 existence that she has been born a woman as a 
 punishment. 
 
 The books of all non-Christian writers abound 
 in proverbs about the intrinsic and hopeless de- 
 pravity of woman. The Hebrew philosopher 
 shows his belief in the opposite. He speaks of 
 the virtuous woman as if she were not only a 
 possible idea, but an actual person. He sketches 
 from life. She is industrious. "She seeketh 
 
84 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her 
 hands. " "She riseth while it is yet night and 
 giveth meat to her household, and a portion to 
 her maidens." 
 
 She is a business woman. "She maketh fine 
 linen and selleth it. She delivereth girdles to 
 the merchant. She perceiveth that her mer- 
 chandise is good." 
 
 She understands the laws that underlie the 
 rise and fall of real estate, for "she considereth 
 a field and buyeth it." 
 
 She is any thing but feeble-minded, for 
 "strength and honor are her clothing." 
 
 Sh»? knows something and can tell it in a 
 wise way, for "she openeth her mouth with 
 wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of 
 kindness." 
 
 She is benevolent. "She stretcheth out her 
 hands to the poor; yea, she reacheth out her 
 hands to the needy." 
 
 She cares personally for the comfort of a 
 well-managed home. "She looketh well to the 
 way of her household." 
 
 She has a happy family life. "Her children 
 arise up and call her blessed; her husband, also, 
 and he praiseth her." 
 
 Her piety is the crowning glory of her life. 
 "Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but the 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 85 
 
 woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be 
 praised." 
 
 The degenerate Judaism of Christ's time 
 had swung far enough away from the divine 
 ideal. Its rabbis said, "He is a fool that at- 
 tempts the religious instruction of a woman;" 
 and "Let the words of the law be burned rather 
 than given to a woman." 
 
 Paul, whose utterances on this subject have 
 been wrested by the unlearned and unstable to 
 the destruction of thousands of souls, — Paul gives 
 an epitome of his belief in this sentence: "There 
 is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond 
 nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye 
 are all one in Christ Jesus." When the Chris- 
 tian Church cuts down through gloss and preju- 
 dice to the core of the meaning of that utter- 
 ance we may look for the millennium. 
 
 The retrograde Christianity of the dark ages 
 shut woman out of the world of sober thought 
 and earnest endeavor, making her a drudge, or, 
 at her best estate, a dainty plaything, on account 
 of whose personal charms daft wights should 
 write wretched rhymes, or doughty knights 
 break each other's skulls. 
 
 In the sixteenth century Francoise de Sain- 
 toigne attempted to establish primary schools for 
 girls. She was hooted in the streets of Paris, 
 
86 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 and her father called in four doctors learned in 
 the law to sit in solemn conclave upon her terri- 
 ble heresy, and decide whether or not the mis- 
 guided woman were possessed with devils, 
 prompting her unheard of and dangerous scheme 
 of teaching girls to read! 
 
 In the eighteenth century Dean Swift wrote 
 his "Letter to a young lady on her marriage*' — 
 a piece of literature which was received without 
 dissent as an excellent bit of advice to a young 
 gentlewoman. He says "It is a little hard that 
 not one gentlemen's daughter in a thousand 
 should be brought to read or understand her 
 own natural tongue. But it is no wonder when 
 they are not so much as taught to spell in their 
 childhood, nor can they ever attain to it in their 
 whole lives. I know very well that those who 
 are commonly called learned women have lost 
 all manner of credit by their impertinent talka- 
 tiveness. But there is an easy remedy for this 
 if you once consider, after all the pains you may 
 be at, you never can arrive in point of learning 
 to the perfection of a school-boy. Your sex 
 give more thought and application to be fools 
 than to be wise and useful. When I reflect on 
 this, I can not conceive you to be human crea- 
 tures, but a certain sort of species hardly above 
 a monkey, who has more diverting tricks than 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 87 
 
 any of you, is an animal less mischievous and 
 expensive, might, in time, be a tolerable critic in 
 velvet and brocade, and for aught I know would 
 equally become them." 
 
 Phidias said of his statue of Minerva, " Give 
 it the light of the public square." In giving this 
 question the light of the centuries we find that 
 in no land or time in all this sorrowful world 
 has there ever been hope or heart for women 
 except as the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 has borne sway. Women never had and never 
 can have a firmer, better friend than the Son of 
 Mary. Of all systems of philosophic and relig- 
 ious thought none has given her the place ac- 
 corded to her by Protestant Christianity. They 
 who strike at the Church because some of its lim- 
 itations are faulty and irksome, are like the An- 
 cient Mariner who shot the albatross. They will 
 bring down upon themselves a doom more bitter 
 than death, that of the abominable old sensualisms. 
 
 The Bible is woman's Magna Charta, and it 
 is worse than suicide for her to set aside its pure, 
 high truths. 
 
 Marriage is a Biblical institution. The home 
 is found only in Christian lands. Without Scrip- 
 tural guards a woman's life is poor and petty and 
 pitiful enough. The woman who has sufficient 
 moral dignity to desire to be nobly and truly her- 
 
88 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 self, and enough insight to see where the danger 
 lies, must cherish Christianity as she would her 
 own life — nay, her own soul. 
 
 While the permanence of marriage may be 
 nullified by the degradation of women, it is at- 
 tacked no less fatefully from another quarter. 
 
 Before the abolition of slavery a southern 
 lady wrote : ' ' We women of the South are 
 merely the heads of harems." It was a fearful 
 thing for slave-women to be at the mercy of the 
 lust of their masters. It was a no less fearful 
 thing for the civilization and the home that the 
 masters were thus rendered liable to a devel- 
 opment of the low, the sensual, the animal. 
 Thoughtful, Christian people in the South saw 
 with the utmost pain the danger to free institutions 
 from this terrible maladjustment. Where the mis- 
 chief was allowed to enter a household the har- 
 mony and confidence necessary to a happy home 
 were at an end. It did not need the genius of a 
 Fanny Kemble for a woman to understand the 
 cheat of giving her whole self to a man, while 
 he divided his love between a legal family and 
 two or three others not recognized by law. 
 
 Thus servitude avenges itself. The very pres- 
 ence of a subject class leads to a most harmful 
 development of character in those for whose com- 
 fort the lower are deprived of natural rights. As 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 89 
 
 "mercy blesseth him that gives and him that 
 takes," so domestic wrongs curse the doer as 
 heavily as the immediate sufferer therefrom. 
 
 Pagan men have proved this by the utter loss 
 of all the " small, sweet courtesies," the tender, 
 beautiful, bracing home atmosphere from which 
 a man goes forth to face the rough, bad world, 
 inarmored, invulnerable as Achilles was when his 
 mother dipped him in the Styx. 
 
 Whoever holds another from a God-given 
 right is guilty, not only of a crime against his 
 victim, he sins most egregiously against himself. 
 If he uses the power given him in his own do- 
 mestic circle to perpetrate an injury that he 
 would by no means endure from another, his sin 
 is suicidal. He may be as handsome as a Turk, 
 as proud as a Spanish grandee, as gifted as Lord 
 Byron, as superbly selfish as Napoleon, yet he is 
 stabbing to the heart the purity of his manhood, 
 the integrity of his moral nature, and rendering 
 impossible the best that this life can give him, 
 the permanence and excellence of marriage and 
 a home. 
 
 The mischief wrought in domestic life by 
 
 pride and passion does not stop with destroying 
 
 the dignity of marriage. It is felt throughout 
 
 the community and the state. The vanity and 
 
 insolence developed by being allowed to lord it 
 
90 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 over others, can but result in civil and national 
 broils, brawls, and wars. The man who is accus- 
 tomed to have his way, whether it be reasonable 
 or sottish, is not likely to have himself well in 
 hand in a diplomatic encounter. A government 
 in the hands of such statesmen is in danger of 
 constant entanglements and embroglios. The 
 man who does not respect the rights of those 
 upon whom he can trample with impunity can 
 not be trusted to legislate upon the destinies of 
 thousands who are at his mercy. In proof of 
 this turn to those pages of history that record 
 the growth and decay of that magnificent Persia, 
 of the Roman Empire, of the Saracenic domina- 
 tion, of the rich old East Indian civilization. 
 Self-government is at the base of ability to gov- 
 ern others. 
 
 It was not a mere accident that the apostle 
 enjoined domestic purity and integrity upon the 
 men who were to hold office in the Church, over- 
 seeing her interests and shaping her polity. "A 
 bishop then must be blameless, the husband of 
 one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given 
 to hospitality, apt to teach, not given to wine, 
 no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre ; but patient, 
 not a brawler, not covetous ; one that ruleth his 
 own house, having his children in subjection with 
 all gravity (for if a man know not how to rule 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE, 9 1 
 
 his own house, how shall he take care of the 
 Church of God)." Before he can rule others he 
 must learn to hold a tight rein upon his own 
 passions. They who are accustomed, in little 
 matters, and when free from outside restraint, to 
 respect fully the individuality and all personal 
 rights of others, can hardly fail of probity in 
 public affairs. 
 
 Plenty of nonsense has been uttered and 
 written upon the equality and inequality of the 
 sexes. Probably a logical adjustment of this 
 question is impossible, as it is based upon the 
 comparison of things that may not be compared. 
 As w r ell may we attempt to measure mathemati- 
 cally the difference between color and sound, the 
 fragrance of roses and the sheen of stars or 
 other incompatible conditions. 
 
 If women reverence their husbands as the 
 Scriptures enjoin, and men love their wives as 
 Christ loved the Church, each will second the 
 efforts of the other to make the most of any 
 special gifts that may help the general good. 
 The wife will not say, "It is for my personal 
 comfort to have you devote yourself to money- 
 making, so you must thrust aside that artistic or 
 intellectual or benevolent ability that seems to 
 dominate your character. You must not write 
 or paint or preach as you believe you ought to 
 
92 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 do. You must make money to keep me and 
 my children in ease and elegance." 
 
 The result of a domestic council upon the 
 case may bring out the fact that, while he has 
 the soul of sensibility, the fervor of spirit that 
 might make him abundantly helpful as a moral 
 leader, he lacks the practical ability that gets 
 one comfortably ready for pay-day— an ability 
 that, for some wise purpose, she has in full 
 measure. Then she will take the commissary 
 department while he devotes himself to the work 
 for which he was especially intended. 
 
 On the other hand, he will not say, "These 
 buttons must be kept securely sewed on, though 
 your poem be never written, though your book 
 wither and die in your brain, your benevolent 
 scheme never find opportunity or use. Ten 
 thousand souls whom your voice ought to warn 
 of the wrath to come may stumble on in dark- 
 ness to death, rather than that my coffee should 
 lack the amber clearness your talent might give 
 it, or my dinner the epicurean relish that your 
 abundant energy might plan for my comfort. " 
 
 The true equality, that of the Golden Rule, is 
 not so very difficult to attain when Christ's Gos- 
 pel has a chance at the lives of men and women. 
 Under that principle, marriage is to neither a 
 sacrifice, but a girding of the surest strength. 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE, 93 
 
 The home will stand pure and strong and glori- 
 ous, the very bulwark of the civilization and of 
 godliness. 
 
 Marriage is usually necessary to roundness 
 and completeness of character. Each life needs 
 another to which it may be joined by an un- 
 breakable bond supplementing its lack by add- 
 ing the quality or grace in which it is deficient. 
 The timid man or woman must be united to the 
 courageous, the brusque to the gentle. Joined, 
 they make a completed life, each doing the bet- 
 ter work for the influence of the other, each 
 working freely to the law of his or her being, 
 each following the will of God and working to 
 his purpose. 
 
 There may be those to whom it is given to 
 remain single for the sake of special personal 
 responsibility with which marriage could but in- 
 terfere seriously, but there can hardly be a more 
 harmful fallacy than that marriage is opposed to 
 holiness, and that they who would be specially 
 devoted to God's work must keep themselves 
 aloof from its entanglements. The Romish 
 Church has committed its religious services to 
 an army of celibates. It, is, consequently a 
 strong political and militant organization, but, 
 in meeting the spiritual needs of its communi- 
 cants, it is an utter failure. Better a thousand 
 
94 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 times that its host of ghostly old maids and 
 bachelors follow the example of the monk Mar- 
 tin, when he gave the sweet little nun, Katie 
 Von Bora, a legal right to fill with rest and sun- 
 shine the stronghold where he retreated when 
 hard pressed by the outside conflict, teaching 
 thus by example as well as by precept how to 
 do that most godly thing, the making of a pure, 
 noble home. 
 
 There are also w r idowed hearts whose love 
 lies in the dust of the sepulcher, and who ad- 
 just themselves to their loss as one does who 
 has parted with an arm. Possibly marriage bells 
 never chimed for them, but their hearts know 
 the rest that comes only from the joining of two 
 lives that are " meant for each other/' 
 
 Marriage adds to the moral strength, instead 
 of lessening it, but that this may be so neither 
 must claim dictatorship. Each must respect in 
 the other the ultimate supremacy and responsi- 
 bility of the soul's choice. 
 
 But how seldom do we see wrought out this 
 divine ideal. How wretchedly have sin and 
 selfishness wrenched out of all form and comeli- 
 ness this good intention of the kind God ; and 
 what worlds of mischief grow out of the sad 
 mistake ! 
 
 Multitudes are fastened together for conven- 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 95 
 
 ience or pride, by diplomacy or avarice, really 
 living, as blunt old Dr. Clarke has it, in ' ' legal- 
 ized adultery." 
 
 Many others who seemed at first well mated 
 have grown into such coldness toward each 
 other, w T e can but conclude they would be glad 
 to be free. We can almost tell the number of 
 their married years by the distance between 
 them — husband and wife. What a disappoint- 
 ment! Instead of the expected paradise, only a 
 desert of indifference ! They are obliged to 
 speak across this waste, arranging monetary 
 matters. Now and then they catch a glimps of 
 each other as they kneel side by side in the 
 worship of God. The Lord winds the love of 
 little children around their hearts to draw them 
 together. Their tears mingle beside dying beds. 
 They clasp hands by little graves, where seems 
 to be buried the heart of each. Yet, in spite of 
 all, they drift further and further apart — he mar- 
 ried to his business or his ambition ; she, to her 
 babies, her housekeeping, or society. All those 
 kindly glances, those touches of hand and lip, 
 those gentle, loving attentions that were to have 
 been the dessert of each day's fare, are forgotten 
 or laughed at as school-boy poetry, or, like 
 faded flowers from coffin lids, they are sighed 
 over in secret. The twain grow old and die, 
 
g6 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 utter strangers to each other's real life, alto- 
 gether unaware of the strength and happiness 
 they have missed by not living and loving as 
 married people ought to do. 
 
 But this negative, this starving, is not the 
 tvorst side of the mischief. The positive danger 
 is far greater. Satan is not slow to bring in a 
 brood of lawless loves to poison and destroy the 
 hungry heart. If the affections of one wander 
 wickedly sometimes the other is to blame. One 
 is careless of the domestic bond because the 
 other is selfish or cold, heartless or hateful. 
 
 Great harm comes to the children who are 
 born into such families. When the household 
 loves are frost-bitten, no brown-stone elegance can 
 supply the lack of heart-warmth. From those 
 frigid mausoleums daughters hurry off to find 
 elsewhere what they have missed at home, and 
 sons are easily lured into the by-ways of Hell ! 
 The children of such families not unfrequently 
 grow up in doubt of the possibility of home- 
 happiness, and conclude to repeat their parents' 
 blunder, and settle into domestic mummies — 
 their only relief, a costly embalming ! 
 
 Married people can ill afford to freeze each 
 other and ruin their children by their bickerings. 
 Each icicle that falls between them, like the 
 dragons' teeth sown by Cadmus, will spring up 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 97 
 
 a hateful, malignant spoiler. It is so much easier 
 to indulge a captious, petulant spirit than to hold 
 it in check. People neglect those little foxes, 
 surliness, snappishness, fault-finding, till they 
 have spoiled all the vines. Such parents may 
 help their children to good social position. They 
 may will them a few paltry dollars, but they rob 
 them of what is worth more than millions, the 
 kindliness, the sweet memories, the culturing in- 
 fluence of true home love. 
 
 Let us find some of the reasons why so many 
 married people fail of happiness. In the outset 
 we may note a fault ir> the preliminaries. Mar- 
 ried life is held constantly before young people, 
 not in its own plain, beautiful, common sense 
 simplicity, but tricked out with all manner of 
 moonshiny sentimentalisms, and unreal fancies. 
 The subject of getting married makes the staple 
 of their jests, the main part of their merriment. 
 Their amusements are planned with this thought 
 uppermost. Their confidences are largely made 
 up of the telling of love affairs. Their books 
 outside of the school-room teach little else. 
 What was that your boy hid under his pillow? 
 A love story. And little need is there of hiding 
 that sort of literature these days when even Sun- 
 day-school libraries are full of it. What was your 
 daughter crying over? The tribulations of a pair 
 
 7 
 
98 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 of unfortunate lovers, the course of whose affaires 
 du cceur seemed running at the usual unsmooth 
 rate. Some authors catalogued brilliant have 
 written but little except how people may get 
 married in spite of difficulties and obstacles. 
 
 Sculpture, painting, poetry, music, all have 
 been pressed into the business of drawing young 
 people toward the Eden of wedded life. By this 
 glamour during a decade of the most susceptible 
 young years, marriage is made to appear the ne 
 plus ultra of existence. For each there is wait- 
 ing somewhere an angel that has chanced to be 
 clothed in human form, and the chief end of life 
 is to find that seraphic being and bring about a 
 right understanding. But when the congratula- 
 tions are over, the cake eaten, the flowers faded, 
 the every-day dress resumed, the newly-joined 
 pair find themselves thrust back suddenly into a 
 sober, matter of fact world where people have to 
 eat and drink, pay rent and doctor's bills. The 
 angel turns out to be a only good-looking young 
 fellow, who will smoke horrid cigars with his feet 
 on the backs of the parlor chairs, and talk slang 
 and pick his teeth at the table ; or a pleasant little 
 woman in a somewhat unbecoming morning 
 dress, who has shocking headaches at inoppor- 
 tune times, and who cries to see her mamma 
 when things are not exactly to her mind. "To 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 99 
 
 work" is the verb that must be conjugated now 
 in all its moods and tenses, though the mistaken 
 pair expected to loiter sunnily through "to en- 
 joy." If they had been held to better sense they 
 would have found that the two are synonyms. 
 
 The fiction-steeped ambrosia and nectar begin 
 to sour. The cream of life seems to be only bit- 
 ter whey, and there they are, fast for a life-time, 
 their happiness wrecked by a charming blunder ! 
 
 That conviction, do you see, is as wrong as 
 were their azure and gold expectations. They 
 may swing back to a sensible view of the case, 
 though some never do. 
 
 Young people ought to go through with their 
 courtship with their eyes open. The blind Cupid 
 is a pretty myth for the poets, but not one in 
 whose hands we may risk our happiness for life. 
 When a young man fancies that he is marrying 
 perfection, we can but anticipate for him a disa- 
 greeable awaking. Knowing the tendency of 
 human nature to extremes, we quite expect him 
 to take a tiit in the opposite direction, and un- 
 derrate the lady in the ratio of his present ex- 
 travagance. That is what we always do when 
 disappointed in any friend. We mark him as 
 much too low as we had him before too high. 
 
 A little common sense is an immense help in 
 such cases. Let the young man understand that 
 
ioo DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 his lady-love, though quite as angelic as it is 
 proper for his wife to be, is simply human after 
 all, made of about the same material as the 
 mother who bothers him with her advice and wor- 
 ries because he does not heed it, or the sister 
 whom he drives into the pouts now and then with 
 his teasing. The same human stuff, only more 
 thoroughly in his power — more easily hurt His 
 mother knows that he is growing away from her 
 and presently he will go into a home of his own. 
 His sister comforts herself with the hope that 
 she will have somebody some day to love her 
 boundlessly — some one who will not torment her 
 so. But this woman knows that there is no 
 proper way out of the reach of his burriness ex- 
 cept to die. 
 
 Some set out with right notions, but they are 
 quite too prodigal of each other s love and pa- 
 tience. They seem to take it for granted that 
 the supply is exhaustless. To be sure, it took a 
 world of effort to bring the affair to its present 
 delicious state, but, thank Providence, it is hap- 
 pily adjusted at last. After the knot is tied they 
 may be as careless as they choose to be about 
 those little attentions and politenesses of which 
 they were so profuse a few months before. This 
 is a radical mistake. It takes more care to hold 
 than to w r in a love. If it be worth any thing, 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 101 
 
 and you are certainly not so idiotic as to think 
 it of no moment that the friend nearest you 
 should care for you always tenderly, you ought 
 to plan deliberately to keep alive the sentiment 
 you have been so fortunate as to inspire. 
 
 The graduate is a failure who stops studying 
 when he takes his diploma. The victorious gen- 
 eral who does not keep connection with his base 
 of supplies will soon find himself in no enviable 
 position. The young Christian who congratulates 
 himself that he has nothing to do but to sing and 
 praise will soon find that he has little left over 
 which to rejoice. So the man who thinks his 
 courtship ends with the bridal "yes," or the 
 woman who backslides into the slipshod and 
 easy-going as soon as her husband is caught, is 
 sure to wreck domestic happiness. 
 
 Married people must not expect to think ex- 
 actly alike about every thing. Of course, each 
 must be firm in matters of conscience, but in 
 the non-essentials let each defer to the other's 
 preference, as far as possible. There is no use 
 in arguing. Let there be candor and the utmost 
 respect for each other's opinions in the consider- 
 ation of questions about which there is a differ- 
 ence. If an agreement seems impossible, let 
 that controverted point be fenced about — unap- 
 proachable territory — like the Elis of the Greeks. 
 
102 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 The one who has most patience and self-control 
 will probably win in the long run. 
 
 There are those who loved each other gen- 
 uinely at the outset who have suffered the cares 
 of life to crowd them into coldness and indiffer- 
 ence. If the eye of such a one rests upon this 
 page, let me whisper that there is hope. It is 
 never too late to mend. Your love may have 
 been cut down by the frost so that it has hardly 
 put forth a leaf for a dozen years; but the roots 
 are alive, and with care the plant will spring up 
 again. Let there be an explanation, an under- 
 standing, if practicable. Let each decide to be- 
 gin anew to live as people ought, with the help 
 of the good God. It will be no small undertak- 
 ing — much harder than to have kept right from 
 the first. Your habits are against you, and you 
 are less mobile in character, but it can be done, 
 and it will pay. 
 
 Perhaps the mutual regard has been so long 
 buried, the ground above it tramped so hard 
 by neglect and coldness and little asperities, that 
 its very life is a matter of doubt. But remem- 
 ber you -are bound together for all time. Not 
 only your own but your children's happiness is 
 at stake. Give the love the benefit of the 
 doubt. Act toward each other as if all were 
 right between you. Keep back every impatient 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 103 
 
 look and word as carefully as if you were trying 
 to secure some great favor of a stranger. Try 
 the effect of the little attentions that drew you 
 together at first — the confidences, the silent de- 
 ferring to each other's taste. Begin anew your 
 courtship. Before marriage you always had for 
 each other a kind look, a smile, a word of wel- 
 come. Try it now. If one comes in whom it 
 is to your interest to please, it does not matter 
 how tired or worried you are, you can smooth 
 your face and put on a smile. There is no hu- 
 man being whose deportment toward you can 
 affect your life like the demeanor of the one to 
 whom you are bound for w r eal or woe. Better 
 a thousand times please that one by your kindly 
 courtesy than all the world besides. Let the 
 wife meet her husband at the door with a kiss 
 when he comes home from his day's work. If 
 she goes into his office or store or study, let 
 him treat her with as much politeness as he 
 would use toward a stranger, and not intimate 
 that she is a great bother, only " around after 
 money." 
 
