s
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 By 
 RUSSELL H. CONWELL, D.D. 
 
 Author of " Acres of Diamonds," " The Angel's 
 Lily," " Why Lincoln Laughed" etc., etc. 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 THE sermons included in this volume 
 were delivered recently to large congre- 
 gations in the Baptist Temple, Phila- 
 delphia. They can truthfully be called 
 "Sermons That Have Helped the Masses." 
 Back of every sermon delivered by Dr. Con- 
 well is the spirit of helpfulness. The thous- 
 ands of letters he is receiving constantly, 
 telling of the uplift, enrichment and inspira- 
 tion his sermons have given, are an indication 
 not simply of his popularity, but of the fact 
 that his utterances have found ready response 
 in the needy and hungry soul. 
 
 Dr. Conwell's influence in his pulpit min- 
 istry is of more than local character. It ex- 
 tends literally "to the ends of the earth." On 
 two recent Sundays in October an account 
 was taken of those present in the Temple 
 from places other than Philadelphia and 
 Pennsylvania, including only those who gave 
 their cards to Dr. Conwell at the close of the 
 service, with the following result : 
 
 Massachusetts 4 Sweden 3 
 
 California 6 Scotland 2 
 
 Arizona 2 Japan 7 
 
 3 
 
 20731 ?
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 Canada 6 
 
 England 4 
 
 Germany 4 
 
 Norway 1 
 
 China 1 
 
 Persia 4 
 
 India 3 
 
 Nepal 1 
 
 Michigan 3 
 
 Delaware 5 
 
 Maine 1 
 
 Texas 3 
 
 Washington State ... 4 
 
 France 2 
 
 New Jersey 16 
 
 Mexico .1 
 
 Armenia 2 
 
 Egypt 1 
 
 South Africa 2 
 
 New York 13 
 
 Washington, D. C. . 8 
 
 Ohio 3 
 
 Missouri 1 
 
 New Mexico 3 
 
 Oregon 4 
 
 Vermont 1 
 
 New Hampshire. . . 1 
 
 Cuba 3 
 
 Hawaii 2 
 
 Italy 3 
 
 Russia 2 
 
 Poland . . 9 
 
 All of Dr. Conwell's discourses abound 
 with observations of his varied career as 
 student, soldier, schoolmaster, lawyer, re- 
 porter, traveller, author, lecturer, educator 
 and preacher. His intimate association with 
 some of the country's greatest men, includ- 
 ing Beecher, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, 
 Bayard, Taylor, Wendell Phillips, Garfield, 
 Blaine, Emerson, Grant, Gough, and many 
 others, provides a wealth of information on 
 which he freely draws. In his travels abroad 
 he met Gladstone, Garibaldi, Tennyson, 
 Dickens, Ruskin and other eminent states- 
 men, writers and public men.
 
 This volume, therefore, will place within 
 reach of both layman and preacher a store- 
 house of illustration, historic fact and Chris- 
 tian philosophy, the rich harvest of help and 
 inspiration gleaned from the author's life of 
 service in the uplift of humanity. 
 
 CHABLES E. MILLER. 
 
 Philadelphia, Penna.
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. UNUSED POWERS . . 9 
 
 II. MAN AND His BURNING BUSH . 23 
 
 III. No OTHER PLACE TO Go . . 37 
 
 IV. DISGUISED VICTORIES . . .53 
 
 V. POWER TO RISE AGAIN . . 65 
 
 VI. WILL You BE MISSED? . . 81 
 
 VII. A WELCOMING SMILE . . 101 
 
 VIII. OUTSIDE AND INSIDE . . . 115 
 
 IX. THE OPEN DOOR . . .130 
 
 X. WITHOUT PAY .... 144
 
 I 
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 HOW much more a man can do than he 
 thinks he can! How far short we all 
 come of what it was possible for us to 
 have accomplished. My text presents that 
 idea. It is found in the eighth verse of the 
 nineteenth chapter of First Kings, in the 
 account of Elijah's journey when he was flee- 
 ing from Jezebel, and going as he thought 
 into the desert to die. 
 