 Let each give the other special attention at 
 the table, as though there were none there, not 
 even guests, who are more to be honored. It 
 will not be long till the ice will give way, and 
 the warm tide of early love will be again pulsat- 
 
104 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 ing through hearts that had nearly lost hope. 
 This must be done or the united life that might 
 be a bond of surest strength, will prove to be 
 like the robe steeped in the blood of Nessus — a 
 ceaseless, deadly galling. 
 
 You were deceived in your choice? The 
 probability is you are far better mated than you 
 think; and if you were free, you would do 
 about the same thing again. At any rate, your 
 one chance is to make the best of the case as 
 it is now. That coldness may be only a crust 
 of reticence over a warm, quick heart. The 
 peevishness may be merely the querulousness 
 of hunger for which no one is so much to blame 
 as yourself. 
 
 Well for society and the world if the well- 
 meaning, frigid people could be induced to begin 
 anew a cordial treatment of each other, and thus 
 happiness be brought back to many an empty- 
 hearted, lonely home. 
 
 Married people are altogether too chary of 
 their commendation of each other's good acts. 
 They can criticise and censure and wax eloquent 
 over faults, delivering themselves of proverbs, 
 with homilies attached, ad infinitum; but a right 
 good, hearty word of praise — it would choke 
 them, one might think. 
 
 And an immense, psychological blunder is 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE. 105 
 
 that, to be sure. We are oftener helped to hu- 
 mility by honest, straightforward approval of 
 our efforts than by scolding and fault-finding. 
 Some who carry the bravest face are at the de- 
 spair point because they amount to so little, 
 staggering under a burden of fancied incompe- 
 tency, needing far more than any one ever 
 dreams a little encouragement. Help them over 
 that hard place, and they, will have time and 
 strength to think of being actually humble. 
 
 Some men are full of praise of their domestic 
 establishments behind the back of their wives — 
 the very ones who need the good word — while, 
 in the presence of the disheartened hausmiitters, 
 you could hardly draw a syllable of appreciation 
 from them with forceps. 
 
 In old times good people used to put on 
 their Sunday clothes and kid gloves before they 
 dared speak of their . religious experience; and 
 their love for their friends fared but little better. 
 If one spoke of the love of God shed abroad in 
 his heart by the Holy Spirit, it was regarded a 
 sure sign that he was a hypocrite. No clearer 
 mark of a reprobate than to believe your sins 
 pardoned, and have a disposition to declare the 
 joyful fact In those old iron-clad days if a 
 married pair indulged ''before folks" in any sort 
 of manifestations of regard, they were set down 
 
106 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 at once as people who quarrel when the eye of 
 the dear public is off their behavior. So they 
 trudged on, those old saints, at infinite pains to 
 keep the fire shut in most carefully, while those 
 who were dearer than life were freezing to death 
 at their side. 
 
 Unfortunately, this frigid mode of life has 
 not all passed away with knee-buckles and ruffled 
 shirts. There are plenty of married people yet 
 who walk icily side by side, till one bends over 
 the other's dying bed. Then, when there is 
 little use, the pent stream bursts forth. The 
 wealth that was intended for all those cold, hun- 
 gry years, is poured forth lavishly, and it is all 
 too late! 
 
 Let us be wise in time. God never meant 
 this life to be a desert utterly barren of all that 
 is good and beautiful and refreshing and glad. 
 
 Finally, in this matter, "Whatsoever things 
 are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatso- 
 ever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
 whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
 are of good report; if there be any virtue, and 
 if there be any praise, think on these things." 
 
 A home where Christ abides is a little rem- 
 nant of Eden. The benediction of God falls ver- 
 tically upon its blessed inmates. It can but be 
 a power in the evangelization of the race, an 
 
MARRIED PEOPLE, 107 
 
 armory where God's soldiers are equipped. Let 
 Christian homes be constructed by that wisdom 
 that is "from above, that is first pure, then 
 peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, 
 full of mercy and good fruits, without parti- 
 ality, and without hypocrisy." Then " the fruit 
 of righteousness" will be "sown in peace for 
 them that make peace." 
 
 Let the Scriptural law of unselfish love and 
 reverence, based as it is upon the inherent dig- 
 nit) 7 of humanity, and the golden rule of giving 
 precisely what each would wish to receive from 
 the other — let this divine dictum be observed. 
 
 Then shall the home be, what God meant in 
 its plan, the center and stronghold of the civili- 
 zation, the very exponent and chief guard of 
 Christianity. Children born in such gardens of 
 good will escape the spiritual warping and maim- 
 ing that now so often sends them forth into the 
 work of the world hopelessly tyrannical or cring- 
 ing, self-confident or discouraged, unable to touch 
 the problems of the future that press alike upon 
 the sympathies and energies of men and women. 
 
 By the arithmetic of heaven, while one may 
 chase a thousand, two can put ten thousand to 
 flight, — the uniting of strength multiplying the 
 efficiency by five. So of a good man and woman 
 joining hands for the long walk through life, 
 
108 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 each free in Christ's freedom, each living by the 
 divine will, and yet the twain united by the 
 miracle of Him who honored with his presence 
 the wedding in Cana of Galilee, and who must 
 always himself unite the truly married, — the 
 union after this manner can but increase infin- 
 itely the ability for noble work. 
 
 
 "Two heads in council; two beside the hearth; 
 Two in the tangled business of the world ; 
 Two in the liberal offices of life ; 
 Two plummets dropped for one to sound, the abyss 
 Of science and the secrets of the mind. 
 In the long years liker must they grow, 
 The man be more of woman, she of man. 
 He gain in moral height, nor lose 
 The wrestling thews that throw the world. 
 She, mental breadth, nor fail in childward care 
 Till at the last she set herself to him 
 Like perfect music unto noblest words; 
 Then comes the statelier Eden back to man, 
 Then reign the world's great bridals chaste and calm, 
 Then springs the crowning race of human kind." 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. 1 09 
 
 THE Scriptures always sketch from life. 
 They do not group figures for ' artistic 
 effect, throwing awkward facts into the back- 
 ground. If their pages had been dictated by 
 human wisdom, the immoralities of the patri- 
 archs, David's sin, Solomon's defection and Pe- 
 ter's lie would have been left out, and so would 
 the disputes of the disciples about which should 
 be the greatest. 
 
 The Bible, like one who takes an instantane- 
 ous photographic view, brings before us people 
 as they were, and not as they ought to have 
 been. In this naturalness, this humanness, this 
 truthfulness, may be found much of the force of 
 its teachings. 
 
 The very defects of its characters are helpful, 
 because they are so much like those that cripple 
 us and deprive us of power for good. They are 
 like signals of warning set up in dangerous ways, 
 like light-houses built upon terrible rocks. They 
 cry to us, " Beware, a great soul perished here ! 
 
HO DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Stand off, a nation struck that reef and went 
 down !" 
 
 Probably none of the warnings of Scripture 
 are more needed by many souls than that given 
 in the apostolic quarrel about who should be the 
 greatest. It was certainly a very weak and child- 
 ish affair. A struggle for pre-eminence among 
 the disciples of a Master who was so poor he 
 had not where to lay his head, dependent for his 
 food upon the charity of those who risked all in 
 his service, and obliged to work a miracle to get 
 money to pay his taxes. It w r as most inoppor- 
 tune. The gloom of Gethsemane and Calvary 
 had begun to settle upon his soul. He was in 
 the first act of the awful redemptive tragedy. It 
 was unutterably discouraging. He was lifting to 
 his lips the cup of doom prepared by sin for 
 every human soul. He was about to taste death 
 for every man. The life he was to purchase 
 could come only by the casting out of the old, 
 selfish nature. Yet those whom he had been 
 teaching for three years, and who had been per- 
 mitted to enter with him the very inner sanctu- 
 ary of the divine presence, were giving way be- 
 fore the very first onslaught of the enemy, to 
 that pride and selfishness that he was sacrificing 
 his life to eradicate. 
 
 Foolish and inopportune and discouraging as 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. in 
 
 was that miserable dispute, it was no worse than 
 what the Master has heard in the hearts and 
 homes of Christians many and many a time now- 
 adays, and always. That same wretched ques- 
 tion echoes and re-echoes through our lives, day 
 by day, like the ceaseless wash of waves. 
 
 The Savior was at infinite pains to bring them 
 and us to a better understanding of life and its 
 uses. He said again and again, " If any man 
 desires to be first among you, the same shall be 
 last of all and servant of all." Our stumbling so 
 constantly at this point is a sure index that there 
 is a right impulse of the soul, and a strong one, 
 that has broken loose from restraint and lost its 
 way, and from that comes the trouble. We de- 
 sire to save the life from utter oblivion and for- 
 ge tfulness. 
 
 ' 'To die, 
 To sink as sinks the traveler who falls 
 In the streets of busy London, 
 When the crowds close in and all ? s forgotten." 
 
 This seems such a pitiful fate, so like never 
 having existed, so like being blotted completely 
 from the roll of being, w r e look about in desper- 
 ate earnest to find something w 7 ithin the compass 
 of our power that shall give us immortality. 
 We want to clamber a little way above the com- 
 mon herd whose very names will be forgotten be- 
 fore their bodies fairly turn to dust. A fortune, 
 
112 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 political preferment, professional reputation, liter- 
 ary fame, something must help us to a niche in 
 the rocks where we may write our little story 
 with a hope that the waves may not wear it away 
 for at least half a century. 
 
 Possibly we lack in genuine self-respect We 
 want to bolster our importance by some outward 
 manifestations that indicate our consequence. 
 We must distinguish ourselves in some way to 
 set us at peace with ourselves. 
 
 Some have an inborn love of power, a death- 
 less determination to stand first and foremost at 
 all cost to others. The Alexanders, the Tamer- 
 lanes, the Attilas, the Caesars, the Napoleons 
 shine forth in the firmament of history, their 
 lamps lighted at the altar fire, kept burning upon 
 the shrine of godless ambition. They flame with 
 a lurid gleam, like torches made ragged by the 
 gloom, and flaring over pools of battle gore. 
 
 Like the attempts of the Egyptians to stave 
 off the doom of forgetfulness by postponing the 
 decay of the lifeless body, they succeed only in 
 perpetuating the loathsomeness of death — their 
 fame being little more than a disgusting mummy. 
 
 Jesus said, ' ' Whosoever will save his life 
 shall lose it ; but w r hosoever will lose his life for 
 my sake the same shall save it." 
 
 They who have really saved the life, living 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. 113 
 
 through the ages in the continued vitality of their 
 thought and action, are those who have wrought 
 by the Master's rule, losing all in a single-eyed 
 devotion to right principle. 
 
 Among the very first names upon this Roll 
 of Honor, we find that of Abel, the proto-mar- 
 tyr to the doctrine of justification by faith. His 
 voice, muffled by distance, comes to us from the 
 dim, early dawn, emphasizing the vital truth for 
 which he died. " He being dead, yet speaketh," 
 and his utterance is echoed by the most ad- 
 vanced religious thought of this, the latest cen- 
 tury. "The just shall live by faith." 
 
 Moses also saved his life by its loss. He 
 found the greater part of the inhabitants of the 
 globe segregated, nomadic. There were neither 
 domestic nor civil institutions worth the name, 
 because there were none based upon the eternal 
 principles of right. Man as man had not enough 
 inherent dignity to enable him to claim any consid- 
 eration at the hand of another, except what mus- 
 cular or monetary power could exact as his due. 
 
 Moses found the dominant race, the more 
 highly civilized and intellectual, enslaving the 
 the simpler and weaker, and keeping it under 
 by murdering its children and forcing it to toil 
 ceaselessly to fill the land with architectural 
 marvels. 
 
1 1 4 DIAMOND D UST. 
 
 Impetuous in his fiery zeal, and full of enthu- 
 siasm for a grand principle, he threw himself into 
 the work of reform. He slew an Egyptian who 
 happened to be an exponent of the general op- 
 pression, and hid him in the sand. He found, 
 to his cost, that he was working at the wrong 
 end of the problem. The subject race must be 
 made to comprehend its own dignity. The prin- 
 ciple violated in human servitude is the inherent 
 greatness of humanity, and they who are under 
 can be trusted to rise to equality or superiority 
 only as they apprehend this principle. Without 
 that apprehension a change -of position would be 
 only a change of tyrannies. 
 
 To lift up a man or a race, one need not 
 trouble himself to make the oppressor understand 
 the worth of the slave. Let him teach the slave 
 his own dignity, and trust him to make his mas- 
 ter comprehend that lesson. The liberator must 
 also see so plainly the tremendous import of hu- 
 man life, that he will go down among the op- 
 pressed and share the obloquy of their wrongs, 
 sustained by his belief in the intrinsic human 
 royalty. 
 
 To emancipate the degraded Israelites, Moses 
 had to go to work, not as the Egyptian prince 
 philosopher, the heir of the proud throne of 
 the Pharaohs; he must count the wealth of 
 
SA VING THE LIFE, 1 1 5 
 
 achievement in lifting up the enslaved greater 
 riches than the treasures of Egypt, with its affluent 
 old civilization. It took forty silent, meditative 
 years alone with Jehovah in Midian for him to 
 learn that lesson. At last he promulgated his 
 code, giving the wisest adjustment of the rela- 
 tions of men to men possible for many centuries. 
 He epitomized common law, which, after the 
 lapse of nearly four thousand years, wraps the 
 civilized world in the mantle of its guardianship. 
 
 And what a grand saving of the life was 
 his ! To be able to lay a net-work of obliga- 
 tion upon all the races that recognize the in- 
 spired supremacy of conscience — giving to untold 
 millions the happiness of a safe, protected life. 
 What an expansion and intensifying of one's 
 own vitality! What if he did wrap himself in a 
 coarse Arab mantle and lie down to die upon 
 Nebo, crownless, scepterless, throneless, with no 
 shelter but the open sky, a houseless wanderer? 
 For what better tent could we ask in which such 
 a grand being should breathe out his life, than 
 the star-gemmed heavens, with the sun in his 
 strength and the moon in her brightness to guard 
 his burial place — angels about him, and Jehovah 
 to minister the last mortal rites? 
 
 Aristotle was another of the glorious self- 
 givers. It was his work to carry the world from 
 
1 1 6 DIA MOND D UST. 
 
 the brazen into the silver age. Under his power, 
 brawn yielded to brain. Muscle had been king 
 and thought its slave.^ He reversed the order, 
 and made the animal serve the intellectual. He 
 taught the subjugation of the passions by the 
 reason, and for twenty centuries his dictum has 
 been obeyed in all the lands conquered by his 
 genius. 
 
 He died in the outer, that he might save the 
 true, strong, inner life. Of the Macedonian no- 
 bility, the tutor of Alexander the Great, endowed 
 by his royal pupil with millions of money, cov- 
 ered with courtly honors, yet he held steady to 
 the work in hand. No bribes could buy him; 
 no flatteries seduce him; no successes inflate 
 him ; no glories swerve him from his course. 
 When the tide turned, and the people for whose 
 emancipation he had given his best years rejected 
 his counsel and cast out his name as evil, he 
 stood unmoved like a rock among the breakers, 
 choosing rather to suffer affliction than to aban- 
 don the principles of right after which he had 
 groped in his heathen twilight. He died an 
 exile, yet the mighty reform he wrought in the 
 domain of intellect has made reasoning reliable, 
 and all emancipation possible. 
 
 The Greeks who lived and taught before Aris- 
 totle's day had a supreme contempt for human-. 
 
SA VI NG THE LIFE. 1 1 7 
 
 ity, seeing in it only the development of fine 
 animal life, and regarding it of value only so far 
 as it was physically faultless. Aristotle put his 
 shoulder under the burden of the world's wrong 
 judgment and consequent oppressions, and 
 through all the long centuries the animal has 
 never regained the ascendency. He died to all 
 that was preferred by the people around him, 
 yet he will live forever in the gratitude of the 
 thoughtful. 
 
 Mohammed, also, gained all by losing all. 
 He found the people groaning, almost uncon- 
 sciously, under the beastly burdens laid upon 
 them by their many gods. He tried to teach 
 them a pure, monotheistic worship. The}' called 
 him an impostor, and drove him from his native 
 city. He persevered against all obstacles, till 
 they came at last to believe that they had found 
 in him their long -looked -for deliverer. Then 
 came his coronation-day; and for four centuries 
 the scholarship of the world was found among 
 his followers. His life was a forfeit to his pur- 
 pose to establish monotheism. He sacrificed to 
 that work ease, pleasure, all earthly good. Only 
 thus could he succeed. 
 
 William, Prince of Orange, enjoyed his 
 broad estates and elegant life, probably, with a 
 nebulous notion of human equality floating 
 
Il8 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 through his brain. In the midst of luxury, how 
 could he know the hard life of the poor? In 
 high favor with royalty, how could he under- 
 stand the grinding taxation necessary to support 
 regal pomp and glory? God meant him to be 
 the champion of civil and religious liberty, and 
 it took hard discipline to arouse him fully to the 
 need of the hour. 
 
 The Romish Church stole his son, and that 
 awakened him to a sense of its tyrannies. The 
 Duke of Alva, with his dragonnades, trying to 
 establish the Inquisition in Holland, made per- 
 sonal liberty a myth. When the silent states- 
 man began actively to remonstrate, his estates 
 were wrested from him; and then, with an 
 empty purse, insufficient service, indifferent cloth- 
 ing, no place of safety, a price on his head, the 
 proud Prince of Orange began to know the 
 meaning of poverty. Then he became truly the 
 friend of the poor. 
 
 When the great, hungry need of the op- 
 pressed people laid its hand upon his shoulder, 
 he was young, rich, courted, full of the proudest, 
 highest life. It led him, step by step, down the 
 winding stair to its den of want. He became 
 one with the common people. He gave all for 
 their emancipation. When, under the assassin's 
 steel, he was dying for their liberties, his last 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. 119 
 
 words attested the completeness of his identity 
 with the cause of the poor, "O my God, have 
 mercy upon my poor people !" A wail went to 
 heaven from every home in Holland. He who 
 had lost his life for the sake of a noble cause 
 had gained the first place on his country's roll 
 of honor and in the regard of all good men 
 and true. 
 
 A man in our own country and time lived 
 and died like William the Silent, losing his life 
 for the oppressed, and saving it to the best and 
 most enduring immortality. He gave liberty to 
 as many millions as did the Prince of Orange, 
 and humbled as proud an oligarchy. 
 
 Lincoln came from among the "poor white 
 trash" of the South, yet as princely a soul was 
 housed in his rough physique as lived in the 
 bosom of the man of elegant culture and noble 
 blood. One has said of him, "His large palm 
 never slipped from the poor man's hand. A 
 child of the people, he was as accessible in the 
 White House as he had been in the cabin. The 
 griefs of the poor African were as sacred to him 
 as were the claims of the opulent white man/' 
 Measuring all by their humanity, he found them 
 essentially equal. Seeing in God the Father of 
 all, he saw in every man a brother. 
 
 In the senatorial contest between Lincoln 
 
T20 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 and Douglas the latter was victorious. Lincoln 
 said: "His life is all success, mine all failure. I 
 would give every thing for his opportunity of 
 working for the uplifting of the oppressed." 
 After the hard discipline of the years, his hour 
 came. He was found equal to the complete self- 
 giving that marked him the Christly man of the 
 ages, and in the achievement he gave all, hold- 
 ing steady to his purpose even when his friends 
 turned from him in distrust. At last he gave his 
 life for the cause he served. 
 
 He was like the century plant that we saw a 
 few years ago. After seventy patient years it 
 burst into glorious bloom, and then it died. After 
 the supreme act of his life Lincoln went to God, 
 and the mourning throughout all lands where 
 liberty was loved was as if one were dead in 
 every household. Said a Russian lady upon the 
 shore of the Black Sea to a tourist, ' ' So you are 
 from America — Lincoln's land. When word 
 came that they had killed him, I could do noth- 
 ing for hours but walk the floor and say, 'Lin- 
 coln is dead! Lincoln is dead!' " 
 
 The Great Commoner, he interpreted to the 
 people their own sense of dignity. Though he 
 lost his life, he saved it by the suffrage of uni- 
 versal thoughtful humanity. 
 
 The life of Jesus the Christ was the most 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. 121 
 
 emphatic illustration of saving the life through its 
 loss. 
 
 He who is ' ' the blessed and only Potentate, 
 who only hath immortality," "made himself 
 of no reputation, took upon him the form of a 
 servant, and was made in the likeness of men ; 
 and being found in form as a man, he hum- 
 bled himself and became obedient to death, even 
 the death of the cross." 
 
 He went down into the very depths of human 
 lostness that he might put his great heart under 
 the burden of the curse. Like a strong swimmer 
 who had dived among the monsters in the cav- 
 erns under the sea, he came up pale, exhausted, 
 quivering in every nerve, but bearing in his arms 
 a rescued race. 
 
 Of all who ever lived none so completely and 
 abundantly saved his power for good, his vitality, 
 his life as did Jesus. To-day the thought of the 
 crucified Galilean is the mainspring of the civi- 
 lizations. All bonds that bind together the na- 
 tions and hold them back from savagery are of 
 his weaving. All cords that draw them toward 
 the throne of the Eternal are of his twining. He 
 is not only the Way and the Truth, he is also 
 the Life. 
 
 Since it appears plain that to make the life 
 amount to the most in God's work, it is neces- 
 
122 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 sary to lose it, we may ask what it is to lose the 
 life for Christ's sake. 
 
 Is it not to submit to his control all that goes 
 to the make-up of the being? 
 
 Perhaps in no point of self-surrender does the 
 will take a more stubborn stand than in submit- 
 ting to him the conduct of the life. 
 
 Self-direction is the regal power. It is the 
 crowning glory of human existence. Most 
 thoughtful people will die rather than surrender 
 to others this citadel. Thousands have preferred, 
 death to servitude, since nothing seems so de- 
 grading as unconditional submission to a human 
 will. 
 
 It is not easy to surrender even to God the 
 control of one's individuality. 
 
 It adds to the difficulty to know that for the 
 sake of discipline and development He will prob- 
 ably lead us to just the work we most dislike, and 
 hold us back from the things that we prefer. 
 
 A wise mother crowds out upon the play- 
 ground the nervous, sensitive child that is forever 
 poring over his books, while she holds to study 
 the robust, roystering one who is always ready 
 for any thing that will take him away from his 
 lessons. So, in his efforts to bring us to com- 
 pleteness of character, God will probably have to 
 lead us directly against our inclination. 
 
SAVING THE LIFE^ 1 23 
 
 If one is specially fond of public work he 
 may be ordered to the rear, that in the retire- 
 ment of private life his piety may be deepened, 
 and his reflective faculties duly developed; while 
 another who has thought and studied a great 
 deal, shrinking always from public notice, may 
 be sent to the front that he may be obliged to 
 have new courage and daring, and because others 
 need the result of his accumulated thought. 
 
 When called upon to place ourselves in God's 
 hand we may have a premonition of this disci- 
 pline that will make us draw back from the pain. 
 
 When the mother of James and John asked that 
 her sons might sit, one on the right and the other 
 on the left hand of the Master in his kingdom, 
 he asked if they were able to drink of the cup 
 that he was to drink of, and to be .baptized with 
 the baptism that he was baptized with. They an- 
 swered "We are able." Probably they under- 
 stood better the terms of promotion in the king- 
 dom of the Redeemer, when the headsman's 
 sword gleamed above the head of one, and the 
 other was hunted from city to city by his perse- 
 cuting kinsmen. 
 
 It may be helpful for us to glance at some of 
 the specific points that come under this generic 
 principle of self-surrender. Our wish to acquire 
 property must be given to God. This is one of 
 
124 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 the first impulses shown by a little child. He 
 pulls every thing toward himself,and cries if what 
 he has seized is taken out of his hand. He must 
 have every thing that catches his attention and 
 pleases his fancy, whether it be his father's watch 
 or the moon. 
 
 Nothing pleases the boy better than to have 
 something for his very own, "to keep forever 
 and ever." 
 
 When he gets older he sets himself to get the 
 best of every thing. He may divide with the 
 less fortunate, but it is because the name and 
 sense of being generous may furnish more pleas- 
 ure than the use of the trifle he gives — acquir- 
 ing another gain, a finer and greater one. 
 
 After passing his thirtieth mile-stone he cares 
 less for that pleasure and more for substantial 
 acquisition's. So he begins to store away the 
 dollars or their equivalent. He must have a 
 place and stock of his own. 
 
 With most people of forty, fifty, and sixty, 
 the determination to get property becomes the 
 dominant purpose. They may flatter themselves 
 that they do not love money, yet they hardly 
 dare deny that they do care immensely for the 
 consideration and the attention that the world gives 
 those only who are accounted rich. It seems a 
 fine thing to have elegant madames trail their 
 
SAVING"' THE LIFE, 125 
 
 costly silks in at one's door, while a coachman 
 in livery drives the superb carriage up and down 
 the street in front of the house, and to hear the 
 rustle in an audience when one enters a church, 
 or hall, and the sweet sibilants, "our first citi- 
 zens," "our best families." Who would not en- 
 joy the thousand and one obsequious attentions 
 that are paid to the wealthy ? Who would not 
 shun the neglect, and coldness, and contempt 
 with which the poor are usually treated. "The 
 rich have many friends, but the poor is hated 
 even of his own neighbor." 
 
 How often we hear the expression, "poor, but 
 worthy," as if the terms were usually antithetic, 
 and so must be separated by a disjunctive — the 
 case named being an exception to the rule. That 
 shows the general drift of the current of opinion, 
 and few of us are of better mind, even though 
 we be followers of the crucified Nazarene. 
 
 The spirit of the world is wrong in this esti- 
 mate of people, and God means to set it right. 
 If he gets us in hand he will spare no pains to 
 correct our false notions. He will make us un- 
 derstand human equality. He will give us to 
 see that a few thousands of money, more or less, 
 make no sort of difference .with one's intrinsic 
 worth, and in order to that it may be necessary 
 to give us a view from the lower side of the scale 
 
126 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 of his standard of values. Some one has said, 
 "God shows how little he thinks of wealth by 
 the class of people to whom he permits its pos- 
 session." His nobility, they of whom the world 
 was not worthy, "were stoned, were sawn asun- 
 der, were tempted, were slain with the sword ; 
 they wandered about in sheepskins, and goat- 
 skins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented/' 
 
 The twelve, to whom the highest possible 
 honor w r as promised, were driven from place to 
 place with cruel mockings and scourgings, and 
 all but one sealed their testimony with their 
 blood. 
 
 Paul the noblest of them all, a prince of the 
 realm, was familiar with hunger, and nakedness, 
 and perils. He suffered the loss of all things for 
 the excellency of the knowledge of Christ. 
 While he sat in the dark at Damascus he was 
 shown how great things he must suffer for the 
 sake of the Gospel. And the Spirit showed 
 him that every-where bonds and imprisonments 
 awaited his coming. When we surrender to 
 God this natural desire for the pleasant things 
 of this life we are not at all sure but he may 
 lead us to an apprehension of his estimate of 
 human circumstances by some such processes. 
 
 If one is permitted to keep his property after 
 accepting the divine will in the matter, he holds 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. 127 
 
 it no longer as his own, but always subject to 
 the order of God. His sense of ownership is 
 changed to a simple stewardship ; so that, though 
 he may not have to deed it away to a Church or 
 charity, it is as certainly given up as if it had 
 passed out of his hands. All this implies an 
 immense overturn of natural tendencies, and the 
 uprooting of habits that are the growth of years. 
 No wonder it is called a crucifixion, and that it 
 seems like an actual losing of the life. 
 
 Closely allied to our desire for property is 
 our wish to be well spoken of — highly esteemed. 
 This also must be surrendered. And in it, as 
 in the other points of character that have been 
 shaped by general opinion, we may expect dis- 
 cipline. They said of our Master, <l He hath a 
 devil;" and he says to us, ''The disciple is not 
 above his Lord." 
 
 It is no easy matter to consent to be led di- 
 rectly against the opinions of those to whose 
 judgment we have been accustomed to defer. 
 In that experience we begin to know something 
 of the weight of the "cross of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ by whom the world is crucified unto us 
 and we unto the world." 
 
 The crucifixion of self-surrender would not be 
 so hard if we could suffer one great pang, and 
 have done with it; or if, in the submission, we 
 
128 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 might so lose our free agency as to be perfectly 
 safe from ever drawing back unto perdition; or, 
 if we could look our last upon the temptations 
 of the world, and shut ourselves up in some 
 sweet, quiet cloister, where there would be only 
 prayers and meditations and holy offices. But 
 it is the plan of God that we shall present our 
 bodies a living sacrifice, and any drawing back 
 will abate correspondingly our union with God, 
 and our deadness to the world. 
 
 And just here we note one of the paradoxes 
 of the Gospel. We are never so fully and com- 
 pletely alive as when we are dead. We have 
 never so fully the symmetry of character, the 
 strength, the enjoyment, the assurance of living 
 by the law of our being, the certainty of suc- 
 cess, as when we have surrendered all to the 
 Master. 
 
 When we are dead, and our life is hid with 
 Christ in God, we are most keenly alive to every 
 worthy interest, we have the most glorious full- 
 ness of existence. 
 
 And what is the life that we save by the losing? 
 
 It is primarily the spiritual life, and it de- 
 pends upon union with God. The original life 
 of the soul was forfeited by sin. Grace finds us 
 dead in trespasses and sins, and renews in us 
 the life of God. We live this life more or less 
 
SAVING THE LIFE, 129 
 
 affluently in proportion to our submission to the 
 divine will, and our trust in the atonement. 
 
 When, in the maturity of our Christian knowl- 
 edge, we accept the will of Christ in all things, 
 he will lead us not only to completed spiritual 
 life; he will also give us the best physical and 
 mental culture possible. 
 
 He will give us to understand that when our 
 bodies belong to him, w T e must take care of them 
 for him, and see that they subserve to their 
 utmost the uses of the mind and spirit. We 
 must give them good food, not to pamper false 
 appetites, but to keep them in repair. They 
 must have enough sleep, and only as much 
 work as they can endure with safety. Well- 
 meaning people have sometimes cheated God 
 out of years of service by squandering their 
 strength in overwork, or by crowding themselves 
 through the drudgery of digesting the villain- 
 ous compounds known as good fare, or by some 
 other dissipation. 
 
 When we comprehend that our bodies are 
 the temples of the Holy Ghost we will keep 
 them clean as well as strong. We will not 
 drink nor chew nor smoke poisons that not only 
 hurt us, but make us offensive to others. 
 
 And it is doubted whether we w r ill cut holes 
 in our noses and ears for the hanging on of 
 
130 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 pieces of metal as the custom is in heathen 
 countries. 
 
 We will stop our fretting when we come to 
 know that the investment and use of our powers 
 depend, not upon our puny wisdom, but upon 
 unmistaking, divine judgment. We will cast our 
 care on Him who careth for us : and with the 
 care all taken off of the weak nerves, a little 
 physical strength can be made to go a great way. 
 
 When our mental pozvers are taken completely 
 out of the service of self and devoted simply 
 and only to that of our Heavenly Father, we will 
 comprehend not merely our privilege, but our 
 duty to bring them to the greatest strength. 
 
 Satan crowds thoughtful people to study, that 
 through their intellectual attainments they may 
 gain money, refinement, luxuries, reputation, 
 and friends. After grace has conquered their 
 ambition, and they care no more for the pride 
 of life, he holds them back by reminding them 
 how much good has been done by people of 
 low mental attainment. He would have them 
 believe that it is better to give one's self wholly 
 to devotion. 
 
 If God does not want consecrated thought 
 to be developed in strength, why has he given 
 us mental acumen above the simplest uses? 
 Certainly the very best of every thing belongs 
 
SAVING THE LIFE. 131 
 
 to him, and nothing can transcend in polish or 
 strength the needs of his work. 
 
 He wants pictures full of thought and feel- 
 ing, so delicately traced and beautifully limned 
 that they shall set us looking toward himself, 
 the Source and Author of beauty. He wants 
 poems as pure and strong as angels winging 
 their way into the homes of the people, and 
 singing God's truth into needy souls. He wants 
 books, vital with his own thought. For this 
 very purpose he has made artistic, poetic, and 
 literary talent. 
 
 To be sure, some who have poor grammar, 
 false rhetoric, and limping logic are used to win 
 thousands to Christ; but who knows how much 
 more might have been done by the same faith 
 and fervor in a richly endowed and well-disci- 
 plined soul. 
 
 Never were so many persons converted under 
 one sermon as under that of Peter, the Galilean 
 fisherman, fresh from the Pentecostal baptism. 
 Yet, afterward, that same Peter endangered the 
 very life of the infant Church by truckling to 
 Judaizing teachers. Paul had to withstand him 
 to the face, because he was to be blamed. 
 His undisciplined mind did not carry him 
 through the task of settling the tenets of the 
 new faith. It was Paul, trained in the best 
 
132 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 schools, who was used of God to give the 
 Church its theology. 
 
 In the Anglican revival of the last century it 
 was not the fiery eloquence of Whitefield, who 
 came untrained from the common people, that 
 organized the victory, but the quiet, steady, 
 Scholastic thought of Wesley and Clarke, with 
 their broad erudition and profound culture. 
 
 We need not fear intellectual pride while we 
 trust Christ to save us from sin. At all events, 
 his salvation is our hope of immunity from that, 
 as from every other wrong tendency. No 
 amount of personal humiliation, penance, or 
 mind-starving will have the effect to keep us 
 humble in regard to mental ability. He alone 
 is the deliverer from evil. 
 
 Above all, if we lose our life by surrendering 
 it to God, we may claim and expect the most 
 thorough discipline and complete development; 
 possibly by processes not such as we would 
 choose, but those that God sees best fitted to 
 produce the result. 
 
 We will have to learn to be abased before it 
 is safe for us to abound. It took eighteen 
 years to bring Columbus to nerve and daring 
 enough to enable him to discover America. 
 John Bunyan preached like a son of thunder, his 
 soul on fire with zeal for the salvation of the 
 
SAVING THE LIFE, 133 
 
 miserable masses. God permitted him to be 
 shut up in Bedford jail for twelve long years. 
 How his fiery spirit must have chafed! The 
 world perishing, and he utterly powerless to help 
 and save! But the result of that burying of 
 energy was the production of his wonderful 
 book, which has acquired an authority and cir- 
 culation next only to the Book of God. 
 
 Wood fire must be pent, buried out of sight 
 to make charcoal ; and charcoal has to be shut in 
 the very heart of the rock to crystallize into dia- 
 monds. So, when our life is given to God we 
 may look for discipline that shall seem to shut 
 us from the very opportunities we seek, but we 
 will find ultimately that it was administered in 
 the highest wisdom to bring us to a strength and 
 fullness of life that will enable us to do the 
 heavier, higher work. 
 
 "Pain's furnace blast within me quivers; 
 God's breath upon the flame doth blow, 
 And all my heart in anguish shivers, 
 And trembles at the fiery glow. 
 And yet I whisper, 'As God will,' 
 And in his hottest fire hold still. 
 
 He comes, and lays my heart, all heated 
 
 On his hard anvil, minded so 
 Into his own fair shape to beat it 
 
 With his great hammer, blow on blow, 
 And yet I whisper, 'As God will,' 
 And 'neath his heaviest blows hold still." 
 
134 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Our saved life will be hid with Christ in God. 
 We will look out upon the petty squabblings 
 and ambitions of the people as the mere bicker- 
 ings of foolish little children. 
 
 As if the King had taken us into his palace 
 and given us costly clothing from his own ward- 
 robe, and all the fine, high fellowship of the 
 regal life, we might look down upon the peas- 
 ants at their sports upon the green with kindly, 
 patient charity, remembering the days when we 
 were among them, and as full of eagerness as 
 any in the small emulations, the little strivings 
 for superiority; but now their pastimes have no 
 charm. We would only wish that we could win 
 them to seek the royal favor, and trust the 
 royal bounty till they, too, should become heirs 
 of the kingdom, joint heirs with the Great Prince. 
 
 And what companionship would be ours — 
 "with Christ!" what a secure hiding-place, — 
 "in God!" Our "place of defense the muni- 
 tions of rocks!" No care for the life that now 
 is. Our "bread shall be given" us, our "waters 
 shall be sure!" And for the eternal, the cease- 
 less life, our "eyes shall see the King in his 
 beauty. We shall behold the land that is very 
 far off!" 
 
COURTEOUSNESS. 135 
 
 POLISHED manners are not usually a pass- 
 port to the confidence of good people, be- 
 cause flatterers and diplomatists depend mainly 
 upon the soft address for their power to deceive. 
 
 The aesthetic has been the bond slave of evil 
 passions, and the good have come to dread its 
 potency. Fine culture has become effeminacy, 
 weakness, voluptuousness. Forever in the his- 
 torical rotations the cultured have become the 
 degenerate and a prey to the rough and uncouth 
 who are strong and virtuous. 
 
 Macedonian abstinence conquered Persian 
 magnificence. Roman discipline mastered the 
 elegant Greeks. The rugged Norsemen tram- 
 pled down that polished Roman civilization. 
 
 Reading this the thoughtful have chosen the 
 safety of rough virtue, instead of the weak pol- 
 ish of culture. The studied roughness of the 
 Roundheads followed the profligate elegance of 
 the cavaliers. Puritan angularities are a swing- 
 ing to the opposite extreme in the purpose to 
 
136 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 escape the sensuous formalism of a corrupt, de- 
 caying Church. 
 
 Every one has seen enough of the evil do- 
 ings of especially smooth people to make him sus- 
 picious of danger when there is in the manner a 
 suggestion of finesse. 
 
 There are snaky people who can turn a cor- 
 ner as easily as can a viper. They wriggle into 
 homes with their fine, obsequious airs, and charm 
 every body with their polite attentions, their studi- 
 ous care of the good feeling of all. In the mean- 
 time, they are carrying out their deep-laid plans 
 for self-aggrandizement, and secretly stinging to 
 death all who are in their way. The honest, 
 straightforward folk get so disgusted with these 
 slimy, viperous methods, that they come to sus- 
 pect an evil motive wherever there is a charming 
 suavity. They swing to the opposite extreme, 
 and prefer any sort of brusqueness to what they 
 look upon as dangerous trickiness. 
 
 There are none whom we so dread as the 
 completely selfish and unscrupulous Becky 
 Sharps, and the crawling, detestable Uriah 
 Heeps. Yet we do greatly err if we set down 
 every expression of humility, and every kind, 
 appreciative utterance to the score of a purpose 
 to wheedle for selfish uses. 
 
 As the years clear our vision we come to un- 
 
COURTEOUSNESS. 137 
 
 derstand that right and wrong lie back of the 
 exterior. Chesterfieidian manners may gloss 
 black intentions; and so may sanctimonious 
 boorishness. Blandness of address is not of ne- 
 cessity a badge of badness. 
 
 It can not be denied that there are false court- 
 esies that are used to win the regard for sheer, 
 unmitigated selfishness. There are hypocrites 
 who steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil 
 in. There are chameleon-like people who change 
 the color of their coat to suit the preference of 
 the company into which they may chance to 
 fall. There are the courtier-like — those who re- 
 semble the sycophants that dance attendance 
 upon royalty, sunning themselves in its smile, 
 and slinking away from its frown. Their base- 
 ness is proverbial. Indeed, the quality under 
 consideration — courteousness — takes name from 
 the same source that gives them theirs, hence, 
 possibly, a little of the suspicion with which the 
 sturdily honest receive people of fine manners. 
 
 There is, also, a supercilious counterfeit of 
 courtesy that comes rather from a lack of appre- 
 hension of the intrinsic dignity of humanity, and 
 of the law that regulates our relation to others, 
 than from malignant selfishness. A man who 
 could upon no account forget to touch his hat 
 to a lady, and yet who can speak roughly to a 
 
138 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 pauper's child, knows nothing of true politeness. 
 A woman may know by heart the rules of eti- 
 quette — the precise number of steps to advance 
 or retire, the exact curve of the hand and bend 
 of the head, for each salutation, and a faultless 
 inflection for the pretty little nothings that so- 
 ciety dictates for this, that, or the other occa- 
 sion ; and yet, if she speaks abruptly to her 
 sewing-girl, sharply to her children, or peevishly 
 to her husband, she has yet to learn the first 
 principles of genuine courtesy. 
 
 The very fact of a counterfeit argues the ex- 
 istence of the real ; and the free use of the spu- 
 rious proves the possible power of the genuine, 
 
 There could be no hypocrites if there were 
 no Christians to imitate; and the constant use 
 of 'finesse demonstrates that abundant influence is 
 secured by a pleasant address. 
 
 When one handles much coin he comes to 
 know the counterfeit by the touch, the ring, the 
 very color. Politeness that is from the heart 
 comes to be generally known. It gives rest and 
 warmth to the weary and heavy laden. 
 
 Heartless courtesies are like dead things, 
 stirring with a galvanized mockery of life. The 
 sensitive soul shrinks from them as we do from 
 cold worms crawling upon the flesh. 
 
 Tnte courtesy is born of self-respect and charity. 
 
CO UR TEO USNESS. 1 3 9 
 
 "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
 The entire system of etiquette is epitomized in 
 that sentence, and not the least important part 
 of it is the last clause — as thyself. It presup- 
 poses appreciation of personal dignity. 
 
 No one who comprehends his relation to the 
 Lord of glory, his possible coheirship with 
 Christ to an "inheritance incorruptible and un- 
 defined, and that fadeth not away," can be a 
 cringing sycophant. No one with a sense of 
 the dignity of redeemed humanity can be super- 
 ciliously careless of the right to kind attention 
 inherent in the very humblest and lowest. He 
 can but understand that 
 
 "Of one clay God made us all, 
 
 And though men push and poke and paddle in 't 
 
 (As children play at fashioning dirt pies) 
 
 And call their fancies by the name of facts, 
 
 Assuming difference, lordship, privilege, 
 
 When all's plain dirt — they come back to it at last; 
 
 The first grave-digger proves it with a spade 
 
 And pats all even." 
 
 It is a nice thing to weigh one's own capa- 
 bilities and adjust one's claim to respect. Some 
 people are in a perpetual "claim quarrel" with 
 society. Their demands are never met; and 
 they are forever in a grumble — disappointed, un- 
 appreciated. Of necessity such fail to be court- 
 eous. They must first be reconciled to those 
 
140 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 about them who, as they say, have a pique at 
 them, and then they can treat others with due 
 civility. 
 
 Others undervalue themselves, though they 
 differ widely from each other in their manner 
 of showing their self-depreciation. They may 
 blunder along through the proprieties, violating 
 each principle, because they so constantly dis- 
 trust their own judgment, fear to take their 
 proper place, underrate their own dignity. In a 
 perpetual purpose to get to the foot of the 
 class, where, they seem to think, they are pre- 
 destined to stand, they incommode the whole 
 line, jostling a dozen others out of place. They 
 make distressing efforts to be agreeable, but 
 their shortcomings so confuse them that they are 
 in a ceaseless flutter of apology. They never 
 make up their minds to do a thing the best they 
 can, and let that suffice — simply and plainly, if 
 simple and plain has been their culture. 
 
 One who has sufficient insight to look down 
 through outer glosses to the intrinsic worth, is 
 never at a loss about his deportment. If he is 
 taken into a circle to whose formulae of etiquette 
 he is a stranger he does not worry every body 
 with his apologetic newousness. He is simply 
 and quietly himself. He does not compare his 
 appearance with that of those about him, be- 
 
CO UR 1 £0 USAT£SS. 1 4 1 
 
 cause he understands that the difference between 
 social castes is very slight, at most. He sees 
 that all are poor, weak humans together, each 
 acting his role in the drama of probation, under 
 his lidless eye whose judgment alone is final, 
 and who notes, not the folds of the drapery, nor 
 the pose of the head, but the thought, the spirit, 
 the inner life. He knows that humanity is too 
 great to be cramped down to the petty outside 
 measurements that prevail among weak-headed 
 snobs. 
 
 " Is there for honest poverty 
 That hangs his head, and a' that ? 
 The coward slave, — we pass him by, 
 We dare be poor, for a' that ! 
 For a' that, and a J that, 
 Our toils obscure, and a' that ; 
 The rank is but the guinea's stamp ; 
 The man 's the gowd Tor a' that. 
 
 What tho' on hamely fare we dine, 
 
 Wear hodden-grey, and a' that. 
 
 Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, 
 
 A man 's a man for a' that. 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 Their tinsel show, and a' that; 
 
 The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 
 
 Is king o' men, for a' that. 
 
 A prince can make a belted knight, 
 
 A marquis, duke, and a' that ; 
 
 But an honest man ? s aboon his might, 
 
 Guid faith he mauna fa' that! 
 
 For a' that, and a' that. 
 
 Their dignities and a' that, 
 
142 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth 
 Are higher ranks than a' that. 
 
 Then let us pray that come it may, 
 
 As come it will, for a' that, 
 
 That sense and worth o'er a' the earth 
 
 May bear the gree, and a' that. 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 It 's coming yet, for a' that, 
 
 That man to man the wide world o'er 
 
 Shall brother be, for a' that." 
 
 Carlyle's description of Bums' s visit to Edin- 
 burgh illustrates the genuine humility and manli- 
 ness of the man who believed in the essential 
 worth of manhood. 
 
 ' ' This month he is a ruined peasant, his 
 wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from 
 him ; next month he is in the blaze of rank and 
 beauty, handing jeweled duchesses down to din- 
 ner, the cynosure of all eyes ! We admire much 
 the way in which Burns met all this. Tranquil, 
 unastonished, not abashed, not inflated ; neither 
 awkwardness nor affectation, he feels that he there 
 is the man Robert Burns ; that ' the rank is but 
 the guinea's stamp, that the celebrity is but the 
 candle light which will show what man, not in 
 the least make him a better or other man ! Alas, 
 it may readily, unless he look to it, make him a 
 worse man, a wretched, inflated wind-bag, inflated 
 till he burst and become a dead lion." 
 
COURTEOUSNESS. 143 
 
 Why should we cower and cringe before those 
 who may have had bett&r food and clothing, 
 higher-priced teachers, and more leisure than 
 we ? By God's standard our fare and our rai- 
 ment, our lessons and wisdom may be by far the 
 costliest and the best. The world's methods of 
 measurement are all wrong. Let us learn to live 
 by God's rule. 
 
 There have been various christenings of that 
 lack of independence that makes plain people ill 
 at ease in the presence of those who seem to be 
 of more consequence. It is tenderly ycleped 
 timidity, or bashfulness — manvaise honte in hon- 
 est French. 
 