 The poor man thought he had reached the 
 end, that there was nothing more worth living 
 for in the world. The poor old man had tried 
 to serve the Lord all his life, had sacrificed 
 and suffered, his friends had betrayed and left 
 him, his enemies had conquered, righteousness 
 seemed to be at an ebb, and unrighteousness at 
 the flow. Poor old discouraged man gone into 
 the desert alone. Alone? No, he was sur- 
 rounded by a multitude of witnesses he did 
 not see, and he ought to have felt that, for he 
 had told that young man years before that the 
 
 9
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 Lord would open his eyes and he would see a 
 company of angels. Now he thinks he is all 
 alone. It is strange that a Christian man who 
 has faith for so many years can fall into these 
 intermittent conditions of discouragement. 
 
 What would we not be if every hour of 
 every week and day we had done our utmost? 
 The possibilities of man reach out beyond our 
 vision, beyond our imagination. What would 
 we get if we only did our best? 
 
 The poor old man lays down under the 
 juniper tree, and said, "O that I could die. 
 I have no friends left. I have nothing to do. 
 The Lord has defeated me at every turn I 
 have taken. He does not want me on the 
 earth. My friends don't care for me any 
 more. I am only in the way. Lord, let me 
 go. I am weary of life." 
 
 The text says that the angel of the Lord 
 came and said, "Arise and eat; because the 
 journey is too great for thee." The angel fell 
 in with Elijah. That is often a safe method 
 to fall in with an insane person. I see the 
 demented almost every day. The only thing 
 you can do with them is to fall in at first with 
 their hallucination. 
 
 A man with a pistol came into my study 
 here, and said that the Lord had sent him to 
 
 10
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 shoot me. I had often been told in years past 
 that the only way to do is to agree with such 
 maniacs. I said, "That is all right, only you 
 came on the wrong day. If you had looked 
 up the date to see when you were to come you 
 would come to-morrow." He said he had not 
 looked at the calendar, and I called his atten- 
 tion to the date, and said, "Why this is not 
 to-morrow. You came the wrong day. You 
 may come again to-morrow. Leave the pistol 
 here, and come back to-morrow." He gave 
 me the pistol to keep and I put it in my desk, 
 then called the officer, who took him away. 
 
 While I relate that simply as a personal ex- 
 perience it represents an important thought. 
 The angel of God seems to fall in with the 
 weaknesses of people, and will not contradict 
 them outright, for there are some people so 
 stubborn that they will contradict an angel of 
 God if they have the opportunity. Elijah 
 was one of that character, one of those de- 
 termined, strong, decisive men who feared not 
 kings or queens when he was in the right 
 spirit. Now he is altogether discouraged, and 
 the angel soothes him, and says, "You think 
 you are weak. Now then prepare yourself." 
 He partakes of that simple meal. 
 
 How long a man can exist without food we 
 
 11
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 do not realize. I saw a man last week in the 
 mines of West Virginia, who said he was en- 
 closed by an explosion, and was there thirty- 
 one days. While there was excellent spring 
 water dripping down, and he had plenty of 
 that to drink, he had no food except a piece 
 of bread left from his luncheon, for thirty-one 
 days, yet he came out alive, and in five days 
 returned to his work. 
 
 The text says: "Elijah arose, and did eat 
 and drink, and went in the strength of that 
 meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb, 
 the mount of God." The Lord was saying to 
 him, "You see you can go forty days and 
 forty nights without food. Now then learn 
 the lesson that in all things you can do a great 
 deal more than you dream. You poor dis- 
 couraged old saint, you have lost your faith, 
 and you are making your own life miserable. 
 You are avoiding the service of God because 
 you do not realize that you have still a won- 
 derful strength for forty long days and nights 
 of journey." 
 
 Was not Elijah ashamed of himself when 
 he reached the end of that journey and looked 
 back, and said, "There I was under the Juni- 
 per tree asking the Lord to take me hence 
 because there was no more I could do." Then 
 
 12
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 he looked back over forty days, and said, "I 
 never could have done that before." Yes he 
 could. He could have done it any time if he 
 had been required to do it, and had the 
 courage. 
 
 How much more we can do than we think 
 we can do. There was a village in West 
 Virginia where poor miners had lived, and 
 the mines were exhausted. It was a very 
 wretched village, so a gentleman told me. 
 But there is a small river running down 
 through the mountains toward the Ohio 
 through that village. The people in the vil- 
 lage met to try to vote for a schoolhouse. 
 They had no money, and finally gave it up. 
 They agreed to hold the school around in the 
 various rough miners' cottages because they 
 could not build a schoolhouse. One who was 
 present at the meeting, though not a native 
 of the town, said to them after the meeting 
 had adjourned, "Yes, you can do a great deal 
 more than you think you can. Why don't 
 you get together and go out and build a log 
 cabin all yourselves. You will have a good 
 time. You will enjoy it." They said they 
 could not do it very well without the direction 
 of a carpenter, so they sent down the Ohio 
 River for a carpenter to come up and oversee
 
 the work, and they built the house themselves. 
 The carpenter sat on the river's bank, and 
 thought, "If we could only saw this wood we 
 would save all this chopping and all this 
 time." He looked upon the passing river, 
 and thought how much power is passing all 
 the time, every minute, power to saw logs, 
 power to dig in the earth for coal, power to 
 cut up the stone, and power to run railroads. 
 He said, "There is great power passing your 
 door every hour." One or two of them, it 
 seems, acted upon the suggestion. Anyhow, 
 they put an undershot water wheel across that 
 stream from bank to bank, built no dam, but 
 let the wheel down into the water, so that the 
 water would run against the paddles of the 
 wheel underneath the long shaft. Now they 
 send their electricity all over that region. 
 Now the people own land, and are wealthy. 
 Now there are great factories there, and ex- 
 press trains stop at that city. Now they have 
 a High schoolhouse in which they invited me 
 to come and lecture next year. Power going 
 by the door all the time, constantly passing 
 them, and they in the depths of poverty. 
 "We cannot do anything. We cannot build 
 a schoolhouse." Yet millions of riches right 
 there passing the door every day. 
 
 14
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 Wherever a river runs on the face of the 
 continent there runs an equal power, and the 
 government is just awakening to the fact. 
 There has been introduced in Congress a bill 
 to conserve the wonderful power of our 
 streams that they may become of use to the 
 public, that they may turn out electricity to 
 be sent five hundred miles in any direction 
 over the land to run all our factories, to cook 
 our food, to furnish all our light and heat all 
 our houses and churches, and do it at a cost of 
 less than one one-hundredth of what it now 
 costs. Yes, power is wasted all around us. 
 How much more the nation can do than it 
 thinks it can do. 
 
 I was in a gathering some little time ago in 
 which there was present a person who was 
 describing to me his experience in a railway 
 wreck. He said the cars crashed together and 
 were torn in every direction, and that he was 
 there under the end of the railroad bridge 
 with the crumpled car all around him, and a 
 car on top of the car in which he was enclosed. 
 There seemed to be no hope of his recovery at 
 all. It was something mysterious. He said 
 he prayed for life, and the reason he asked me 
 the question was as a theologian: "Do you 
 think God gives especial strength to men 
 
 15
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 under special circumstances in answer to 
 prayer?" He told how they lifted that car, 
 the near side of it, and tore out the side with 
 their hands, and with what miraculous 
 strength they held on to the uplifted car as 
 he and one or two others crawled out from 
 under it. He exclaimed : "Who would dream 
 it possible that a little woman like one of the 
 rescuers, weighing less than 130 pounds, 
 could have lifted so much." We have read all 
 our lives of the great things men have done 
 under extreme circumstances by the power of 
 their muscle when called upon to do or die, or 
 what is more, called upon to do or some friend 
 will die. When to our own efforts there is 
 added, as there was in the case of Elijah, the 
 power of God, O then how limitless are our 
 possibilities. 
 
 Remember the story of Gideon. He had 
 so many thousand men that he was sure of 
 victory, but really sure of defeat. When he 
 had such a company of vigorous, patriotic, 
 well-disciplined troops around him, the Lord 
 said to him, "Send them home. Take them 
 down to the river, and those that drink by 
 dipping their hands in the water and lapping 
 it from their hands as in a hurry, you take and 
 send the others home." There was only three 
 
 16
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 hundred left, and I have always thought of 
 that story as a discouraging thing for poor 
 Gideon, general of a great army, head of a 
 great nation, with only three hundred men 
 against so many thousand. Did he get dis- 
 couraged? No, he was the contrary in dispo- 
 sition to Elijah. If there is anything on this 
 earth that brings a joy deeper and higher 
 than another it is to lead a forlorn hope. I 
 have heard of men who led in some of the 
 charges in an army when it was called a "for- 
 lorn hope," when upon those few men de- 
 pended the fate of the nation or the army. 
 They to go on, then to win Oh the magnifi- 
 cence of it ! Gideon was blessed of God. His 
 heart was happy, his whole spirit did praise 
 the Lord that his number was so reduced that 
 it was a "forlorn hope." No man or woman 
 is ever so happy as when with confidence in 
 God he or she leads a forlorn hope. It is 
 the greatest privilege of God to be placed in 
 the front of such an undertaking as that, to 
 have other men say it cannot be done, to have 
 other men say it is too big for us, and then to 
 take hold and lift it into the sight and help of 
 God. Oh the peace and joy, the satisfaction 
 of soul! Young man, go lead some forlorn 
 hope for God, and find out what is the deepest 
 
 17
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 and richest joy of human experience. You 
 can do so much more than you think with the 
 help of God. 
 