 However it may be disguised, it is execrable, 
 and betrays a weak character. The man who take? 
 on the crawling order of conduct, not quite sure 
 in certain society that he has a right to be in 
 the world at all, is certainly deficient in self- 
 respect. He is a coward, and that means that he 
 would be a tyrant if he happened to get an up- 
 ward tilt. Coward and tyrant are interchangea- 
 ble terms, because both are based upon a wrong 
 notion of the worth that inheres in a Christ-re- 
 deemed being, whether he be wrapped in calico 
 or satin, in coarse muscle or fine, in abrupt man- 
 ners or delicate address. 
 
 I know a man who sidles in and out of a 
 
144 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 room to take up the less space, like Dickens's Mr. 
 Chillip. He sits down in the most out of the 
 way corner, tucks his feet under his chair, folds 
 up his little frame like a pocket-lantern, and slips 
 in his uncertain sentences with a wheedling sim- 
 per, as though it was the height of superlative 
 goodness that permits him to open his unworthy 
 lips. It is impossible to draw from him a straight- 
 forward opinion even upon no more complicated 
 a question than the state of the weather. He 
 means to be truthful, but let one ask him if it 
 isn't raining; "Why — yes — he guesses — to be 
 sure — you know — well, it must be — it is," though 
 a blink of sunshine through a blind that very 
 minute contradicts his wriggling answer. 
 
 A dozen others who are not one whit more 
 sure of themselves, don a brazen mask, and try 
 to brace up by putting on independent airs. 
 They are like the silly people who starve them- 
 selves in their thread-bare attempts at ' ' keeping 
 up appearances." They bluster, and stamp, and 
 talk loud, and stalk through the room, lords of the 
 manor surely ! What do they care for rules ? Eti- 
 quette, indeed ! Superior to all such twaddle! 
 After all their bravado they are not much unlike 
 the scared little man who smirks in your face so 
 provokingly, 
 
 I know another, of humble parentage and 
 
COURTEOUSNESS. 145 
 
 narrow culture, a "working man," and withal 
 a gentlemen. He is at home in any society be- 
 cause he is not ashamed to be his plain, excel- 
 lent self, faultlessly polite, because dignifiedly 
 self-forgetting and kind. He is no doubt inno- 
 cently ignorant of some of the flourishes that pass 
 for politeness with shoddy gentility, yet there is 
 not a requirement of genuine courtesy that he 
 does not understand intuitively, through his com- 
 mon sense, his self-respect, and his wish to make 
 others happy. 
 
 Politeness is only a pleasant name for justice, 
 and one can but be just if he has ample Christian 
 charity. No one with the tender love of the Re- 
 deemer pulsating through his soul can be other- 
 wise than kindly just. 
 
 This genuine courtesy is beautifully amplified 
 in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. 
 The love that beareth all things, hopeth all things, 
 endureth all things, does not flame up at every 
 slight. It remembers that when one seems care- 
 less and negligent of the attentions that he ought 
 to bestow, it is not impossible that a secret agony 
 is gnawing his heart like the vulture at Prome- 
 theus's liver. It does not shy those who seem 
 distant and indifferent. It gives them the ben- 
 efit of the doubt, and determines, at all events, 
 to keep its own temper generous and genial. 
 
146 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Ten to one its affability will win its way into the 
 confidence and warmth of the most hopeless and 
 unpromising reticence. Even churlishness will 
 have to give way before its quiet radiance. 
 
 Courtesy belongs to civilization. Among sav- 
 ages its demands are met, in the main, if each 
 lets his neighbor's scalp alone, and keeps his 
 tomahawk out of the other's brain. As the so- 
 cial network grows complicated and interlaced, 
 courtesy must keep pace with the need of inter- 
 course, making it agreeable. It is of practical 
 use in every-day life. Like the oil that lubricates 
 the machinery, or the rubber pad upon the axle, 
 it eases the jolts of the rough, hard-going cir- 
 cumstances that are posting us through the 
 world. 
 
 Courtesy is like the spring check upon a brake, 
 causing the train to stop by littles and not w r ith 
 a jerk that would send the passengers flying out 
 of the windows or up through the roof. With 
 due attention to the suaviter in modo one can use 
 the fortiter in re with safety. It is the iron hand 
 in the velvet glove that grasps firmly and with- 
 out harm to the subject. 
 
 At best this is an out-of-joint world. All 
 are burdened and weary. Courtesy lightens the 
 loads and medicines the weariness. It is like 
 fresh flowers, cooling drinks, and soft music in a 
 
CO UR TEO USNESS. r 4 7 
 
 sick-room. Though it may not have healing 
 power in itself, it soothes the worn nerves, and 
 prepares the way for more potent, remedial 
 agents. 
 
 Much of our suffering is unreal. We are like 
 children who shiver in the dark for fear of In- 
 dians that are beyond the Mississippi. We con- 
 jure up wraiths of possible trouble and have the 
 gloom about us all a-mutter with dread may- 
 happens. 
 
 A nervous man's note is protested a dozen 
 times in his imagination when it is once really in 
 danger. A fidgety woman's child falls into the 
 river twenty times in her fancy, and she suf- . 
 fers all the agony of having him drown, except 
 the certainty, while the little fellow is having a 
 merry time at making mud pies on the bank. We 
 suffer as certainly and sometimes as keenly from 
 these unreal sorrows as if they were actual ; and 
 we need kindly patience and forbearance to stim- 
 ulate and strengthen the mind to more healthful 
 action. It is enough to drive one insane to be 
 treated with abruptness and severity by some 
 wise, coolheaded superior who sees the fallacy of 
 the foreboding and is out of patience because we 
 are so foolish. 
 
 When great griefs and bereavements come 
 upon us and we stagger and grope through the 
 
T48 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 loneliness of the empty rooms, the "small, sweet 
 courtesies" make us forget for the moment 
 
 " The silence 'gainst which we dare not cry, 
 That aches around us like a strong disease and new." 
 
 We ozve all people courteousness, be they black 
 or white, base-born or high-bred, possible or real 
 disciples of our Lord. 
 
 The flower lifting its bright face by the way- 
 side owes me as much of beauty and fragrance 
 as the Good Father has given me an order for, 
 and the bird owes me a daily installment of heart- 
 helping song. I owe every man, woman, and 
 child with whom I have contact a word, a look, 
 or a thought of kindness. 
 
 Many of the well-dressed, pleasant-faced peo- 
 ple that we meet are carrying about "a lumpish, 
 leaden, aching thing in place of a heart." Do 
 we not owe them sweet charity? Do we go 
 shouting and stamping through a hospital where 
 men and women are lying with aching heads and 
 throbbing nerves ? 
 
 Christ teaches us to care for all who suffer, 
 hence genuine Christians obey the apostolic in- 
 junction, "Be courteous," as certainly as they 
 confess their sins and pray for pardon. 
 
 True courteousness is an outgrowth of piety. 
 Said a sharp-eyed worldling of a professor of 
 religion, "You can't make me believe that that 
 
CO UR TEO USNESS. 1 4 9 
 
 man is a Christian. He is too rude; Christians 
 have better manners.'' If there were no social 
 ban upon boorishness, God's tender sympathies 
 in the soul would make one courteous. 
 
 Nowhere is politeness more necessary than 
 in the church, where gentle-souled Christians 
 meet to worship the kind God. 
 
 I have seen a strange thing under the sun — 
 strange and sad. A drunkard's wife, weary with 
 the wretchedness and wrangling of her hut, has 
 gone to God's house in vague hope of getting 
 help to bear her burdens. Finding herself so 
 shabby among the comfortable Christians, she 
 has slipped into a pew, when a high-headed dis- 
 ciple of the crucified Galilean has driven her 
 from the seat with a stony stare or a haughty 
 gesture. Then there has echoed through my 
 soul the cry from Calvary, "They know not 
 what they do!" Better, a thousand times better, 
 to go down into the sea with a millstone about 
 the neck than to offend one of Christ's little ones. 
 
 I have seen a Magdalen upon whose heart 
 had fallen the softening rain of God. As she 
 went forth to seek a better life, she was met by 
 a woman who drew aside to avoid contact with 
 the penitent, and whose scourge of silent scorn 
 turned the wretched feet again toward hell ! 
 The blood of that woman's baleful perishing 
 
150 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 could but rest upon the head of her Christian 
 sister! 
 
 We must give to all kindly courtesy, for we 
 may never know their sore need ; but, above 
 every thing, we must be courteous toward those 
 who are in our own homes. Nowhere else is the 
 lack of politeness, kindness, considerateness, so 
 keenly felt. 
 
 Weary with the cares and worry of life, we 
 rest in our homes, having laid by our armor; so 
 it is easy to gall us with rough words and coarse, 
 unkind acts. 
 
 Incivilities in the home are like sand in the 
 eyes, and gravel in the shoes. No wonder they 
 who have only sour looks and cross words where 
 they ought to receive loving sympathy and care, 
 are easily lured to destruction. 
 
 Some people treat casual acquaintances with 
 more courtesy than they use toward their near- 
 est friends. One-half of the incivilities they 
 fling right and left, every hour, when free from 
 the restraint of the public eye, if indulged else- 
 where, would destroy every friendship they have 
 outside the enduring home bond. 
 
 Savages sometimes tie an enemy to a tree as 
 a target for bow and arrow practice; and yet 
 there is a more cruel barbarism even in civilized 
 homes. You may bind one to yourself with 
 
CO UR TEO USA 7 ESS. 1 5 1 
 
 promises of lifelong love and cherishing, and 
 then vent upon the luckless head your superflu- 
 ous cruelty. By and by you will be unable to do 
 your outside work, and you will need the rest 
 and tenderness that are found nowhere this side 
 heaven, except in a good home. Then the love 
 that should have helped you bear the weariness 
 and infirmities of age is scarred and withered 
 and dead. No upbraidings, it is what it is on 
 account of your own roughness and unkindness. 
 
 Some treat their children almost brutally, be- 
 cause the poor, helpless things are in their 
 power. They forget that the harsh, cutting, 
 bitter words that they throw around so reck- 
 lessly, day by day, will be paid back, by and by, 
 with compound interest. When one is old and 
 crippled and broken, his children may do pre- 
 cisely as he did when he had the vigor, and they 
 the helplessness. They will be respectful enough 
 before folks, too proud to be caught using rude- 
 ness toward the decrepit old father; but when 
 they are alone with him, if they have a touch 
 of indigestion, or a business bother, then see 
 how the hard, hateful words rattle about his 
 helpless head. Does he recognize his own 
 severe sayings of long years before? Whatso- 
 ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. 
 
 Some parents love their children violently. 
 
152 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 They will do any thing for them but restrain 
 their own savage instincts; and so, unwittingly, 
 they develop in them a harshness and hateful- 
 ness that will plant with thorns the path toward - 
 the sunset. 
 
 Children have rights that parents are bound 
 to respect. They are as certainly entitled to 
 courtesy and kindness as are parents. The in- 
 justices practiced upon them will be repaid by 
 them when they come to power. 
 
 Who does not love to recall the pretty 
 Quaker home in " Uncle Tom's Cabin/' with 
 the gentle mother directing the merry, young 
 people with her kind, "Hadn't thee better do 
 so and so? 1 ' Where in this wide world is courtesy 
 so beautiful or so useful as in the household? 
 
 Sometimes brothers and sisters are more 
 ashamed of a caress than of a cross word. If 
 they were caught hurling at each other a biting 
 criticism, they would not be half as much em- 
 barrassed as they would over a kind com- 
 mendation. 
 
 I was taking vocal music lessons once with a 
 young lady of her brother. They were pleasant 
 young people, and they thought enough of each 
 other, yet I noticed that he used little incivili- 
 ties toward her that would have finished my 
 lessons at once if he had ventured to address 
 
CO UR TEO USNESS. J 5 3 
 
 me in the same manner. I said to him one day, 
 after one of his usual sharp cuts at her dullness, 
 "You don't like your sister as well as you do 
 me?" He stared a moment. "Of course I do. 
 I think enough of her. Why?" "Oh, noth- 
 ing, only you never scold me when I make a 
 blunder. You smooth it over very nicely; but 
 if Lizzie sings wrong, you say so sharply, ' Now, 
 what did you sing that way for? I've told you 
 better than that more than a dozen times.' '" 
 
 Many a girl whose brothers w T ould do any 
 thing and every thing for her happiness except 
 treat her with the civility they are ready to use 
 toward every other young lady, is driven into an 
 unfortunate marriage hoping to find that respect 
 and attention that we all prize so highly in the 
 home. 
 
 And ten chances to one she fails in her mat- 
 rimonial venture. There are men who visit 
 every little domestic misliap and delinquency, the 
 loss of a button, a rip in a glove, an accident to 
 the morning paper, with an avalanche of sharp 
 words as bitter and biting as a March hail-storm. 
 Some put more gentleness into the voice when 
 they address any living being whom it is to their 
 interest to please, than they use in speaking to 
 the wife of a dozen years. When the back of 
 the dear public is turned they do not hesitate to 
 
154 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 practice toward her a thousand little abruptnesses, 
 any one of which, before marriage, would have 
 made a decided change in their relations. 
 
 Not every woman is so fortunate as the 
 Scotch lassie who, standing before the minister 
 with her laddie, declined to promise obedience. 
 After two or three unsuccessful attempts to ad- 
 just the matter satisfactorily, the clergyman hes- 
 itated. " Ne'er mind," said Sandy; "I maun 
 see to the ' obey ' if there be strength i' this guid 
 right arm." " Sae that 's to be the tune," quoth 
 the bonny lass; "weel, then, guid day," and 
 she left him to seek a spouse that he could gov- 
 ern with less trouble. 
 
 Many a man who would scorn to lay the 
 weight of a finger upon his wife in temper, shows 
 upon small occasions of annoyance a petulance 
 that hurts worse than a blow. Many a woman 
 who is ready to sacrifice to the utmost for her 
 husband's comfort, denies him the kindness of 
 address and manner that she recognizes it her 
 duty to bestow upon all besides. 
 
 Only at home, where courteousness is most 
 needed, can it be properly learned. Let boys as 
 well as girls be taught genuine politeness. There 
 is no reason why "that boy" should be per- 
 mitted to be a boor, while all pains are taken 
 to make his sister a lady. If she needs gentle- 
 
 
COURTEOUSNESS. 155 
 
 ness and self-control for the work of life, so does 
 he. The day is passing by when men are to be 
 as coarse and rough as savages with a little awk- 
 ward polish for court occasions, while women 
 must be always obsequious and amiable. In the 
 better time there will be no abatement of the best 
 ideal of womanly self-sacrifice and meekness, and 
 yet the role of angelhood will not be monopolized 
 by her ; it will be understood that it is also good 
 for men to "be courteous," and to "be kind 
 one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one 
 another, even as God for Christ's sake hath for- 
 given" them; "With all lowliness and meek- 
 ness, with long suffering, forbearing one another 
 in love." 
 
 Courtesy must be taught like music, begin- 
 ning as early as possible. If you begin to teach 
 your daughter music when she is nearly grown 
 it will take a deal of practice to make her even 
 a passable player. But let her tiptoe up to the 
 piano and strike the keys as soon as she can 
 stand alone, and she will grow up, other things 
 being equal, its mistress. 
 
 If w T e would have our children courteous, we 
 must begin with them early, and teach them by 
 example as well as by dictation. 
 
 Gentle manners are beautiful, and there is 
 always power in beauty. The touch of the sun- 
 
156 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 beam moves the granite column far more surely 
 than does the wrench of the tornado. Harmo- 
 nies of color, rhythm of movement, and melody 
 of voice sway the .soul with surer strength than 
 can the force of reason or the grip of law. Let 
 us be no longer afraid of what is beautiful be- 
 cause the children of this world, always wiser 
 than the children of light, have prostituted it to 
 base purposes. Let us conscript all beauty and 
 elegance, and give it Christian baptism, and set 
 it at work to help on the right. 
 
 Under the old typical law the firstlings and 
 those without spot or blemish were used in sac- 
 rifice. Time will come when the best music need 
 not be sought in the opera, the best art where it 
 represents pagan or Christian idolatry, the best 
 poetry in the service of Bacchus, Venus, or 
 Mars. " The earth is Jehovah's, and the fullness 
 thereof," and the day is dawning when the long 
 arrears are to be collected. 
 
 The beautiful must be set free from its old 
 associations, and, with the chrism of Christ upon 
 its forehead, it must be wedded to the true and 
 the good. Then may he who embodies all har- 
 mony and beauty and excellence reign over a 
 regenerated realm. 
 
MY NEIGHBOR. 1 57 
 
 WHEN the lawyer would test Christ's teach- 
 ing upon moral obligation, he asked what 
 he should do to inherit eternal life. The Savior 
 responded by questioning him upon the "Mosaic 
 Law." The question was quite in the lawyer's 
 line, and in reply he epitomized the Jewish code 
 in an able manner. He gathered in one state- 
 ment all our duties to God, and in another our 
 duties to our fellow beings. 
 
 He showed a fine analytic as well as synthetic 
 power in stating, not the common frame-work of 
 the duty, but its underlying principle. "Thou 
 shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and 
 with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and 
 with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself." 
 
 We may imagine that the Master's keen eye 
 was fastened upon the face of the comfortable, 
 self-righteous lawyer, and the word slid from his 
 lips touching like a lance of steel the core of the 
 man's egotism, "This do and thou shalt live." 
 Stung by an awakened conscience and "willing 
 
158 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 to justify himself," he asked a little petulantly, 
 as we may suppose, "Who is my neighbor ?" 
 
 The Savior, who always used consummate 
 skill in dealing with human nature, did not an- 
 swer directly. As a Jew he would have replied, 
 "One of your race, or nation, 01 creed." As 
 the Son of man he must give a broader scope to 
 the obligation. But first he must, if possible, 
 disarm the lawyer's prejudice, that the truth, 
 which so clear a thinker was able to apprehend, 
 might also be received into his heart and make 
 him free. So the Master told a story, the dra- 
 matic interest of which would take the attention 
 of the other from its personal point till the prin- 
 ciple it was meant to illustrate had been accepted. 
 It was about a Jew who fell among thieves and 
 was neglected by the priest and the Levite — the 
 representatives of religion and learning, and cared 
 for by the Samaritan, a man of impure blood 
 and corrupt creed. In conclusion the Master 
 asked which was neighbor unto him that fell 
 among the thieves? The lawyer occupied with 
 the principle involved, gave a straightforward an- 
 swer, "He that showed mercy on him." Then 
 the lance of truth touched again his sordid soul, 
 " Go and do thou likewise." 
 
 The lesson of social obligation taught in this 
 parable may be formulated something in this 
 
MY NEIGHBOR. 1 5 9 
 
 way: The knowledge of need and the ability to 
 meet it lay upon one a responsibility commensu- 
 rate with his power to serve. 
 
 It is not optional with us to help those who 
 need our aid. There is an obligation upon us 
 as sacred and binding as it is possible for any 
 to be, because it is one that grows out of the 
 nature of our relation to others, and it is laid 
 upon us by God himself. 
 
 Paul said, "I am a debtor both to the Greeks 
 and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to 
 the unwise." He has been much lauded for his 
 generous self-giving, as if it were all gratuitous, 
 unconstrained benevolence. He, however, with 
 a clearer insight into the relation of men to 
 men, regarded himself as simply discharging an 
 obligation laid upon him by the knowledge of 
 the danger of sinners and of their possible sal- 
 vation made plain to him by the love of Christ 
 which was shed abroad in his heart by the Holy 
 Ghost. He says, "The love of Christ constrain- 
 eth us." We suppose him to mean that he had 
 been brought into such sympathy with the Re- 
 deemer's purpose to save all people that he had 
 to live by the law of that love and knowledge, 
 doing all that was possible to help every human 
 being that he could reach. He is simply paying 
 a debt that he owed to Greek and barbarian, 
 
160 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 bond and free. There was no merit in all those 
 toils and travels, perils of waters and of robbers, 
 shipwrecks and persecutions. He owed human- 
 ity that debt of service. 
 
 If he had been asked if this obligation was 
 special, resting upon him and not' upon others, 
 he would have replied, "No man liveth to 
 himself." 
 
 The warp and woof of our indebtedness are 
 interwoven with the tissue of every other human 
 life. None of us can cut himself loose from the 
 rest and say, * * I stand alone, owing no man 
 aught." To every soul that needs our help, and 
 that we may be able to aid, we are bound by a 
 chain as unbreakable as that which holds the 
 planets in their orbits. 
 
 We are debtors to our families, our commu- 
 nities, and the race. 
 
 We confess judgment when the first item of 
 this claim is presented. Our very selfishness 
 prompts us to care for our own families. If we 
 neglect them, we know that we are planting 
 thorns in the paths our feet must tread in the 
 old years, when our steps are tottering and 
 uncertain. 
 
 The recognition of our debt decreases in 
 proportion to our distance from those to whom 
 we owe service. It is like the rays of a lamp 
 
M V NEIGHB OR. 1 6 1 
 
 diverging and growing less in power with each 
 yard of space they traverse. 
 
 The philanthropic radius is circumscribed 
 with some good people, reaching hardly beyond 
 their immediate vicinage. Their daily prayer, if 
 freely translated, would be little more than, 
 
 "Bless me and my wife, 
 Son John and his wife, 
 Us four 
 And no more." 
 
 That we may bring our families to the broad- 
 est charity, the best life, the horizon of our 
 sympathies must be widened. 
 
 Besides this home care we must recognize 
 our debt of obligation to the community. 
 
 This caring only for those whom we can see 
 and hear and touch, forgetting our obligation to 
 all others, is a little as if one should pay his 
 shoemaker promptly because he happens to live 
 within sound of the man's hammer, ignoring the 
 claims of all creditors who chance to live a few 
 blocks away. 
 
 Some reach a little farther, taking in "our 
 Church," "our town." Others have a sense of 
 obligation that vitalizes those vague abstractions, 
 "the government," "our country" — patriotism 
 they call the sentiment. 
 
 If we search carefully enough w r e may find 
 1 1 
 
1 62 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 the root of most of these benevolent impulses 
 in selfishness. Unless our friends are respecta- 
 able and good, we are disgraced by their mis- 
 deeds. Unless our community has a reputation 
 for morality, our real estate depreciates in value. 
 Unless our country is prosperous, all our per- 
 sonal interests are in peril. 
 
 Only the few who have stood beside the all- 
 loving Christ upon the mount of God can send 
 their thought away east, west, north, and 
 south to all races and tribes, peoples and kin- 
 dreds, understanding that they are bound to all, 
 no matter how uncouth in life, how rough in 
 speech, how low in civilization, by the unbreak- 
 able bond of human brotherhood, Christian ob- 
 ligation. Only those divinely illuminated souls, 
 looking away from that height of spiritual vision, 
 acknowledge that they owe a debt of service to 
 each wild Bedouin sweeping across his desert 
 waste, each Esquimaux shivering in his snow- 
 hut, each naked negro panting under the equator, 
 each Indian rajah and Chinese cooly, each Si- 
 berian serf and American freedman, each drunk- 
 ard staggering toward perdition, each lost woman 
 hiding in her den of infamy, each vagabond child 
 thrice orphaned and desolate. 
 
 Whether we apprehend the obligation or not, 
 we owe a debt to all our race. None are so far 
 
MY NEIGHB OR. 163 
 
 beneath us but we can go down to their neces- 
 sity; none so far above us but we can reach 
 them to pay the debt. 
 
 All are in want. All suffer in their threefold 
 life from its very beginning. Invisible harpies 
 hover about the vestibule of being, and attack 
 tooth and nail every little helpless human. The 
 few who fight their way up through the multi- 
 form maladies of the first years, find themselves, 
 even before Time claims his license to pull them 
 to pieces, grievously hurt in all their triple life. 
 It would puzzle the angels to find one who was 
 sound even in body. 
 