 Out in western Pennsylvania a man in a 
 little town there told me that he had been 
 wonderfully helped by the kindness of a 
 capitalist. He was talking of capital and 
 labor, as they had been greatly agitated there. 
 As we walked through the snow to the depot 
 he told us where his shop stood. He said 
 there was a great oil refinery next to his shop 
 with plenty of machinery, and there was a 
 great wheel in it. His shop was a carpenter 
 shop in which he did very small work. One 
 day the owner of the oil refinery came by 
 when he was hard at work on a piece of tim- 
 ber, and said to him, "We have much more 
 power on the other side of this wall in our 
 building than we use. Why don't you run a 
 shaft in and put a wheel in your shop. Just 
 run it right through the partition." He said 
 he was permitted to belt on, in a sense, to that 
 wheel through the partition, and he began in 
 that humble way with the help of that power 
 to manufacture, until now his manufactory 
 stretches up the valley in five buildings, and 
 is a far larger plant than the refinery. He 
 was lifted by that additional power into that 
 
 18
 
 place where he could make those things that 
 are demanded over the world. He could do 
 so much more than he thought he could be- 
 cause there was a larger power on the other 
 side of the partition. So with every young 
 man or old man, young woman or old woman, 
 who says, "I cannot do this. I cannot accom- 
 plish that." There is not only your power 
 not yet used, but there is a power right 
 through the partition on which you can belt, 
 and which shall help you beyond all measure. 
 There is a God that answers prayer now just 
 as He answered it in days past. 
 
 In Washington, at a Bible Conference, I 
 heard a man from the West tell a story of 
 how he had signed the pledge, broken off 
 drink, and that for a year he had kept the 
 pledge, and had joined the church. Then he 
 became so intoxicated by some sudden sweep- 
 ing in of temptation that he was dragged into 
 the station house by the police. He told us 
 how, when word was sent to his wife that he 
 was drunk again, she said, "It is the last 
 time. I cannot do anything with him. I will 
 see him no more." She had tried him again 
 and again, and you could not blame her for 
 it. But as has been so often the case in such 
 incidents this man told us how his little girl 
 
 19
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 was sent around by his brother to bring him 
 something to eat, and he was wretched and 
 could not eat. They allowed the little girl to 
 come in the cell where he was, and his little 
 girl, pale, thin, and sickly for years, sat down 
 beside her father and ran her little hand 
 through his hair, and said, "Father, I love 
 you. I trust you. Let me go with you." 
 "Why," he said, "mamma would not let you 
 go." "Mamma would not say no," said the 
 little girl. "I want to go with you." "Why 
 do you want to go?" "I want to help you." 
 Said her father, "Your hands, so little and 
 thin, and you so pale and weak, could not 
 earn a living for your old father." She said, 
 "I don't know what I could do if I tried, but 
 I could help." The man told us in his simple, 
 plain, straightforward manner how he inter- 
 ceded to have his wife try him once more, and 
 declared to himself, "I will destroy my life if 
 ever again I fall"; and how, when that little 
 hand was taken to the grave he and his wife 
 stood beside it, and he said, "Wife, I have 
 been a very wicked man, but that little hand 
 has helped me beyond any hand." Now he 
 gives his entire time to train men away from 
 evil into righteousness and truth because of 
 that little hand. She didn't know whether 
 
 20
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 she could do much or not, but what she could 
 do she would do. It is ever the record of 
 Christian experience everywhere in life. We 
 get help from hands that are unexpected, 
 and the little child's hands that we did not 
 dream had strength may turn us from evil 
 unto God. 
 
 I went to a Baltimore church some years 
 ago. I went there to lecture, and discouraged 
 indeed they were. They had built a great 
 church with random recklessness, without 
 care, with an extravagant faith, an ouerfaith 
 that was only recklessness, and a great debt 
 upon them covered more than the whole thing 
 was worth by a great deal. When I lectured 
 I tried to encourage them, but I myself did 
 not feel the confidence that I tried to impart 
 to them. 
 
 The next week two of the ladies of the 
 church came together, and they said to each 
 other, "Isn't there something we can possibly 
 do? Must we let it go? Why not hold a 
 prayer meeting?" They called three or four 
 of the ladies of the church together, and they 
 held a prayer meeting, and that church be- 
 came the most prosperous in the city of 
 Baltimore. They met together and prayed 
 the Lord that they might belt on to His 
 
 21
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 wheel, and belting on to Him they could 
 carry on their great work. 
 
 There are many churches that can do great 
 things, but they do not think they can. They 
 can go forty days and forty nights in the 
 strength they now have, and at the end of the 
 journey God will come with His still small 
 voice and tell them what to do next. There 
 are many young men discouraged about their 
 education, young women discouraged about 
 their work, or men discouraged who are walk- 
 ing the streets with no employment, and to 
 them the voice of God comes to-day in the 
 distinct terms with which it came to Elijah, 
 "You can go forty days and nights yet. Rise 
 up, look men in the eye, look up unto God, 
 have faith in God, and go on to the accom- 
 plishment of that which you desire." 
 
 And so the lesson of my thought is that 
 every one of us can do more for God, more 
 for ourselves, more for our family, more for 
 our city or country than we have ever yet 
 dreamed of. The possibilities of what we may 
 do when we reach the limit of our strength, 
 we have not seen. 
 
 22
 
 II 
 
 MAN AND HIS BURNING BUSH 
 
 IN the third chapter of Exodus we have 
 the account of Moses' stay in the wilder- 
 ness. In the third verse, we read: "I will 
 now turn aside, and see this great sight, why 
 the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord 
 saw that he turned aside to see, God called 
 unto him out of the midst of the bush." 
 
 In the city of Kirksville, Missouri, there 
 are two brothers who inherited a large estate. 
 One of the brothers was a very temperate, up- 
 right, Christian churchman, and the other 
 was a wild, racing, wicked man, wasting his 
 money. The temperate brother had taken his 
 part of the estate, and had added to it. He 
 built for himself a beautiful residence on the 
 hillside, which looked down upon the lovely 
 valley from one side of the highway, near to 
 their old homestead. 
 
 The young man who had been dissipating, 
 and who had wasted his money, had become 
 exceedingly poor, lived with his family in an 
 
 23
 
 humble place some distance in the country. 
 One night he walked to Kirksville, deter- 
 mined to go to a saloon and secure a drink of 
 whiskey. There had never occurred to him 
 in any way that there was anything about 
 drinking that was really wrong, although he 
 was often sorry that he wasted his money on 
 it. Before he came to the saloon, he saw a 
 red lantern in the road, close to the saloon, 
 and as he approached it, he found that there 
 was a ditch dug across the highway. He 
 stopped to think why the lantern was thus 
 placed in the road, and as he was thus medi- 
 tating he asked a passing man what that red 
 lantern was for. The stranger said he did 
 not know, but he thought it would be better 
 not to attempt to get into that saloon. This 
 man, whose appetite was very strong, whose 
 desire for that drink was fearful at that time, 
 stood there meditating, looking at the red 
 lantern the signal of danger. As he medi- 
 tated, his conscience began to work, and im- 
 mediately he began to accuse himself for the 
 first time in his life. He began to realize 
 what sin he had committed in wasting his 
 father's money and leaving his family in such 
 dire distress, while his brother had built a 
 beautiful residence from what he had saved 
 
 24
 
 and added to the estate. Under these circum- 
 stances, the man was very full of remorse, 
 and he began to accuse himself of being the 
 worst sinner that ever came down the street, 
 and as he looked at that lantern, the signal of 
 danger, it was his "burning bush," and it was 
 talking to him through his conscience and 
 through his memory. 
 
 As in memory he went back to the time he 
 lived with his father and mother and recalled 
 how he was brought up to reverence the good 
 and the true, and he thought of the family, 
 how they knelt at morning prayers, and how, 
 since his father's death, he had gone steadily 
 down and down, and down. Standing there 
 by that "bush" and hearing God in his own 
 conscience awakened all those memories that 
 accused him of sin. He turned squarely 
 around at once, retraced his steps to his house, 
 called his wife and said to her: "I have seen a 
 signal of danger, and I realize now what I 
 have never realized before, notwithstanding 
 all that you have said about it; that I am a 
 dreadful sinner. I have come back here de- 
 termined that I will never taste that awful 
 stuff again." So clear was his conviction and 
 so strong his will that he was able to conquer 
 his appetite, and when I was recently visiting 
 
 25
 
 in Kirksville, the other brother took me up 
 the street and showed me another house like 
 his own, just across the highway, so nearly 
 alike that you could hardly tell them apart. 
 The man who had turned away from drink 
 became an excellent business man. 
 