 The whimsical, rickety, patched up old tene- 
 ment is usually an exponent of the wretched life 
 under its miserable roof. So the unsound body 
 represents, not unfairly, the general pitiful mental 
 condition. There are as few in complete health 
 of mind as of body. 
 
 We use gentle names in speaking of intellect- 
 ual unsoundness, for we do not relish awkward 
 plainness in regard to our own ailments. We 
 have "low spirits," "the blues," "hypochon- 
 dria," when blunders, misjudgments, and evil 
 surmisings indicate that the mental machinery is 
 getting out of repair. When the disease has 
 reached a given point, the general safety de-_ 
 mands that the patient be shut within stone 
 
1 64 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 walls, subjected to careful sanitary treatment, 
 and put in a strait-jacket. 
 
 We pity the poor wretches who have lost 
 their reason as if it were an unusual calamity, 
 yet we can not walk a block in any town with- 
 out looking into the blank faces of fools who can 
 not reason, the sharp faces of bigots who will 
 not, and the close faces of knaves who dare not, 
 use their reasoning powers. 
 
 Apish vanity, foxy cunning, wolfish cruelty, 
 hyena-like jealousy, with all their kith and kin 
 of brute passions and beastly appetites, lie in 
 wait to mar and maim and poison the soul. 
 You may wade through miles of people upon 
 city pavements without finding one who is free 
 from physical disease; so you may travel leagues 
 without finding one unhurt in mind, perfectly 
 sound in spirit. 
 
 Moral infirmities and maladies are even more 
 common and pitiful than those of body or mind. 
 Multitudes have felt the touch of the Great 
 Physician, but very few of us have permitted 
 him to bring us to even our own scant notions 
 of moral health and vigor. 
 
 We dislike to look upon ulcers, goiter, idiocy, 
 misshapements, physical and mental. If our 
 eyes were opened to see our own moral deform- 
 ities and those of the people about us, we 
 
MY NEIGHBOR. 165 
 
 should be driven to a hermit's cell to escape the 
 painful sights of every day. 
 
 There is more tragedy in every life than was 
 ever brought out upon the stage. Every feast 
 has its skeleton. Under the peals of merriment 
 and shouts of triumph may be heard the rattling 
 menace of its fleshless fingers, the sullen chatter 
 of its lipless teeth. Every human being, unless 
 healed by the good Christ, is, by the witness of 
 God, ''full of wounds and bruises and putrefy- 
 ing sores;" and the worst hurts, the deepest 
 gashes, are hid most secretly. They must be 
 sought out, if one would help the sufferer. 
 
 You meet a man in society who looks robust 
 enough to relish a good dinner and digest it sat- 
 isfactorily. You exchange with him the com- 
 monplaces of the day, and then you go your 
 way, like the priest and the Levite, leaving him 
 in his utter darkness to stagger and grope and 
 clutch after the rope of faith that has been 
 wrenched from him by human treachery. 
 
 You are seated for an hour's talk with a lady. 
 The worn pleasantries of chitchat are tossed 
 back and forth gayly enough. If you would 
 listen so wisely as to catch the hard whisper of 
 her soul's dire need, the smile would fade from 
 your eye, and the jest hurry back from your lip; 
 for before you is not a merry-hearted woman, 
 
1 66 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 full of life and hope, but a wretched soul wrest- 
 ling with fearful doubts of man's truth and 
 God's pity. 
 
 Perhaps but little was required of you for the 
 helping of these needy people. Only the cup of 
 cold water. Not an exhortation nor a sermon, 
 possibly not even an uttered prayer — only to give 
 the bewildered soul a look into a pair of steady, 
 kind, honest eyes, or the grasp of a clean hand — 
 yet it might have held the wavering faith, till 
 the courage had regained its strength. A world 
 better if you had not been born, than for you to 
 be delinquent in these simple debts — this throw- 
 ing a rope to the shipwrecked. 
 
 A man is driving to market along a surf- 
 beaten shore. In the last night's gloom ruffian 
 winds and merciless waves seized a good ship and 
 dragged her down to the cavernous depths. In 
 the cold gray morning men and women are toss- 
 ing in the breakers, clinging to spars and 
 boards, and crying for help. What does our 
 comfortable marketer do ? Does he spring from 
 his wagon and use every effort to get men, and 
 ropes, and boats before the poor, drowning peo- 
 ple are swallowed up by the hungry sea? Oh, 
 no. He drives on, whistling a careless tune, and 
 busying himself upon the probable gain from his 
 load. What cares he for the perishing wretches? 
 
M V NEIGIIB OK. 1 6 7 
 
 Why, be does not know one of them even by 
 name. He left his own safe in their homes. 
 Lynch him ? Not so fast. Execrable murderer 
 as he is, he will live to a fair age if one who is 
 without guilt must cast at him the first stone. 
 
 Victor Hugo in M Les Misei'ables" makes his 
 bishop regard himself as having wronged the 
 poor, because he bought comforts for himself 
 with the money that he might have used in buy- 
 ing them bread, and Jean Valjean as no worse 
 in stealing the articles than he in keeping their 
 value from the starving. 
 
 The French philosopher may have over- 
 wrought a trifle his picture in his attempt to make 
 us see our obligation to the poor, yet John Wes- 
 ley was about as extravagant when he said, " If 
 I die worth ten pounds men may call me a vil- 
 lain. '' Hugo's sad eyes have been fixed upon 
 the maelstrom where the unfortunate are drawn 
 down to death, unpitied and unhelped, till his 
 brain may not be steady enough to work out the 
 problem of their rescue ; yet he lays a stout hand 
 upon every man's shoulder, and with the peremp- 
 toriness of justice he charges him with unpaid 
 indebtedness ; worse, with the embezzlement of 
 widow's crusts and pauper's rags. In the " cruel 
 social juggle " he turns his sharp gaze this way 
 and that for help, but in vain. Another, whose 
 
1 68 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 heart is no more deeply touched with a sense of 
 wrong, but upon whose eyes God's light has been 
 poured, jnay lead us directly to Christ, the em- 
 bodiment of unselfish love, as the one cure of 
 this terrible plague. 
 
 With the increase of knowledge comes an in- 
 crease of responsibility. We are living in an ear- 
 nest, restless time. Many "run to and fro, and 
 knowledge is increased." Steam navigation, rail- 
 roads, telegraphs have made all nations our next- 
 door neighbors. The Celestial Empire has been 
 towed across the sea and anchored to our West- 
 ern coast. It is even emptying upon our coun- 
 try its surplus population. We have already in 
 the United States two hundred thousand Chi- 
 namen. 
 
 It is an unambitious college that has not a 
 Japanese name in its catalogue. One can hardly 
 meet a parlor full of comfortably intelligent peo- 
 ple without hearing one say, "I saw the like of 
 that in Shanghai," and another, "We bought 
 that in Calcutta." 
 
 The dark side of the world is rolling up 
 toward the light. We adjust our postal and tel- 
 egraphic glasses, and peer across the narrowing 
 Pacific. We talk over at the breakfast-table what 
 the East Indians were about last evening. For- 
 merly those great lands full of queer people were 
 
MY NEIGHBOR. 1 69 
 
 all terra incognita. The shreds of humanity 
 packed away in them were so unlike ourselves in 
 all their modes of life and thought, so far from 
 our notions of what is essential to the species we 
 hardly regarded them as human. But we have 
 come to know that those immense masses of peo- 
 ple, crowded and crushed together, as much alike 
 as the individuals of a flock of blackbirds, and as 
 meaningless in their jargons — mere census items, 
 too numerous for counting — we have come at last 
 to understand that they are hoping, fearing, lov- 
 ing, hating, sinning, sorrowing human souls, each 
 redeemed by the blood of the Son of God, each 
 capable of boundless development in good, each 
 as dear to the Lord Christ as are the people by 
 whose side we kneel at the home altar, or the 
 communion rail. 
 
 We have come to know the pitiful mistakes 
 of their civilization, how they grope for temple 
 doors in their self-made darkness, and clutch 
 each other's throats. We have seen how great 
 souls among them, Confucius, and Zoroaster, and 
 Mohammed, held aloft their flickering torches, 
 only making the gloom more dense, while the 
 people stumbled this way and that, sinking 
 deeper into the mire at each step. 
 
 We have looked into their living places. We 
 see them buying and selling their wives — their 
 
170 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 pride and passion trampling upon the very hearts 
 of those whose love and care ought to make for 
 them good homes. We hear the gurgle in the 
 throats of the little daughters that they drown. 
 We hear the moans of the old mothers pushed 
 off into the Ganges, or left to the tender mercies 
 of the wild beasts of the jungle. We know their 
 misery. They have become our neighbors. We 
 can not shake off" the responsibility of sharing 
 with them the light of our clearer day, the bless- 
 ings of our Christian civilization. 
 
 Our obligation is increased also by the in- 
 crease of our ability, Christianity is the main- 
 spring of improvement in art, science, literature, 
 civil and international polity ; and with each 
 added facility for commerce and travel there 
 come new duties. Christianity and progress are 
 synonymous. With the increase of Christian 
 light there is added ability to bring things to 
 pass, and with the increased power comes added 
 responsibility for those less favored. 
 
 We can translate Bibles, and prepare and send 
 teachers to the needy abroad as never before. 
 
 Instead of its taking months to make a copy 
 of the Scriptures and months more for a sailing 
 vessel to creep across the sea with its precious 
 cargo, we can take the paper from the mill and 
 the ink from the factory, and in a few days our 
 
M V NEIGHB OR. 1 7 1 
 
 ship has steamed around the world leaving at 
 each port the Word of Life. 
 
 Fifty years ago it was a rare thing to find 
 one who could read an Oriental language. Now, 
 classes meet in our parlors hunting for Hebrew 
 roots as an afternoon recreation, and our colleges 
 turn out readers of Sanskrit by the dozen. It 
 will not be long till a cued Chinaman or a nim- 
 ble-witted Japanese professor will be teaching 
 Oriental monosyllables at each of our educational 
 centers. Already in a national university in 
 Japan is there a professorship of moral philos- 
 ophy filled by a Christian missionary, who uses 
 the New Testament as his text-book in ethics. 
 If the sense of responsibility in the Christian 
 Church had gone beyond that of the apostolic 
 era in the ratio of added ability, long ere this the 
 world would have been evangelized. 
 
 During Paid s thirty-three itinerant years South- 
 western Asia and Southern Europe were dotted 
 with churches. Not a city of consequence in 
 the civilized world was left unvisited. Compa- 
 nies of men and women fished from the slums of 
 heathen sensualism became the primitive Church, 
 to whose purity and excellence we are never 
 tired of referring. 
 
 When Paul was in Corinth, writing to the 
 Church at Rome, he told them that he must 
 
172 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 carry to Jerusalem a benefaction for the poor 
 Christians there from the Macedonians. After 
 that journey he hoped to go to Spain and visit 
 his Roman friends by the way. It was no small 
 matter in those days of slow, unsafe sailing to go 
 from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. 
 It was as if one of us should write to a Church 
 in Bombay, "I must carry a gift from the Bos- 
 tonians to the poor saints at Athens. After I 
 have performed that duty, I hope to go to Pe- 
 king to preach the Gospel there, and I will stop 
 and see you in Bombay on my journey thither." 
 
 If the sense of obligation to all men crowded 
 the apostle to the Gentiles through all manner 
 of perils and afflictions, how ought our added 
 knowledge and ability to urge us onward in this 
 work of the world's conquest for Christ. If the 
 Church in these days were moved by that prim- 
 itive zeal, every one of the dark-souled millions 
 would have a knowledge of Christ's salvation 
 within a decade. 
 
 In giving the ignorant masses, at home or 
 abroad, a knowledge of salvation by Christ, we 
 help them in all their hurt threefold life. 
 
 Christianity establishes not only Churches and 
 Sabbath-schools, but it provides asylums for the 
 infirm, hospitals for the sick, care for the aged, 
 homes for the homeless, friends for the friend- 
 
MY NEIGHBOR. 173 
 
 less, schools for the ignorant, health, peace, 
 prosperity for all. 
 
 I might fill my house with the shivering poor, 
 and it would become only what Christianity has 
 taught every city and county to build — an alms- 
 house or hospital. If I give those same poor 
 people a knowledge of Christ's power to save 
 from sensuality and vice, I make them self-sup- 
 porting. Their sins are the one luxury that they 
 can not afford. What they spend in intoxicants, 
 physical and mental, would give them an inde- 
 pendence, with ample medicine and care for 
 their illnesses. 
 
 The religion of the Lord Jesus teaches us to 
 crowd this common evangelism while we provide 
 amply and generously for those who must be 
 cared for by general public charity. 
 
 We can meet our obligation to our neighbors 
 only by giving them a knowledge of Christ's 
 power to make them pure and free, strong and 
 noble. As the greater includes the less, this will 
 be a medicine for all the ills that infest humanity, 
 a lifting of the curse from our sorrowing race. 
 
 When we meet our ordinary financial obliga- 
 tions we take a receipt acknowledging the fact. 
 We need expect no credit on this world's books 
 for the expenditure of time and money and 
 strength in paying the debts that we call benev- 
 
174 DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 olent. Indeed, so sadly are beliefs and notions 
 of right jumbled, we will pass for fanatics and 
 fools, if we do not spend our substance in add- 
 ing to our own magnificence, rather than in be- 
 stowing upon others as God wills. 
 
 We can do this work properly only when we 
 have reference to the record above, careless whether 
 the eyes about us beam kindly or dart upon us 
 scathing contempt and hate. The unslumbering 
 Eye notes even the cup of cold water given in 
 his name. 
 
 God never forgets. He will not pass lightly 
 over any neglect of obligation. "My lord car- 
 dinal," said Anne of Austria to Richelieu, ''God 
 does not pay at the end of each week, but at 
 the last he pays" 
 
 He will hold us to the uttermost farthing if 
 we fail of our duty to his poor, be they sufferers 
 in estate or body, in mind or spirit. "Then 
 shall the King say also unto them on the left- 
 hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlast- 
 ing fire, prepared for th£ devil and his angels; 
 for I was a-hungered, and ye gave me no meat: 
 I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink : I was 
 a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and 
 ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye 
 visited me not. Then shall they also answer 
 him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee a-hungered, 
 
M Y NEIGHB OR. 175 
 
 or a-thirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in 
 prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then 
 shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto 
 you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the 
 least of these, ye did it not to me." 
 
 So wonderful is his condescension and tender- 
 ness of care, he will enter upon the Record and 
 apportion the eternal reward as if each act of 
 unselfish love and care of the miserable here had 
 been done to himself. "Then shall the King 
 say unto them on his right-hand, Come, ye 
 blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom pre- 
 pared for you from the foundation of the world: 
 for I was a-hungered, and ye gave me meat: I 
 was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a 
 stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye 
 clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was 
 in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall 
 the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when 
 saw we thee a-hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, 
 and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a 
 stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed 
 thee? or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, 
 and came unto thee? And the King shall an- 
 swer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, 
 inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the 
 least of these my brethren, ye have done it 
 unto me." 
 
IT 6 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Lowell's knight, in his vision, found this 
 glorious truth — the same that the Master taught 
 in the parable of the Good Samaritan: 
 
 " For Christ's sweet sake I beg an alms." 
 
 "Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing, 
 The leper lank as the rain-blanched bone, 
 That cowers beside him, a thing as lone 
 And white as the ice isles of Northern seas, 
 In the desolate horror of his disease. 
 
 And Sir Launfal said, 'I behold in thee 
 An image of Him who died on the tree. 
 Mild Mary's Son acknowledge me, 
 Behold through him I give to thee.' 
 
 Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes, 
 
 And looked at Sir Launfal, and straightway he 
 
 Remembered in what a haughtier guise 
 
 He had flung an alms to leprosie ; 
 
 When he girt his young life up in gilded mail 
 
 And set forth in search of the Holy Grail. 
 
 The heart within him was ashes and dust; 
 
 He parted in twain his single crust, 
 
 He broke the ice on the streamlet's brink 
 
 And gave the leper to eat and drink. 
 
 'Twas a moldy crust of coarse brown bread, 
 
 'T was water out of a wooden bowl, 
 
 Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed, 
 
 And 't was red wine he drank with his thirsty soul. 
 
 As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face, 
 
 A light shone round about the place; 
 
 The leper no longer crouched at his side 
 
 But stood before him glorified, 
 
 Shining and tall and fair and straight 
 
 As the pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate; 
 
MY NEIGHBOR, 177 
 
 Himself the gate whereby men can 
 
 Enter the temple of God in mar., 
 
 His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine, 
 And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine, 
 Which mingle their softness and quiet in one 
 With the shaggy unrest they float down upon. 
 And the voice, that was calmer than silence, said ; 
 ' Lo it is I, he not afraid. 
 In many climes without avail 
 Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail ; 
 Behold, it is here, this cup which thou 
 Didst fill at the streamlet for Me but now ; 
 This crust is my body broken for thee, 
 This water his blood that died on the tree; 
 The Holy Supper is kept indeed, 
 In whatso we share with another's need, 
 Not what we give, but what we share, 
 For the gift without the giver is bare. 
 Who gives himself, with his alms, feeds three, — 
 Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me,' ;? 
 12 
 
178 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 ifo$£ mo <p}ffl %n> 05 ii m%m 
 
 FIRST let us acknowledge fairly that we are 
 suffering from that horrid mental indisposi- 
 tion, and not go about with a machine-made 
 smile and uplifted brows, trying to cheat our- 
 selves into a belief that, though we are the most 
 unfortunate and sadly abused persons on the 
 planet, yet we are altogether saintly in pa- 
 tience — indeed, fair specimens of the noble army 
 of martyrs. Let us lay aside our mask of 
 wintery sunshine, and confess honestly and un- 
 flinchingly, "Yes; I'm in the blues. I know I 
 ought to rejoice evermore, and in every thing 
 give thanks, yet somehow my cares are quite 
 too much for me." 
 
 Let us face the danger of indulging in the 
 melancholy pleasure of being thoroughly wretched 
 over every little piece of ill-fortune. Let us 
 understand that, if w r e make mountains out of 
 molehills of trouble, we shall abide under the 
 shadow of snow-capped miseries all the long, 
 long, weary days. 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES." 179 
 
 The diagnosis of the case will not be difficult 
 if we apprehend the presence and importance of 
 the disease. 
 
 There is a close analogy between physical 
 and mental ailments. 
 
 Sometimes a part of the physical mechanism 
 gets out of order, and the patient pays little 
 attention, hoping to be well in a few r days. The 
 disease, meanwhile, creeps stealthily and steadily 
 toward the stronghold of life, till some miserable 
 morning the man awakes to the fact that he is 
 at its mercy. It can be dislodged from the cit- 
 adel of strength only by severe and energetic 
 measures. 
 
 In like manner many a tired heart yields to 
 a sense of discomfort that grows into a burden 
 of care, an unbearable load, accompanied by all 
 manner of forbodings, evil surmisings, misap- 
 prehensions, and heart-break, till the sufferer 
 finds himself at last in a cell with padded 
 walls. 
 
 Let us take these mental maladies in time; 
 and first let us find the seat of the disease. 
 There has been a deal of blundering at this 
 point. Some of our wise moderns declare that 
 a torpid liver is at the bottom of the mischief. 
 They prescribe blue-pill or podophyllin to take 
 the indigo out of affairs. They believe that the 
 
I So DIAMOND DUST, 
 
 mental health hinges altogether upon physical 
 conditions. Their one remedy for all the ills 
 that flesh is heir to is found in good, generous 
 care of the body. 
 
 They can not claim originality in these no- 
 tions. The old Greeks put the highest premium 
 upon physical and aesthetic culture as conducive 
 to mental and moral excellence. They paid 
 supreme national honors to the man of fleetest 
 foot and firmest muscle. Their success in that 
 line of development was unparalleled, yet they 
 had a state of morals that could but give the 
 gloomiest views of life here and hereafter. If 
 they did not have "the blues" it was no credit 
 to their common sense. 
 
 Plato said: " While the soul is mingled with 
 this mass of evil, our desires for truth can not 
 be satisfied ; for the body is a source of endless 
 trouble to us, filling us with fears, fancies, idols, 
 and every sort of folly. It prevents our ever 
 having so much as a thought." 
 
 No one can deny that the body affects the 
 mind, depressing it when out of repair and ren- 
 dering it faithful service only when sound; yet 
 Ave must insist that mental disease is usually out 
 of the reach of physical remedies. From close 
 observation, as well as from pitiful personal ex- 
 periences, we may conclude that the mental dis- 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES." 181 
 
 order known as "the blues" is to be regarded 
 simply as an aggravated attack of egotism, and 
 as such it must be treated. Instead of saying, 
 with amiable self-pity, "I have the blues to-day, M 
 let us use plain English, "I am suffering from an 
 attack of egotism.'' 
 
 The victims of the disease are legion. The 
 young girl at a party who is uncomfortable un- 
 less she has an opportunity to shine with special 
 brilliancy at the piano or elsewhere; the young 
 man who measures the enjoyment of the even- 
 ing by the amount of attention he receives from 
 host, hostess, or distinguished guests ; the 
 brother who has a good prayer-meeting only 
 when he has the lion's share of the exercises ; 
 the woman who must lug into the conversation 
 the story of the fine home she came from, the 
 elegant people who are on her calling list, the 
 trip to Europe she expects to take next year; 
 the stupid old fellow who is forever telling of the 
 things that happened when he was in college, 
 the fine position his son is taking in business or 
 political life, the excellent match his daughter is 
 about to make, — each contented or wretched in 
 proportion to the attention given by others to 
 his weighty personalities — in cases like these the 
 symptoms are so plain, there is little trouble 
 with the diagnosis. 
 
1 82 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 "But I'm sure I'm no egotist," says a reti- 
 cent, sharp-browed man who carries an iceberg 
 atmosphere about with him at least three hundred 
 days of the year. "I seldom talk about myself 
 or my doings. The fact is, I 've felt a hundred 
 times like shooting myself because I 'm such a 
 dunce." 
 
 You no egotist ! Why, my friend, you have 
 a determination to be first and foremost in all 
 things, a purpose as inveterate as that that 
 nerved Alexander to mow down human oppo- 
 nents as men cut grain. You have too much 
 conscience to give the purpose full play, and be- 
 cause you have not brain enough to carry out 
 your mighty egotism, you have a falling out with 
 self. Every now and then you set your will as 
 a flint to be somewhat in the world yet, and the 
 failure leads you to the shooting point. Your 
 egotism is ten times deeper and more dangerous 
 than that of your braggadocio brother. His 
 bubbles to the surface; yours seethes and burns 
 like a pent volcano. Your reticence and dispar- 
 agement of self are chains and rods that your, 
 conscience whispers necessary to keep the giant 
 down. 
 
 "True, true," sighs a sad-faced Christian with 
 a meek drawl of self-depreciation. "Egotism is 
 a great hindrance to grace, and I 'm thankful 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES." 183 
 
 I 'm safe from that snare. I always feel to 
 mourn over my own unworthiness. M 
 
 And yet yours is one of the most inveterate 
 cases of spiritual egotism — if there is such a 
 thing. Half your moping over your narrow 
 usefulness — as you cheat yourself to think it — is 
 really dissatisfaction that you are not regarded 
 specially successful in the work you attempt. 
 If you will analyze the mortification over your 
 failures, you will find that your grief is not 
 usually because the Master's work is suffering 
 loss, but because you yourself are likely to come 
 out minus the eclat that is so very agreeable an 
 incense to burn before the ego. 
 
 From observing these follies in ourselves and 
 others, we have come to conclude that ordinarily 
 the pain we suffer over hard circumstances, per- 
 sonal incompetence, lack of opportunity, possi- 
 ble, probable, and actual failure, which we call 
 having the blues, is simply the result of more or 
 less acute egotism, that can be gotten rid of only 
 by remedies that go back of the physical, back 
 even of the mental, and take hold of the spir- 
 itual life. 
 
 Webster defines egotism "a passionate love 
 of self, leading a man to consider every thing as 
 connected with his own person, and to prefer 
 himself to every thing in the world." 
 
184 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 Man has been sagely called a microcosm. 
 This ridiculous passion makes every " little 
 world" the center of the universe; as if each 
 planet and satellite and speck of star dust should 
 glance grandly around through the infinite 
 spaces, and stretch its tiny rays to enlighten all, 
 feeling its wonderful self the central point, the 
 mainspring, the moving power of the whole ; and 
 then, if every planet, sun, and system did not 
 in some way reflect its infinitesimal glory, it 
 should fold in its rays as if it would mantle itself 
 in gloom. Forsooth its efforts at shining are so 
 utterly unappreciated that it may as well give 
 up all attempts thereat, and punish the perverse 
 indifference. 
 
 Egotism attacks us so early \ we can not note 
 its incipiency. We dawn upon ourselves so 
 gradually, and so many of our earlier entries are 
 written over, or rubbed from the record, we can 
 not decipher the date of the birth of our self- 
 consciousness. Richter is the only one I know 
 who gives the when and where of his first cog- 
 nizance of self — his discovery of the ego: Ich 
 bin ein ich. 
 
 A little undue attention, an amount of in- 
 dulgence that it is a pleasure to give, and almost 
 immediately the child is brought under the 
 power of egotism. Under the hot-house devel* 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES." 185 
 
 opment process, all the pert sayings and pretty 
 doings rehearsed before the helpless innocent 
 while he is subjected to an infinity of adulations 
 and flatteries, it will be strange if you do not 
 see the self smirk in his eye almost as soon as 
 he can go alone. 
 
 The little maiden sulking in the corner be- 
 cause she can not have the very finest doll her 
 imagination can conceive, the small boy who is 
 ready to burst into violent indignation because 
 he can not whip every body of his size, and be 
 acknowledged the prince and paragon in every 
 mannish line — these baby humans are already 
 in the advanced stages of the disease; and, ten 
 chances to one, their very best friends by the 
 sweetmeats given in mistaken tenderness have 
 thrown them into the paroxysm. 
 
 Our school work is so planned that we run the 
 risk of a strong development of egotism by our 
 efforts to arouse children to a necessary mental 
 effort. So perverse is humanity even in the 
 dewy morning time, there seems to be only one 
 way of getting the lumbering, clumsy intellectual 
 machinery in motion — that is, by stirring up the 
 egotism. " Emulation/' minces the teacher; 
 "Leaving off head," shout the children. All 
 the same, a strengthened reiteration of the "Oh, 
 how pretty!" of the nursery — a making of 
 
1 86 DIAMOND BUST. 
 
 each child's consciousness the center of the 
 universe. 
 
 Thus, in the cradle, through the school years 
 and on, egotism is pampered and cultured. It 
 grows with the growth, and strengthens with the 
 strength, till its fibers become so interwoven 
 with the very tissue of the being its removal is 
 like cutting a tumor from a vital organ — almost 
 equivalent to taking the life of the patient. In 
 mature years not only do flatterers, who try to 
 secure favors from us through our vanity, in- 
 crease our opinion of our own importance, but 
 our very efforts at self-improvement lead in the 
 same direction. 
 
 Each human soul is a grand temple built by 
 the Lord for his worship. Wonderful, ornate, 
 glorious, but in ruins. Gates broken, avenues 
 choked up, walls prostrate, arches fallen. When 
 one looks into his own spirit, when he walks 
 over the rubbish of wrecked powers, stumbling 
 upon fragments of rarest architecture, bits of 
 richest carving and gilding, jewels that might 
 blaze in a seraph's crown, he can but feel the 
 excellence of this masterpiece of God's handi- 
 work. His language is a risky vehicle trundling 
 over a rough causeway, fit only for baggage-trains 
 laden with animal needs — he can bring no one 
 into the shattered splendor. He can carry few 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES." 187 
 
 specimens out. He can not explore the inner 
 sanctuary of any other life. So he comes to 
 think, though in ruins, his is the temple, par excel- 
 lence. He tries to clear the avenues, set up the 
 arches, polish the gems, and as he grows enthu- 
 siastic unless law checks his careless hand, he 
 may wrench the guards from other lives, and 
 tear them to pieces to build up his own. Thus 
 did that prince of egotists, the great Napoleon. 
 
 Those diseases are most to be dreaded that 
 skulk like an Indian enemy, or glide like ser- 
 pents through the by-ways leading to the life. 
 In egotism, as in consumption, the patient, up 
 to the very last, hour, clings to the hope that it 
 is a mistake. 
 
 If you are sure you at least are exempt, set 
 a guard over your thoughts for one-half day. 
 See how carefully you hide any fact about your- 
 self that is not altogether creditable. How in- 
 geniously, and yet apparently without intention, 
 you parade the items that reflect honor upon 
 self. Your visit to the White House is sure to 
 slip into the talk, while your sojourn in the 
 backwoods cabin among your poor relatives 
 never seems quite suited to point a moral, and 
 adorn a tale. 
 
 How much more agreeable it is to have 
 strangers regard you richer or better educated 
 
1 88 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 than you really are, than to have them make 
 the opposite mistake. Not that you mean to 
 deceive! Oh, no. But the habit of exalting 
 self is so strong, you move in that direction 
 without a noticeable volition. 
 
 If one touches yourself, how you resent the 
 injury! He may strike at the selves of ten 
 other people, and you can find a palliation for 
 the offense. 
 
 If we detect in ourselves the symptoms of 
 egotism, we will certainly desire a cure. Our 
 very selfishness might prompt us to this ; for not 
 only does egotism make itself and all about un- 
 happy by its exactions and discontent, it defeats 
 its own purpose. This is illustrated by success in 
 scholarship. As long as one is occupied with 
 an earnest intention to get the surest knowledge 
 of the theme in hand, he can but get on in his 
 studies. But as soon as his success begins to 
 attract attention and subject him to flatteries, he 
 begins to fail, if he heeds them. 
 
 He is like a boy playing in the snow. He 
 can make a straight line of steps as long as he 
 keeps his eye on the goal ; but when he looks at 
 his own feet and notes every track, he makes a 
 zigzag line in spite of himself. 
 
 The orator who is so full of his subject that 
 he forgets every thing in trying to crowd upon 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES" 189 
 
 his hearers the thought that stirs his own soul, 
 is the one who is pronounced eloquent; while 
 the one who forgets his subject in himself usu- 
 ally fails. 
 
 In no department of effort is egotism more 
 surely fatal to success than in religious work. 
 Those who have been specially used by God to 
 carry forward his work are in great danger of 
 this infirmity. Their good works come to be 
 spoken of with praise; and they find it easy to 
 lose sight of the fact that all reformatory power 
 is vested in the Lord Jesus Christ, and their 
 only hope of success is in humble reliance upon 
 his working in them and with them. 
 
 When one forgets that he is only 
 
 "A messenger at Christ's gateway 
 Waiting for his command," 
 
 he ceases to rely upon the Lord, and he soon 
 finds himself shorn of strength. 
 
 He may keep up the forms of earnestness. 
 
 he may use the tones and forms of expression 
 that belonged to the time when he was full of 
 power by the Spirit of the Lord, his talk ma}* be 
 full of stories of the old days when the pleasure 
 of the Lord prospered in his hand, yet his 
 effort comes to be like the mechanical move- 
 ments of a corpse, loathsome and disgusting. 
 His egotism has killed his usefulness; and un- 
 
190 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 less there is a revivification, the sooner the dead 
 is buried out of our sight the better. 
 
 Can egotism be aired? Can one who has be- 
 come conscious that much of his thought is 
 taken up with the interests of self, leaving but 
 little vigor for high intellectual effort, or earnest 
 spiritual work, one who finds his very humility 
 a misnomer for self pity, his despondency over 
 his failures simply a morbid craving for self-adu- 
 lation — can such a one hope for a cure? 
 
 There can be but one answer. If one hopes 
 to enter heaven, he must be saved from this in- 
 firmity — this sin. Otherwise he would not have 
 peace even in the home of the glorified. 
 
 We who do not believe in purgatory must 
 look for a cure in this life. 
 
 By what means can this be effected? Again, 
 we find but one answer. Self-salvation is out 
 of the question. We can not fortify self against 
 self. It holds the inner fortress. The very 
 pean of victory over its fall may herald its re-en- 
 thronement. 
 
 We can not reduce it to surrender by scourg- 
 ings and starvation. Romanists have wrought 
 upon that problem unsuccessfully for ages. 
 
 There can be nothing in the hour and article 
 of death to work a radical change in the moral 
 nature. 
 
HOW TO GET RID OF "THE BLUES." 191 
 
 We must be liberated by a power not our- 
 selves, above ourselves, in this life, or we must 
 wear the chain forever. 
 
 Our only hope is in the word of the Master: 
 * 6 If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye 
 shall be free indeed." 
 
 The salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ is the 
 only cure for this inwrought, over-mastering sel- 
 fishness. Unless the atonement itself is a fail- 
 ure — a tragical mistake, in Christ there must be 
 an unfailing remedy for this and all other sins. 
 
 A reasonable command presupposes power 
 to obey. God's injunctions are equivalent to 
 promises. If we do our best to obey, he is 
 pledged by his Word and held by consistency 
 with his own declarations of purpose to give us 
 needed grace and help. 
 
 Unless the commands, "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself," "Rejoice evermore," "In 
 every thing give thanks," be sheer nonsense, the 
 power to yield complete obedience is promised 
 in the all-sufficient grace of Christ. 
 
 There have been examples of men and women 
 being completely cured of egotism by the power 
 of grace, fiery souls that have become all tender- 
 ness and charity, turbulent spirits that have 
 been changed into gentleness and patience; com- 
 plaining, petulant egotists that have learned to 
 
192 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 give self utterly and joyfully for the salvation 
 ' of others. 
 
 It was said of St. Jerome, "He subdued the 
 wild beasts of the desert, but it took the Master 
 of all to tame the lion, Jerome.'' 
 
 When we lay our selfish souls in the hands 
 of the Great Physician for a cure, he gives us to 
 know the meaning of those words of the apostle,- 
 "All things work together for good to them that 
 love God." We rest from care of the adjust- 
 ment of our relations and our work, for we cast 
 all our care on him who careth for us. We are 
 careful for nothing, but in every thing by prayer 
 and supplication with thanksgiving w 7 e let our 
 requests be made known unto God, and the 
 peace of God which passeth all understanding 
 shall keep our hearts and minds through Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 We wall be able to say without hyperbole, 
 " Thanks be unto God which ahvays causeth us 
 to triumph in Christ." 
 
GETTING RICH. 193 
 
 WANT is universal. It tugs at every human 
 heart. It sobs in the infant's wail. It 
 echoes in the old man's moan. It jangles 
 through our shouts of mirth. Its discords grate 
 and grind in our songs of triumph. 
 
 The being that bears sway in this evil world 
 is not the man of paradise with the chrism of 
 God's "very good" upon his forehead. This 
 man wants persistently, perpetually. He de- 
 mands violently. He seizes furiously. A child 
 in reason, a beast in appetite. 
 
 Yet he mistakes forever. He does not un- 
 derstand his own need. It is the mind that 
 wants. It is the soul that starves. Will we 
 never learn this? When we do, I think the mil- 
 lennium will not be very far away. This cry of 
 want is ceaseless. It will not down. It is 
 heard alike in cabin and cottage, hut and palace. 
 Listen at the door of the heart of that savage. 
 He gormandizes like an anaconda, and lies in 
 the sun like a lizard. He cares for his mate and 
 
 13 
 
194 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 her young about as the lion does, sheds blood 
 as ruthlessly as the tiger; yet through the beastly 
 wrangling of passions, the low swash of the tide 
 of brutish appetites, and the yell of cruel butchery 
 sounds ever that moaning undertone of the bet- 
 ter being, — hungry, hungry, hungry! 
 
 Turn to the man who sits a king. Not a 
 king made of purple and gems, into whose hand 
 has chanced to fall a scepter, but the one who 
 rules in the thought realm, and makes laws for 
 potentates. Listen to his secret heart-throbs. 
 Is he satisfied? He, too, feels a pinching, wear- 
 ing, perpetual want. 
 
 The present human state is abnormal. We 
 are shipwrecked on an enemy's shore. Stunned, 
 stupid, we can not decipher the cabalistic char- 
 acters of the past. We do not know the vernac- 
 ular of present events. We will not even bend 
 our ear to the whispers of our own inner being. 
 What wonders would be wrought by giving one 
 half hour of each twenty-four to the study of self- 
 needs. Listen to your own better life. It will 
 tell you strange, new things. You have treated 
 yourself as a nurse does the baby she doses out 
 of the world. It moans — down with an opiate. 
 It wails with hunger — thrust a sweetened, sick- 
 ening compound down its throat. It writhes 
 with pain — toss it, shake it, trot it, give it any 
 
GETTING RICH. 195 
 
 thing, every thing but the patient attention, the 
 sure care and healthful food for which it is dying. 
 
 Want prompts to acquire. A babe is hungry. 
 It thrusts into its mouth its fist, or the corner 
 of its cradle quilt, now a bit of broken pottery, 
 then a flower pretty to look upon, but with a 
 poison drop at its heart, — whatever comes within 
 reach of the eager, senseless clutch. As aim- 
 lessly do grown-up children struggle to acquire. 
 
 One attempts to satisfy his hunger with epi- 
 curean luxuries. Dyspepsia and gout stand 
 guard, but he will have these dainties for the 
 animal, no matter about the consequence. 
 
 Another seeks elegant adornments. Worms 
 from Europe, sheep from Asia, and small, wild 
 creatures from Arctic deserts are put under tax. 
 Human lives are woven and stitched into his 
 fabrics, and yet he tires of their beauty. It can 
 not quiet the inner clamor. 
 
 Another translates the cry into a demand 
 for social preferment. He must rise above the 
 common herd. So he tugs and toils, cuts fur- 
 rows in his forehead, wears grooves in his heart, 
 and scrambles upward. Yet the want, like the 
 sea's eternal moan, surges ever through his life, 
 only stronger for the aloneness of the altitude. 
 
 Another, a trifle wiser, thinks to purchase 
 silence with choice mental viands. He seeks 
 
196 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 rare authors, books bubbling with the ripe, red 
 wine of poesy, resonant with the grand, heroic 
 chimes sounded down through the ages by noble 
 souls, — yet never for an hour does the hunger 
 cease its gnawings. 
 
 Most people think to satisfy themselves with 
 money and the fine things it will purchase. Only 
 fabulous misers who starve in garrets, bathing 
 their leathery arms in golden coin, love money 
 for its clink and glitter. The multitude seek it 
 as the sinews of appetite, taste, and ambition. 
 One has been trodden upon in his babyhood, 
 chilled in his boyish years, his ragged coat jeered 
 at on the play-ground. He sees that fine cloth- 
 ing brings gentle treatment and what passes for 
 respect. He is cold and hungry. He must 
 have gentleness and attention. They are in the 
 market for gold. So he sets his purpose like a 
 flint to get gold. 
 
 Another lacks courage. He rates himself at 
 a low figure. If he can get the stamp of the 
 world's mint upon his coinage he will believe it 
 genuine. If he can have a good market price 
 for his wares he will settle it that they are 
 valuable. He will be satisfied, though he loses 
 within an hour all they bring. 
 
 One has been robbed by death, and left quite 
 alone, even in the chill morning gray. He fancies 
 
GETTING RICH. 197 
 
 that money will buy friends, so he also gives 
 himself to getting wealth. 
 
 We plume ourselves that we are not ideal— 
 we are the plain, sensible people who say what 
 we mean and believe what we say. Imaginative 
 folk are they who gaze at the moon and make 
 rhymes. Yet try us by placing a bit of paper 
 in our hands with the national promise to pay in 
 its criss-cross of engraved lines. It might mean 
 to the monomaniac in the garret a thousand 
 shining dollars. The sensualist clasps it in his 
 eager palms and sees wine sparkling, cigar 
 smoke wreathing, horses prancing, gems flash- 
 ing, light feet tinkling, music rippling, laughter 
 ringing. 
 
 To the artistic, it means a sail on the moon- 
 lit, castled Rhine, Swiss mountain views, studies 
 of the old masters, rambles among ruins of 
 Rome and Athens. 
 
 To the literary, it represents walks alone with 
 calm-browed old sages, hymns of immortal vigor, 
 racy chats with spicy moderns. 
 
 The dullest dolt holding it in his hand, the 
 magic little possessive "mine" tingling on his 
 tongue tip, would hardly fail to see in it the 
 things for which he thinks the want within him 
 clamoring. 
 
 We talk of the idealism of ancient pagans 
 
T98 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 who looked into the calm, mild eyes of the 
 sacred ox to see the Spirit of Eternal Power and 
 Patience — forgetting the beast in the idea for 
 which it stood. We are not a whit less imagi- 
 native. We seize bits of green-tinted, pictured 
 paper, to acquire which we have risen early and 
 sat up late and eaten the bread of carefulness — 
 we think we see in them the satisfying of the 
 needs that crowd us to effort. 
 
 The ignorant Hindoo worships the image he 
 carries in his robe. The Brahmin may claim to 
 have his thought upon the spirit represented by 
 the idol. Yet the soul of each is bowed before 
 a low sensualism of his own production. The 
 name matters little. The mode is of small con- 
 sequence. If we were to demolish all the idols 
 of heathendom, unless by some divine process 
 we could get into the pagan soul a nobler idea 
 of the Infinite, the result would be only a new 
 harvest for the image-makers, a new growth of 
 sensuality. To correct the disordered expres- 
 sion of our sense of need, the ideal must be 
 renovated. The want must be interpreted aright. 
 
 Many of our modes of getting rich are honor- 
 able; but others are evil, even under the sanc- 
 tion of law. If a man chances to be born the 
 heir of a coronet or a crown, that accident en- 
 titles him to the result of the hard work of 
 
GETTING RICH. 199 
 
 scores of others who must starve, body and soul 
 for his enrichment. 
 
 The trouble lies back of the grinding and 
 oppression, the thefts and robberies. There is 
 an unsound idea in the foundation of the social 
 structure — a wrong rendering of the need — a de- 
 termination to be rich in purse only, and not in 
 mind and soul. 
 
 Under this regime three people have to be 
 ground up, spirit and muscle, that the fourth 
 may have the means of satisfying his hunger. 
 The question turns upon who shall be the for- 
 tunate fourth in this struggle. The answer is 
 usually the old formula of the survival of the 
 fittest — the strongest of sinew or brain or will, 
 or by that aggregate of will, known as law. 
 
 If they who have power to put others under 
 tax comprehended that their own want could 
 be satisfied only by the enduring riches, they 
 would find means to live in the good and the 
 right way, without harm to others. 
 
 We begin early to give our children a wrong 
 bias in this matter. The w T ant within sets the 
 little one reaching after whatever is desirable. 
 Parents, too thoughtless, too indolent, or too in- 
 tent on getting money to give due attention 
 even to so w r eighty a matter as the shaping of 
 the characters of their children, satisfy them- 
 
200 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 selves by flinging a legal barrier in the path of 
 the inclination. There is no effort to teach the 
 restless, grasping little being that it is a higher 
 pleasure to give to make others happy, to share, 
 to know. 
 
 He soon comes to believe that he must pos- 
 sess if he would enjoy; an error in the formulae 
 of the first chapter. 
 
 Then the tin savings-bank for hoarding pen- 
 nies. To buy comforts for the sick child back 
 in the alley, bread for the poor, Bibles for the 
 heathen? Oh, no. To teach him to be saving. 
 "To see how much he can get." Your child 
 hardly needs to be taught that he must get and 
 save money if he would be happy. The world 
 will wear that lesson into him soon enough. 
 Possibly as a birth-gift he has received quite too 
 strong a tendency in that direction. 
 
 Mother, would you look for the ripened fruit 
 of your careless sowing? See yourself thirty 
 years hence, infirm, old, alone. Your son will 
 not starve you in a garret. He is too proud for 
 that — too humane, possibly — but not too humane 
 to starve you in a corner of his mansion. He 
 has grown rich. The soil of his heart is tramped 
 down, trodden hard by the ceaseless round of 
 bargains, sales, moneyed schemes. His life's 
 horizon is narrowed, and its atmosphere has 
 
/ GETTING RICH. 20 1 
 
 grown cold, till he has never for you a word of 
 cheer or tenderness. He orders for you delicate 
 food and expensive clothing, but he withholds 
 the cup of cold water so sorely needed in your 
 outworn life. Self-centered and sordid through 
 greed of gain, he follows the bent you gave him 
 when you had him under your hand. 
 
 , We must make our children understand in 
 the outset that to be happy is not to gratify 
 every appetite like a mere animal, nor to strut 
 about in showy plumage like a peacock, nor to 
 keep upon the crest of the wave of excitement, 
 forever amused and entertained; but, rather, joy 
 is found in doing, good, conquering self, making 
 others glad, living by the Heavenly Father's 
 law. Children can be taught these lessons. 
 We have seen the experiment carried out suc- 
 cessfully. 
 
 "Oh, yes," sighs an overtasked mother; "it 
 is easy enough to toss off fine theories from a 
 pen's point; but just step into my place once." 
 I know "mother" is a synonym for "sacri- 
 fice." I know there are mothers who stagger 
 under the entire load of training the family — a 
 load that is quite enough for two pairs of 
 shoulders — while the senior partner of the firm 
 gives himself altogether to the commissary de- 
 partment; but my exhortation is intended spe- 
 
2 02 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 cially for those who make eating and drinking 
 and appearing well the chief end of man. Bet- 
 ter a thousand times leave the trimming off the 
 dress and put the love into the heart. 
 
 When a boy is grown, he will be not a whit 
 less a man for having worn garments minus 
 ruffles and embroidery. He will be infinitely 
 nobler if you spend the time carefully culturing 
 the germs of thought and the growth of unself- 
 ish purpose. Now is your time. We reap in 
 Autumn what we sow in Spring. 
 
 Novelists help on our foolish notions about 
 getting rich. The old trick of having a chrys- 
 alis page or artist burst suddenly into a grand 
 duke or prince is worn out, but the principle 
 holds all the same. Hero and heroine must 
 marry and be rich. Moral: Success equals 
 w T ealth ; wealth equals happiness. 
 
 Practical lesson: young man, get rich, honor- 
 ably, if convenient, but at all events get rich. 
 Young lady, marry a fortune; at all hazards 
 catch a rich husband. 
 
 Society also helps strengthen this false order 
 of things. Two friends meet. One inquires 
 how a mutual acquaintance is getting along. 
 These are sensible men. The question must re- 
 fer to the growth and culture of the mind that 
 is avowedly of prime importance. They are 
 
GETTING RICH. 203 
 
 Christians. It must look in the direction of the 
 man's spiritual interests. Nothing of the kind. 
 It means simply, How much money does he 
 make. In what style does he live. ''Oh, he is 
 doing splendidly." How? Working out a plan 
 for helping others into a better life? Turning 
 many to righteousness? Growing in God's good 
 will? No, indeed. Little cares he for moral 
 distinctions or benefits. "Doing splendidly," 
 in every-day Saxon, is simply getting money 
 and spending it upon one's self. 
 
 The notions of society are miasmatic. Un- 
 less one carries a powerful disinfectant, he can 
 but take in the poison. Only now and then one 
 uses this precaution, so the majority take the 
 fever of getting rich. That little adjective may 
 mean a red flannel shirt and a string of glass 
 beads, or it may mean a kingdom. It may 
 stand for a big potato patch and an immeasur- 
 able supply of whisky, or it may represent an 
 additional empire. Some fling society's "thus 
 far" in her face, and take to the high seas with 
 the prospect of being launched into perdition 
 from the rope's end. Others cheat behind 
 counters, more cowardly, but with no less risk 
 of final loss. Some wait for gold to drop from 
 dead hands; others plod on, year after year, to 
 get rich by steady work. 
 
204 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 We may flatter ourselves that we do not care 
 for money. Possibly not, according to the aspi- 
 rations of miserly A, epicurean B, or dashing 
 young C; but it will be strange if our faces are 
 not set towards some other point which means 
 the same thing. 
 
 We are saying to ourselves, ""Now, this sac- 
 rifice, this strain of will, nerve, or muscle, and 
 then such a luxury, such style by and by." Here 
 is a chaos of the odds and ends of desirable 
 things which go to the make-up of a fortune, 
 and which will satisfy no more when once ac- 
 quired than do the cheap, simple purchases of 
 to-day. 
 
 Nothing can be more hopeless than the at- 
 tempt to satiate the soul's thirst with riches or 
 the best that they can buy. They who have 
 most money are the most eager to increase their 
 wealth. 
 
 Some gentlemen in a public room in New 
 York City were discussing the amount of prop- 
 erty necessary to satisfy one completely. One 
 man thought a quarter of a million would be 
 enough. " No," said another, " I shall not leave 
 business till I have at least half a million." 
 " Pooh!" said a third, "one ought to have two 
 or three millions." 
 
 Just then a money-king hurried into the 
 
GETTING RICH. 205 
 
 room — one of those who always go as if the 
 hounds of starvation were snarling at their heels. 
 With an apology for detaining him they asked 
 how much he thought necessary to satisfy the 
 desire for gain. " A little more ! " he snapped, as 
 he rushed on. His reply emphasized the fact 
 . that acquiring only whets the appetite to ac- 
 quire. The acquisition of property does not se- 
 cure happiness. 
 
 Fortunately very few reach the goal toward 
 which so many tug and strain. And the few 
 who call themselves "successful" are the most 
 unsuccessful of all. 
 
 How seldom do you see a rich old man whose 
 face is sweet, and calm, and restful. Most of them 
 in seeking monetary wealth have neglected to ac- 
 quire mental riches and spiritual affluence. See 
 the ridges of care, the furrows of pain upon their 
 foreheads, and the tense, sharp lines about their 
 keen, uneasy eyes — lines of bitterness and disap- 
 pointment. No need of prodigal sons and un- 
 grateful daughters to plant with thorns their pil- 
 low of death. Long as is their rent-roll and 
 profitable as are their stocks, they themselves are 
 
 " Heart-bare, heart-hungry, very poor." 
 
 Of all the calentures that lure to the grave, 
 of all the ignes fatui that dance over death mires, 
 none is so deadly as the greed of gain. Not 
 
206 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 alone is the body cheated out of rest and care in 
 its treadmill, but the mind is robbed of devel- 
 opment and the soul is wrecked eternally. 
 
 The Master, who never used words carelessly, 
 said, "How hardly shall they that have riches 
 enter the kingdom of heaven !" 
 
 We pity those who trudge ever in the service 
 of toil, or slip on the icy stair of fortune, but 
 how infinitely more do they deserve our commis- 
 eration who succeed in building for themselves a 
 gilded mausoleum, a tomb not only for the burial 
 of the poor outworn body but of the mind and 
 soul. 
 
 " Thus did a choking wanderer in the desert cry, 
 * O that Allah one prayer would grant before I die, 
 That I might stand up to my knees in a cool lake, 
 My burning tongue and parching throat in it to slake.' 
 No lake he saw, and when they found him in the waste 
 A bag of gems and gold lay just before his face. 
 And his dead hand a paper, with this writing, grasped, 
 1 Worthless was wealth, when dying for water, I gasped.' 
 Be diadem or helmet on thy head, 
 It must be arrow-pierced, and thou lie dead. 
 Then every man whose mind is wisdom-stocked, 
 Will strive to have his wealth in Heaven locked." 
 
GIVING BY RULE. 207 
 
 THE world is in revolt, and God's main effort 
 toward it is to bring about a surrender. 
 
 It is a principle of healthful reconstruction 
 that each loyal subject shall use all his strength 
 to bring the rest into subjection. God would con- 
 script every thing in which there -is power, and 
 use it in the conquest of these revolted provinces. 
 
 If all who surrender to God would observe 
 this obligation I doubt if the next century would 
 dawn upon a single rebel. The trouble is, very 
 few of us are in downright earnest to carry out 
 God's plans. 
 
 We hire some one as economically as possible 
 to offer eloquent prayers for us, and give us fine 
 disquisitions upon morality ; we give the pittance 
 that is teased out of us by some one who denies 
 himself almost the necessaries of life that he may 
 make us see our duty toward the neglected 
 masses, and then we settle back in our snug 
 pews voting ourselves quite respectable, comfort- 
 able Christians. 
 
208 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 God may collect <Z7'rears of us by force of 
 arms. He obliged this republic, a few years 
 since, to pay for cannon and ironclads what she 
 would not give for school-houses, and churches. 
 
 If we will not evangelize the masses we must 
 keep them under by armed force, and we find 
 that God's police, civilization and Christianity, 
 missionaries and Bibles, are by far the most eco- 
 nomical, considered simply from a financial point 
 of view. Riots and wars force men to give by 
 the thousand in self-defense — men from whose 
 grip a few dollars for God's work are w r renched 
 most difficultly — and the moneyed outlay is by 
 far the cheapest part of their giving. 
 
 Never before were there so many doors open 
 as now to Christian effort. Red-handed war has 
 torn open the rusty gates of sepulchral, old East- 
 ern empires. China, Japan, India, Africa, South 
 America, Mexico, with their swarming millions, 
 are thirsting, dying for the truth of God. If the 
 Christian Church, if Protestant America alone, 
 would give and work as God wills, the world 
 would be evangelized within the century. 
 
 Christianity is based upon self-giving. Christ 
 is God's " unspeakable gift. " They who are one 
 with him in his work must go 
 
 "Toiling up new Calvaries ever, 
 With the cross that turns not back." 
 
GIVING BY RULE. 209 
 
 He who is complete in Christ gives himself 
 for the helping of others as certainly as did Je- 
 sus the Master, not as a propitiatory sacrifice, 
 but as a working force. He ma}' labor with his 
 hands, as did Paul at Corinth ; he may write dic- 
 tionaries and French grammars, as did John Wes- 
 ley ; yet his one thought and purpose are to get 
 all with whom he has contact, and whom he can 
 reach with any sort of influence, back to their 
 allegiance to God. And this is the normal Chris- 
 tian life. Any consecration less than this is un- 
 sound, unhealthy, defective. 
 
 When one has really given all to God's work 
 it is unnecessary to argue the duty of giving 
 money to carry on its operations. The greater in- 
 cludes the less. There is no use in prating about 
 a " complete consecration " if one holds his dol- 
 lars with a stingy grip, while the Lord's work is 
 suffering for financial help. 
 
 It is a slender piety that lays by its wealth in 
 diamonds and laces, elegant houses, handsome 
 grounds, broad acres, bonds and mortgages, 
 while the work of the world's evangelization is 
 held back every-where for lack of money ; labor- 
 ers waiting to be sent to the whitened fields, 
 those already at work recalled, schools closed, 
 and men and women perishing in black ignorance 
 by the thousand. 
 
 M 
 
210 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 A few Christians give liberally. A smaller 
 number give methodically. Before the Church 
 meets fully its obligation in this regard every one 
 who makes a public profession of faith in Christ 
 must take upon himself a pledge to give by 
 rule, and to the extent of his ability. 
 
 Nothing is well done that is not done by 
 system — according to law. This holds in the 
 simplest mechanical work. You can not make 
 so much as a proper hoe handle without bring- 
 ing it into right lines by the laws of mechanics. 
 
 We see this principle wrought out in mone- 
 tary affairs. Two men start in business at the 
 same time. One has a good capital and a fine 
 opening for trade. He invests carelessly, deals 
 recklessly, receives large return for some arti- 
 cles, loses heavily on others, and spends money 
 freely, because he believes that his profits will 
 warrant generous living. He wakes up some 
 gloomy morning to find that his gay craft has 
 been steadily a-leak, and his fine fortune is a 
 wreck. 
 
 The other starts with a small capital, works 
 it carefully, and by rule. He knows each Sat- 
 urday night his approximate assets and liabili- 
 ties, and guages his outlays by the figures in his 
 ledger. After a few patient, plodding years he 
 finds himself with a competence. 
 
GIVING BY R ULE. 2 1 1 
 
 This need of living by rule is manifest, also, 
 in hygiene. Suppose a child is fed once an hour 
 or once in twenty-four, just as he can clamor 
 somebody into attention, how would he thrive? 
 
 Suppose a man exercises one day till he 
 drops from exhaustion, and lies motionless for a 
 week, sleeps forty-eight hours, and then keeps 
 awake till nature shuts his eyes by force, fasts a 
 week and surfeits a fortnight, what do you im- 
 agine would be his physical condition? 
 
 Christianity has added fifteen years to the aver- 
 age of human life, and probably in no one hy- 
 gienic point has it had the advantage more cer- 
 tainly than in its eating, sleeping, and working 
 by rule. In all these matters its practice and 
 methods are directly opposite to those of the 
 savages. 
 
 Suppose education were carried on in a des- 
 ultory fashion — a nibble of Greek, a browse of 
 Latin or German as the inclination might be, 
 mathematics or natural sciences to the taste, fact 
 or fiction according to preference — what sort of 
 scholars would we have with such a curriculum? 
 
 If I were sent outside of the Church for the 
 raw material out of which a strong Christian was 
 to be made, I should take the one who had 
 been trained to live his physical and mental life 
 by rule. He would have his strength well in 
 
2 1 2 DIAMOND D VST. 
 
 hand, his energies under rein, where they could 
 be available. 
 
 The Church should have all her force, talent, 
 culture, money, general influence, where she 
 could lay her hand upon them and make the 
 very most of each item ; and this can never be 
 till each individual member learns to give as 
 well as live by rule. 
 
 The very etymon of the word religion from 
 the Latin religare, to bind anew, indicates the 
 system to which its adherents are to be held. 
 
 Of all people Methodists are most at fault if 
 they fail to work by rule. Some imagine that 
 the grand religious awakening of the eighteenth 
 century was a general riot of glorious irregular- 
 ities. They could not be more mistaken. That 
 freshet of Gospel truth that overflowed the mas- 
 sive, ivy-draped walls of the old Anglican church, 
 and leaped John Calvin's iron barriers, obeyed 
 law as certainly as do the planets in their orbits. 
 They who wrought most wondrously in that 
 mighty current were people who most positively 
 slept and rose, talked and prayed, preached and 
 wrote, lived and gave by rule. 
 
 Look at Wesley's prodigious methods. We 
 think it wonderful for a machinist to hold an 
 entire manufactory in his head — every wheel re- 
 volving, every hammer beating, every ounce of 
 
GIVING BY RULE, 213 
 
 power weighed and adjusted in his tough, tire- 
 less brain. In Wesley's thought was the com- 
 plex mechanism of bands, classes, societies, con- 
 ferences, a membership of all castes, from 
 Kingswood to the court; a ministry of all orders, 
 lay, clerical, and episcopal. Think you his Her- 
 culean labors could have been wrought without 
 the closest system? 
 
 We have a record of his beneficence. When 
 his income was thirty pounds a year he lived on 
 twenty-eight, and gave two. When it was sixty, 
 he lived on twenty-eight and gave thirty-two. 
 When it amounted to a hundred and twentv, he 
 kept himself to the frugal twenty-eight and gave 
 ninety-two. It is estimated that, from the pro- 
 ceeds of his publications and other sources of 
 income, he gave in all over one hundred and 
 fifty thousand dollars. His last entry in his be- 
 nevolence account reads thus: "For upwards of 
 eighty-six years I have kept my accounts ex- 
 actly. I will not attempt it any longer, being 
 satisfied with the continual conviction that I 
 save all I can, and give all I can, that is, all 
 I have." 
 
 God's idea of a ritual was given in minutiae 
 to the Jews. Their one temple was built under 
 his direction, and it was a marvel of beauty from 
 base to cap-stone. Its service was most expen- 
 
214 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 sive. In the very outset one twelfth of the peo- 
 ple were set apart for teachers and priests. The 
 other eleven-twelfths were to support them, re- 
 lieving them from the necessity of laboring for 
 their daily bread. It was distinctly specified 
 that every Jew should give one-fifth of his in- 
 come to the service of education and religion. 
 
 We believe every Christian ought to give at 
 least one-tenth of his income to the work of 
 God ; one-half as much as the benevolence of 
 the old dispensation. 
 
 This plan of giving a tenth to the Lord 
 w r ould be economical. Nine-tenths of our finan- 
 cial troubles grow out of a slipshod keeping of 
 accounts. The large percentage of business ven- 
 tures that result in failure is probably owing to 
 the fact that many go a little beyond their abil- 
 ity, hoping that by some turn in the wheel they 
 can meet their obligations and come through 
 safe. A financial gale strikes the sea. The 
 waves dash higher than they expected and the 
 outcome is wreck and loss. If they had kept 
 their accounts so that they could know at any 
 hour just the condition of their finance, they 
 could have prepared for the storm in time. 
 
 These careless business people never can tell 
 exactly how they stand. They never know the 
 precise appreciation or depreciation, of a piece of 
 
GIVIXG BY RULE. 215 
 
 their property. They hope it is about so much, 
 and they are apt to look at their belongings as 
 people do when they eat cherries with magnify- 
 ing glasses on so as to make them seem large. 
 Facts are relentless, however, and the bank- 
 ruptcy that might have been spared if a plain, 
 simple, sure reckoning had been taken, comes on 
 apace. Women are accused of ruining their hus- 
 bands by their extravagance, when, as the case 
 often stands, it was the man's careless method 
 with his accounts, making himself and his wife 
 think themselves worth much more than they 
 really were, that did the mischief. 
 
 If one promises God one-tenth of his income 
 he can not be honest unless he knows all his re- 
 ceipts and expenditures that he may get at the 
 exact amount due his benevolence account. 
 
 One ought in self-defense to give at least one- 
 tenth of his income. Covetousness is a cardinal 
 sin. One-twelfth of Christ's body-guard fell 
 through covetousness. Christ was so poor he 
 had not where to lay his head. The expenses 
 of his itinerant tours were paid by women who 
 risked all to follow him. He had to work a mir- 
 acle to get a piece of coin for tribute money. 
 Certainly the disciple of such a poverty-stricken 
 teacher was in far less danger from love of gain 
 than we who have houses and lands, stocks and 
 
216 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 bonds. It behooves us to walk carefully where 
 an apostle fell. 
 
 Very few escape an attack of covetousness. 
 Many who are liberal while they are poor, dis- 
 cover a thirst for gain as soon as they begin to 
 acquire. In cholera times we use disinfectants. 
 Systematic giving is God's guarantee against the 
 miasmatic taint of avarice. Others as good as we 
 have grown avaricious. Ten chances to one we 
 will fall into the same snare unless we take spe- 
 cial means for its prevention. 
 
 Those who have done the most for God's 
 work have been among the most self-denying 
 and systematic givers. Mary Fletcher, though 
 a woman of fine tastes and culture, lived upon 
 twenty-five dollars a year and gave the rest of 
 her income. 
 
 Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, gave up her 
 liveried servants and expensive equipages, selling 
 even her jewels, and living in the simplest style 
 that she might have the means to buy and build 
 chapels for the poor, and to turn theaters into 
 places of worship. 
 
 Dr. Coke gave to God's work two fortunes. 
 Near the close of his life he arose in the British 
 Conference and asked for the establishment of a 
 mission in India. He was told there were neither 
 men nor means for the work. He replied, "I 
 
GIVING BY RULE. ' 217 
 
 have yet a small estate of one thousand pounds. 
 I give that and myself with it to go to India. 
 If you refuse my offer you will break my heart." 
 I have read of an English Methodist who looks for 
 divine direction in his business and gives by the 
 Pauline rule, " as God prospers him." A jour- 
 neyman- mechanic, he set up a small business on 
 borrowed capital. Eight years after he pledged 
 to give fifty guineas a day as his missionary sub- 
 scription. Eliza Garrett, of Chicago, to whose 
 benevolence many of the Methodist ministers of 
 the North-west are indebted for their theological 
 education, the foundress of Garrett Biblical Insti- 
 tute, gave all her property for that work, reserv- 
 ing for herself only two hundred dollars a year. 
 
 Giving by rule has Bible sanction. Abraham 
 gave one-tenth, and with God's blessing he be- 
 came a man of princely fortune. 
 
 Jacob went out with his staff, a poor man. 
 At Bethel he vowed to the Lord, " Of all that 
 thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth 
 unto thee." In twenty years he came back rich. 
 
 St. Paul enjoins upon the Churches a weekly 
 benefaction. " Upon the first day of the week 
 let every one of you lay by him in store as God 
 hath prospered him." 
 
 In no part of the work did John Wesley show 
 more skill in handling his forces than in his class 
 
218 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 system. Each leader was to have the care of 
 about twelve persons, not only looking after their 
 spiritual needs as a' sub-pastor, but receiving 
 their contributions for the support of the Gospel 
 and the poor. Every one who joined the 
 Wesleyan Societies must give each week a due 
 proportion of his income for the Lord's work. 
 Wherever his plan was followed there was plenty 
 of money for the needs of the Church. 
 
 In these times of financial pressure when so 
 many of our benevolent enterprises are suffering 
 heavy loss from the lack of means to push their 
 interests, it would be well for us to go back to 
 first principles in our finance. Let every child 
 who comes into the Church as a probationer be 
 taught that at least a penny a week must be 
 given for the support of God's work. Let this 
 be given regularly as an educator in beneficence. 
 Let others give according to their means week 
 after week, and the vexed questions of rented 
 pews, begging speeches at dedications, agents, 
 fairs and festivals would be happily settled to the 
 infinite relief of many excellent people. 
 
 The Roman Catholics are ready enough to 
 take up these plans and make them of the ut- 
 most avail. They have their Society for Propa- 
 gandism, each member of which gives one cent 
 a week. One collects from ten and forwards the 
 
GIVING BY RULE. 219 
 
 dimes to another who sends the dollars to 
 another, each collector gathering and forwarding 
 from ten beneath him, till by the time it reaches 
 the cardinal at Lyons it amounts to hundreds of 
 thousands for pushing forward the plans of the 
 Romish Church. 
 
 Papists never lack money. If a Protestant 
 institution is to be sold for debt, Catholics have 
 the money ready for its purchase, and that money 
 is not from the bounty of the rich but from the 
 littles given by the poor. It is high time for 
 Protestants to begin to use the same wisdom in 
 their financial plans. 
 
 When the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society 
 was organized, many thought it a mistake that its 
 constitution should forbid the taking of general 
 collections. " So much interest in your meeting, 
 ladies, such a tide of enthusiasm, surely if you 
 would pass the baskets you would get hundreds 
 of dollars." " Perhaps so, sir; but what about 
 next year, when our fine talkers would not be 
 here to stir the people ? Better, far better as we 
 believe, the plan of getting the women of the 
 Church to lay aside, always religiously, the little 
 two cents a week. The income will be larger 
 and surer. And then as an educator of the peo- 
 ple this society does more by inducing ten 
 women to give a dollar a year, with the thought 
 
220 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 and prayer that usually accompany such gifts, 
 than by persuading one to give a hundred dollars. " 
 
 A thousand pities that all our benevolences 
 might not be wrought by this same rule; each 
 by a method of its own, but all upon the prin- 
 ciple of gathering the littles steadily and con- 
 stantly from the many. 
 
 But one says: "1 am very poor. One-tenth 
 of my income will be quite too insignificant to 
 offer to the Lord." Let us not forget the widow 
 of whom Christ said, "She hath cast in more 
 than they all." 
 
 Let us be humble enough to give the little, 
 and, though we can ill afford to spare it, let us 
 trust as did the Gentile woman when required to 
 take an extra boarder at the risk of starving her- 
 self and her children. God saw to it that her 
 cruse of oil and barrel of meal did not fail. 
 4 'But I am in debt." People have been known 
 to keep up a lightning-rod of that sort to con- 
 duct off flashing appeals. I believe that if one 
 would use the nine-tenths of his income, giving 
 the other tenth to the Lord's work, he would 
 get out of debt sooner than if he used upon 
 himself the whole. 
 
 We measure our benevolence by that of 
 others in the Church, when the fact is, the 
 Church -does not begin to give as she ought. 
 
GIVING BY R ULE. 2 21 
 
 If she did, Christian enterprises would not be 
 forever on the pauper list. Perhaps we are 
 among the culpable. Let us face the facts in 
 time, lest in the judgment the blood of the per- 
 ishing be found upon us, lest our names be upon 
 the roll of wrath. 
 
 Let us remember that our money, as an agent 
 of good, belongs to our Master. Let us see to 
 it that each dollar is spent under his eye. We 
 may have his ''Well done" on each business 
 transaction, little and large. When they who 
 have been won to him out of every kindred and 
 tribe and people come up before him with joy, 
 there may be those whom even our indirect 
 efforts have helped on the way. Then will his 
 word, sweeter than heaven's most glorious sym- 
 phonies, sound through our souls. "Inasmuch 
 as ye did it to one of the least of these my 
 brethren, ye did it unto me." 
 
222 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 I 
 
 €^0$£W Old). 
 
 N the evening twilight of each life there stand 
 
 two grim, beckoning skeletons — age and 
 death. We may laugh and shout in the merry 
 to-day. We may dance and sing as did the 
 condemned of the Conciergerie with the dead 
 carts and coffins clattering up to the gate, and 
 to-morrow — the guillotine ! Yet we can not shut 
 out the ghastly inevitable. There they stand — 
 those grisly skeletons, age and death. We can 
 escape the one only by the early coming of the 
 other, from whom our every instinct draws back. 
 Age is as unsightly and probable as death is 
 fearful and sure. 
 
 The physical havoc wrought by age is most 
 unlovely and pitiful. If only the earthly house 
 of this tabernacle could be taken down in a 
 more dignified and agreeable manner, as prob- 
 ably it was intended at the outset ! 
 
 See that old pair sitting in the chimney-cor- 
 ner. Once she was bright and beautiful; he 
 handsome and brave. Now, they are wrinkled 
 
GROWING OLD. 223 
 
 and bent and palsied. Her eves were full of the 
 passion and power of womanliness; his as keen 
 as an eagle's glance. Now, the eyes of both 
 are sunken and dim, seeing only blurs and 
 blotches where once they traced beauty. Their 
 hair, once heavy and dark, is coarse and gray, 
 and tucked under uncouth skullcaps. Their 
 teeth ached themselves away long since. Their 
 limbs, that used to trip so nimbly and dance so 
 gayly, have lost their sprightliness and strength. 
 They can only totter and cramp and suffer rheu- 
 matic torture. Their hands have forgotten their 
 cunning, and fumble as clumsily as do those of 
 a twelvemonth's babe. Their voices have lost 
 their melody and power; the poor old bodies 
 whine out their ailments, and on sunny days 
 croon and drawl about the dead past. Ah me! 
 Is this skeleton reaching his arms for every 
 one of us? 
 
 But sadder far than this physical decay is the 
 failure of the mental powers. Once this man 
 and woman were among the elite. Xow, they 
 set the youngsters a-titter with their old-fashioned 
 whims and notions. "Mother's breaking fast, " 
 drawls the old man, nodding across at his wife. 
 "A pity, too! She used to be wonderful smart, 
 quite a blue stocking, as they used to say in my 
 early days. Ah well, we've had our time." 
 
224 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 One would care less for the tumbling down of 
 the old tent, if the royal mind could stand un- 
 harmed in the wreck. The stout strokes of the 
 good right arm, the deftness of the fingers, the 
 strength and glory of the prime, could be given 
 up, if the thought could yet be sent forth among 
 men, a felt force. But to have book and pen 
 fall from the palsied hand, and all the new de- 
 velopments of science and literature drift by un- 
 noted, till one is as little en rapport with contem- 
 porary men and events as would be a resurrected 
 Roundhead, thought and fancy cramped down to 
 a little round of insignificant things, while the 
 grand unfoldings of the age are as little compre- 
 hended as are the diplomacies of Thibet — who 
 can contemplate such probabilities without a 
 temptation to suicide? 
 
 Our old people in the corner remember when 
 the business of the house and the estate were 
 all wrought out in their brain. Now, their opin- 
 ions are of little more weight than the guesses 
 of the nimble-tongued ten-years-old. "Times 
 are changed, father; they don't do things that 
 way nowadays." "Why, mother, you are too 
 old-fashioned for any thing." 
 
 Once that man's ipse dixit was authoritative 
 in town affairs. Now, he urges a question that 
 seems to him vital. Answer: "Why, father, 
 
GROWING OLD. 225 
 
 that was settled years and years ago. Do n't 
 know as you can understand it, but it 's all right. 
 We got through with that the Winter before Ben- 
 nie died. Don't you remember?" Yes, there 
 are marble mile-stones that gleam, white and cold, 
 like ghosts, along the misty, backward way ; he 
 can not lose sight of them ; but all the rest 
 seems like a fog-enshrouded sea. 
 
 Once his incisive thinking cut down through 
 questions that concerned state interests, and his 
 voice told on the destinies of the people. Now, 
 he is cast aside, a child without the future of 
 childhood, lacking all its sweetness and promise. 
 With his worn-out body and effete mind, he is 
 waiting in helplessness for the rickety, creaking 
 machinery to stand still, and free him and his 
 friends from the burden of his being. 
 
 And yet the picture has darker, sadder shades. 
 Those people were once co-workers with the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. Not only did they help 
 nobly in reformatory movements, but they led 
 many and many a soul to the Savior. Now, 
 their religious life is as completely enfeebled as 
 their mental vigor. 
 
 Their voices used to have weight in the 
 councils of the Church. The pastor leaned upon 
 them for sympathy and advice. Now, the Church 
 moves on just as it would if they were in the 
 
 IS 
 
2 26 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 grave. It works, legislates, extends, and they 
 are unable even to comprehend its growth — in 
 danger of reading it all backward. Well for 
 them if they are not left to croak about the de- 
 generacy of modern Christians. They can not 
 pray and praise as they used to do. Things 
 must have gone wrong some way. People have 
 got out of the old paths. ' ' When we were 
 young you could tell a Christian woman by 
 her bonnet as far as you could see her, and it 
 would have done your heart good to hear how 
 long and eloquent-like the men could hold forth 
 in a meeting. But there were Christians in the 
 Church in our young days." 
 
 Oh, the pity of it ! To grow old ! How 
 many times, if we had dared, would we have 
 prayed to die even before reaching "the half- 
 way house " rather than come down to this 
 whining, driveling, pushed-aside old life! 
 
 Is physical, mental, and moral decay inevit- 
 able? Is there no fountain of youth whose waters 
 can give us immortal vigor? 
 
 Much of the decay of old age is the result 
 of neglect, and, therefore, it may be avoided. 
 In attempting to demonstrate this, perhaps, as 
 in some people's theology, the wish is the parent 
 of the argument, and the logic is not more robust 
 than a wish, yet, as we all need comfort on this 
 
GROWING OLD. 227 
 
 score, it may be worth while to make the effort 
 to prove the proposition. 
 
 Lawlessness and laziness are the two prime 
 enemies of human strength and endurance. 
 
 Unreasoning creatures live by law. The law 
 of their life, though originally as benign as divine 
 love could devise, has been infracted by man's 
 sin, and carries the curse-mark of his transgres- 
 sion. Therefore they die. Their life moves in 
 a circle. They come into existence, grow, ma- 
 ture, decline, and are crowded out of being by 
 the pressure of on-coming successions. Except 
 where the penalty of the curse comes in with fe- 
 rocity and violence, these changes of the mode 
 of being are, as far as we know, gentle, painless, 
 and not unsightly. Who ever heard of a super- 
 annuated buffalo, or a chimney corner robin? 
 
 The ability to apprehend and obey law is the 
 kingliness of humanity. It is the base of re- 
 sponsible action. It is that which recommended 
 us to the redemptive notice of the Son of God. 
 With our consent he will ultimately lift from us 
 the curse. Even now he will help us mitigate 
 the effects of that curse, but it must be accord- 
 ing to law. Our perverse disposition to resist 
 and break law is at the bottom of much of the 
 misery that comes upon us when we grow old. 
 
 The taint of laivlessness is in our blood. It 
 
228 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 comes to us straight from the forfeited paradise. 
 It shows itself very early. Children hate re- 
 straint. Tell one of those " toddlin' wee things " 
 not to touch a certain article, and he will not rest 
 till his tiny fingers have pushed their way through 
 your prohibition. The limitation suggests and 
 stimulates the very mischief you would have him 
 avoid. "What made you tell us not to put 
 beans up our noses?" whined a little fellow, when 
 his mother appeared on the scene of misde- 
 meanor and suffering. "We wouldn't have 
 thought of it if you hadn't 'a ' told us not to." 
 
 In our childhood we could hop and skip all 
 day, taking ten thousand useless steps, but it had 
 to be at our own sweet will. If we were set at 
 something that we felt obliged to do, our strength 
 gave out immediately. You can " break " a colt 
 in a month, but it takes ten years to break a boy 
 to steady, reliable, working ways. 
 
 In mental effort also. Children's minds are 
 uncomfortably busy, prying into every thing ex- 
 cept their grammar and arithmetic. Pictures 
 and prizes must be held before them perpetually, 
 penalties and disgrace shaken over their heads, 
 to coax or drive them into the habit of doing a 
 required amount of work in a given time. 
 
 Many students make it the main task of their 
 school life to resist, and wheedle, and outwit the 
 
GROWING OLD, 229 
 
 teacher. He is their natural enemy. A harm- 
 less person, possibly, probably an amiable gen- 
 tleman when they meet him in society, yet he 
 represents the restraint of law, and, as such, 
 must be beaten out of his purpose. 
 
 When they get the conduct of their life into 
 their own hands, it is not unusual for them to 
 throw the rein upon the neck of the lawless im- 
 pulse. They do not venture to raise their hand 
 against their neighbor's life for fear of the law of 
 the land, and of the divine law that has been the 
 one tireless schoolmaster that would not be shaken 
 off; but may they not do as they will in regard 
 to their own personal life ? Their lawlessness 
 relieves them of mental discipline, and they do 
 no more brain work than they are driven to 
 perform by necessity, or it permits them to in- 
 dulge as they will their appetites, passions, am- 
 bitions. They destroy their digestion by crowd- 
 ing their stomachs to overwork upon fiery, 
 greasy masses, villainous compounds that tickle 
 a depraved palate, and that fill the blood with 
 scrofula and fevers. They burn out their 
 nerves and brain with the fumes of tobacco and 
 alcohol. 
 
 If all this takes place among men who belong 
 to Churches and claim to be governed by the Ten 
 Commandments, what havoc of the life is made 
 
230 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 by those who have thrown off the restraints of 
 the more special and personal of those injunc- 
 tions ! 
 
 Let us take an example of the habit of neg- 
 lecting and one of observing physical and men- 
 tal law — Byron and Bryant. The meteoric Byron 
 indulged the worst passions. Bryant held him- 
 self to the simplest appetites and the purest per- 
 sonal life. Dissoluteness burned out the fuel 
 meant to keep Byron's brilliant brain in force for 
 years of glowing thought. Bryant lived by law, 
 as do the beautiful, natural things about which 
 he wrote so delightfully. He took ample sleep, 
 and was up with the birds in the morning. His 
 bill of fare was almost as simple as theirs — 
 he breakfasted usually on oatmeal mush and 
 milk. Byron was in the "sere and yellow leaf" 
 when he was only a little over thirty. Bryant's 
 age more than outmeasured two such rocket- 
 flashes as Byron's erratic years. Seventy found 
 him but little less agile in walking, climbing, 
 leaping, indeed as young as at forty, except the 
 few outer frost touches. Like Moses, he marched 
 to his death with strength unabated. 
 
 The disgusting taint of physical and mental 
 lawlessness and consequent decay renders odious 
 and dangerous Byron's magnificent imagery. 
 Bryant's poetry is as sweet and fresh and 
 
GROWING OLD. 231 
 
 healthful as the breath of balm, and as restful as 
 a mother's evening hymn. 
 
 Who would have his life like Byron's, flash- 
 ing up luridly, and settling into murky night un- 
 der the gloom of the disapproval of a more ear- 
 nest time? How much better that it be like 
 Bryant's, a strong, sure, steady light, ending like 
 an Autumn day in calm glory, its rays slanting 
 back over rich fruitage, and striking forward to 
 a glorious dawn in the Morning Land ! 
 
 Americans are in special danger of physical 
 and mental degeneracy from fast living and over- 
 work. Holmes says: "The human body is a 
 furnace which keeps in blast threescore years and 
 ten, more or less. It burns about three hun- 
 dred pounds of carbon a year, besides other fuel, 
 when in fair working order." We Americans are 
 apt, as he says of pugilists, "to keep the vital 
 fires burning with the blower up." 
 
 Strong, mixed blood bubbles in our veins, 
 some of it the best of the Old World's life, driven 
 hither because dangerous under rotten tyrannies. 
 Below us heave the crowding masses. Before us 
 stretch measureless possibilities. -Forces push. 
 Ambitions beckon, and on we go, with white 
 lines about our mouths, and black furrows be- 
 tween our brows. We overwork and overdrive, 
 and like the wicked, Ave do not live out half our 
 
232 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 days. We tire out and drop off to sleep under 
 the sod coverlet before we have fairly reached 
 our best working strength. 
 
 Albeit we would not exchange our civiliza- 
 tion for that of the Norsemen, whose thick blood 
 creeps through leathern veins, whose heavy jaws 
 crunch the oaten cake, while their neutral-tinted 
 faces are lighted dully with bovine comfort. 
 No; they of the coming better time will feel to 
 the full the propelling energy of this New World 
 life; but they will live so by law, that they will 
 not sin mortally against their physical being, and 
 stretch themselves upon a bier just when they 
 ought to be in the prime of vigor, their mental 
 products inane sensualisms, when they ought to 
 be full of power for the right. 
 
 The mind and spirit are princes. The body 
 is a castle in which they stay threescore years or 
 so. Their condition is often vitally affected by 
 the good or ill repair of their habitation. In 
 the earlier time the magnificence of the man- 
 sion eclipsed the dignity of the indwelling mag- 
 nates. So now, often the greater care is given 
 to polishing and strengthening the outer being. 
 But the age of brawn is passing away, and the 
 best thought is busy in bettering the spirit life. 
 As usual, there is danger of swinging to the op- 
 posite extreme. Many good people underrate 
 
GROWING OLD. 233 
 
 the influence of body upon soul, and serious 
 harm comes of the blunder. 
 
 Bodies have rights that souls are bound to 
 respect. They have ways of their own that are 
 specially potent to avenge any infringement of 
 right. If only a little finger is wronged, there 
 may be an insurrection of pain that will set the 
 whole system in a tumult, and throw even the 
 kingly brain out of balance. 
 
 The years become relentless Eumenides to 
 those who are reckless of physical law, stretch- 
 ing them upon the rack of acute suffering or the 
 gridiron of slow torture. Witness the miser- 
 able old age of the dyspeptic and debauchee. 
 
 Many push their laudable purpose to secure 
 a competency to such an excess that they de- 
 stroy their ability to enjoy what they acquire. 
 
 The farmer thinks to wrest riches from the 
 stingy soil by his own good right arm. He 
 braves storm and weariness, he drives on through 
 heat and cold, and finds himself at fifty a bent, 
 stiffened, old man, with a cramped brain, a hun- 
 gry soul, and, after all, only a few restless, un- 
 satisfactory dollars. 
 
 The mechanic plays the same part with a 
 slight change of scenery. The business man 
 neglects all powers of body and mind except 
 those that are necessary to the driving of a good 
 
234 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 bargain. When he grows old, whether he 
 " fails" or "retires," he finds himself worn out 
 and empty hearted, his faculty for love and wor- 
 ship dead almost beyond hope of resurrection. 
 
 The old Greeks took the very best care of 
 their bodies. We see this illustrated in the 
 Olympic games; the victor in running or wrest- 
 ling was loaded with honor. When he returned 
 to his city he was not permitted to enter through 
 the gates, but a breach was made in the wall near 
 his house, as if they would say, ' ' The city that 
 has such sons to guard her has no need of 
 walls." The result was the finest physical cul- 
 ture, and consequent endurance. With them the 
 age for military service was from twenty to sixty, 
 and not, as with us, reaching only to forty-five. 
 
 We are as certainly culpable if we neglect to 
 take care of our bodies as we are if we injure 
 them by our excesses. 
 
 Many serve their bodies as rented houses are 
 used. The roof leaks, the plaster begins to fall, 
 the weather draws out the nails, and the clap- 
 boards spring off. No matter. We will not have 
 to stay here long. Yes; but we had better be 
 comfortable while we do stay, and not lose time 
 and strength taking care of our coughs and 
 rheumatisms. 
 
 Science, like religion, is growing wise and 
 
GROWING OLD, 235 
 
 practical. Instead of hiding away in midnight 
 cells, straining every nerve to discover the un- 
 discoverable, it has come into our homes and 
 our schools, and is teaching us how to take 
 care of our hair and teeth, our eyesight and 
 digestion. 
 
 Hygiene miracles are wrought nowadays. 
 Take dentistry, for instance. Years ago if the 
 nerve of a tooth was injured, it was treated as 
 some deal with refractory children. There was 
 no inquiring into the cause of the trouble, no at- 
 tempt at palliation or compromise. There was 
 nothing for it, if it continued rebellious, after a 
 few conciliatory pats and strokes, but to be ex- 
 terminated, root and branch, though its loss could 
 never be supplied. 
 
 Can we ever forget how, in our young days, 
 the weeks and months were one protracted de- 
 spair from toothache torture? Wedged in be- 
 tween the alternatives of the dentist's horrid 
 steel and the prolonged agony of having those 
 throbbing molars and incisors wear themselves 
 out, one could almost have risked a Rip Van 
 Winkle sleep, if he were sure of awaking tooth- 
 less. We have learned of late, however, that a 
 little daily care of the teeth and an early appli- 
 cation of the dentist's skill will keep them in 
 good condition for an indefinite period. 
 
236 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 "Oh, but it is too much trouble. I have not 
 time to bother with my teeth more than is abso- 
 lutely necessary to cleanliness." Ah, that is a 
 mischievous and expensive carelessness that you 
 can ill-afford. You may save a few minutes by 
 your neglect of the simple preventive, and, by 
 and by, you may spend months upon the hot 
 spit of agony, lose any amount of nervous vigor, 
 and pay a good round bill for repairs. 
 
 A few years ago the papers told us how 
 John Quincy Adams restored his eyesight by a 
 little daily pressure upon his eyeballs. The old 
 people looked at one another over their glasses 
 and exclaimed, "Wonderful! How nice it would 
 be to see once more without spectacles!" But 
 I know of only one old lady who tried it perse- 
 veringly enough to restore her sight. 
 
 J. G. Holland tells us of an old gentleman, Dr. 
 Scott, of Buffalo, who, when his eyesight began 
 to fail, set himself about what he termed "ocu- 
 lar gymnastics." With proper intervals of rest, 
 he exercised his eyes in making minute letters. 
 At length he became able to read the newspa- 
 pers without glasses; "and, at the age of seventy- 
 one, he wrote upon an enameled card with a 
 style on a space exactly equal to that of one 
 side of a three-cent piece, the Lord's Prayer, the < 
 Apostles' Creed, the parable of the Ten Virgins, 
 
GROWING OLD. 237 
 
 the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the 
 Beatitudes, the fifteenth Psalm, the one hundred 
 and twentieth Psalm, the one hundred and 
 thirty-third Psalm, the one hundred and thirty- 
 first Psalm, and the figures i860. Every letter 
 and every punctuation mark was written exquis- 
 itely/' "showing," as Dr. Holmes says of him, 
 "that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes." 
 
 Much of the decay of old age comes from in- 
 activity. Sometimes when a man finds that he 
 has a competence, his ambition begins to lag, 
 and he turns his business over to his sons. The 
 relaxation of effort would have been disastrous 
 at twenty-five — -it is fatal at sixty. Unusual 
 powers can not fail to lose their vigor. 
 
 The "childishness" of age is not inevitable; 
 it may be prevented by mental hygiene. There 
 is a close analogy between the laws of matter 
 and those that govern mind. Neglect means 
 decay. Inaction is paralysis. We have seen 
 pictures of East Indian fakirs who had moved 
 only one arm for a dozen years or more. That 
 arm retained its strength, while the other limbs 
 were no more under volitive control than if they 
 had been made of wood. Most people treat the 
 intellect in a similar fashion. They choose a bus- 
 iness or profession, and throw all their mental 
 force into the one faculty that is necessary to its 
 
238 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 successful management. The other faculties He 
 inactive till they become as useless as the limbs of 
 the fakir. After a few years the need of using that 
 one faculty ceases to crowd to activity. Then it 
 falls into disuse and paralysis with the rest. The 
 verdict is, " The old man has lost his mind." As 
 Lowell says of a man minus his manhood, " A 
 corpse crawls round unburied." 
 
 An accident or severe illness may injure the 
 physical or mental constitution, and break up the 
 ordinary or normal action of one's powers, yet 
 usually we may work and be strong as long as 
 we will. 
 
 Henceforth let us never say, "my memory 
 is failing." Let us speak the plain truth: "Be- 
 cause I am not driven to use my memory as in 
 my school-days I am neglecting it, and it is grow- 
 ing weak in consequence." A simple mnemonic 
 exercise, the committing to memory of one text 
 of Scripture a day, and the obliging of the mind 
 to go over the whole of the chapter or book upon 
 occasion will hold this faculty in vigor. If the 
 memorizing of three hundred and thirteen dates, 
 suggesting as many important points of history, 
 one for each week-day of the year, were begun 
 upon New Year's with a review once a week or 
 once a month, a good knowledge of past events 
 might be gained, and the memory would be held 
 
GROWING OLD. 239 
 
 111 strength by the discipline. This will be found 
 to be an excellent exercise in a family, a thou- 
 sand times better table-talk than the ordinary 
 chitchat. 
 
 The terminology of "any branch of natural 
 science would make as good mnemonic gymnas- 
 tics, helping the young people to a sure knowl- 
 edge of what they certainly need to know, and 
 keeping the older folk from degeneracy on ac- 
 count of the disuse of memory. 
 
 But one says, " I am so full of work and care 
 I can not find time for mental discipline." We 
 take time to eat because we can not live and keep 
 our strength for work without food. If we must 
 starve a part of our being, let it not be the no- 
 bler, the better, the immortal. 
 
 Where there 's a will there 's a way. Elihu 
 Burritt mastered languages, science, literature, 
 while supporting his family by working at his 
 anvil. 
 
 Let the successful business man decide 
 whether it will pay for a few paltry dollars more 
 than his neighbor has the charge of, or a trifle 
 better furnished house, or more elegant style of 
 living, to cramp and dwarf his mind till he knows 
 nothing but loss and gain and prices current. 
 
 Let the lady who never has time for study 
 and thought weigh the matter fairly, and decide 
 
240 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 whether it will not be better for her to have a 
 few pieces less of the twists and tangles of 
 bright worsteds, a little plainer house-gear and 
 simpler adornments for her person, and secure in- 
 stead that sure, quiet strength of soul that will 
 enable her to ward off the attacks of old age 
 by and by. 
 
 Work or perish is the absolute law. When 
 one begins to say, "I can not learn that, I am 
 too old," his doom is sealed. Henceforth the 
 chimney-corner! They who will work can keep 
 their place in the ranks of workers in spite of 
 of Time. 
 
 Humboldt wrote his "Kosmos" at fourscore. 
 Isocrates finished one of his great works at 
 ninety-seven. Theophrastus wrote his* keen and 
 sprightly "Characters" when a centenarian. 
 Gorgias lived to the age of one hundred and 
 seven, and died with the significant expression 
 upon his lips, " Sleep is now beginning to lay 
 me in the hands of his brother." Death came 
 to Mary Somerville when she was ninety-two, 
 and found her busy upon her abstruse and diffi- 
 cult astronomical mathematics — working her 
 problems only a few hours before she fell asleep. 
 
 But the greatest, the saddest mistake is to 
 imagine that the years must dull our devotional 
 fervor, cripple our spiritual powers, and destroy 
 
GROWING OLD. 241 
 
 our usefulness. It is a trick of Satan to crowd 
 out of the ranks those who have the best equip- 
 ment for service — a ripe, full Christian ex- 
 perience. 
 
 God has said, "I will never leave thee, nor 
 forsake thee." Does not that include the whole 
 of probation? "My grace is sufficient for thee, 
 for my strength is made perfect in weakness." 
 Does not that cover all our infirmities? "Lo, I 
 am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
 world." Does not his presence insure constant 
 development and growing usefulness? 
 
 I remember a beautiful woman who could 
 hardly have been lovelier in any of her life than 
 in the last years, when she was over ninety. 
 She entertained us at the piano with music that 
 she composed sixty years before. She was fully 
 in sympathy with all the aggressive work of 
 good people, and kept pace in her prayers and 
 faith with each movement. "I can't go to 
 your missionary meeting to-night," she said in 
 her sweet, simple way, as we were starting to 
 our anniversary," but I will try and help a little 
 here at home." 
 
 "I knew you'd have a good meeting," she 
 said, when we returned, her face aglow with the 
 glory of the world beyond. "My heart was so 
 warm when I talked to the Master about your 
 
 16 
 
242 DIAMOND DUST. 
 
 work." Who can tell which rendered the most 
 helpful service that night, we at the church, or 
 she in her room "talking to the Master?" 
 
 As sunset hours are usually the most glorious 
 of the day, so the last years ought to be, of 
 all, most replete with beauty and excellence, 
 rich with the ingatherings of time and the fore- 
 shadowings of the blessedness that is soon to be 
 revealed. "The hoary head is a crown of glory 
 if it be found in the way of righteousness." 
 
 For what a glorious, eternal garnering may 
 one hope who has spent a long life in the serv- 
 ice of the Master. 
 
■' -' : - : :■■■"%. 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 021 899 058 7 
 
 m-C;-?:v ■■■% 
 
 MM" 
 
 IPIF