 Another illustration similar to it was when, 
 in this house of God, we offered prayers as a 
 church for the return of a young man who 
 had left home, and his widowed mother did 
 not know where he was. He had been very 
 wild, he had refused to work, or he stayed but 
 a short time at one place; he wandered over 
 the country, drank to some extent, and he was 
 in Chicago the night we were praying for him 
 here. He went up to his room in the hotel, 
 and as the porter lit the gas he noticed a 
 Bible, such as societies supply to some hotels. 
 When the porter had gone out of the room he 
 took up that Bible. It was his "burning 
 bush." And when he saw that Bible his 
 thoughts returned to his home, and his pray- 
 ing mother. God spoke to him through his 
 conscience and through his memory. He took 
 up that Bible, opened it, and read this verse : 
 "He which converteth the sinner from the 
 error of his way shall save a soul from death, 
 and shall hide a multitude of sins." 
 
 26
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 God spoke to him. It was his "burning 
 bush." He came home and told his mother 
 how God had spoken to him through that 
 Bible. 
 
 These illustrations show that God appeals 
 to every age, and Moses is not the only one 
 to whom He spoke. In the days of my youth 
 and I have seen the acacia bush, which is 
 here spoken of I have seen it in the Desert 
 of Arabia, where Moses fed his flocks, and 
 when that plum tree is in bloom in the spring 
 it puts out the most gorgeous colours, and 
 flames out in beauty, and yet that bush was 
 perhaps no more in flames then than the 
 bushes around Philadelphia are now. You 
 go where you will in the country now, at the 
 opening of this Resurrection season, and 
 every bush speaks of God. He flames in 
 every flower that is now coming forth. 
 
 I do not think that Moses was the only per- 
 son who saw a burning bush, and I do not 
 think that that bush burned only at that time. 
 It was probably burning twenty or thirty 
 years before, and he might have seen it, but 
 he did not. 
 
 Emerson said that the great difference be- 
 tween men is that one is a mere man and 
 another one is "a man thinking." The great 
 
 27
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 difference is that one sees something worth 
 while, and the other does not. It reminds me 
 of Emerson's illustration when he said that 
 there was a very heavy truck which was at- 
 tached to a pair of mules, and they were 
 unable to draw it. As they had worked them- 
 selves out, they unhitched the mules, and 
 called upon a large number of men to come 
 and draw the load. The men drew that 
 truck. They were equal to the mules in phys- 
 ical strength, and yet what a difference there 
 may have been between the men who drew 
 that truck and men who think. A mule could 
 draw that truck, and so could a man, if there 
 were enough of them, with their physical 
 strength. When Archimedes discovered the 
 lever by which he could, by placing a lever 
 underneath a weight, lift with one hand, what 
 a hundred men could not lift without a lever, 
 he became "a man thinking." 
 
 A little while ago a great city thoroughfare 
 was covered with teams drawn by horses and 
 mules, and if a man sat behind one of them 
 long enough he would perhaps finally get 
 home. Neither of them thought very much. 
 But one man who was thinking invented the 
 automobile, and now they come and go by 
 hundreds, and they cover the streets, and 
 
 28
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 crowd the avenues, and they carry our com- 
 merce over the world with amazing rapidity 
 because there was found somewhere a man 
 thinking, which made all this difference in 
 transportation. 
 
 Moses may have seen that burning bush a 
 hundred times as he took his flock to feed 
 near it. But it was only when he began to 
 think that he became the great man, the great 
 prophet and statesman and successful man 
 that he was. I say again, I feel very certain 
 that there was nothing unusual about that 
 bush at the time he saw it, beside the fact 
 fact he took notice of what had been there 
 all the time before. I have been trying 
 long to impress the great lesson on the 
 minds of young men and women that " Ob- 
 servation is every man's university," and I 
 have been writing upon that book all this 
 week. When I think of Moses standing 
 before that bush, it was only availing himself 
 of that present opportunity which he had not 
 done before, in noticing the fire in the burn- 
 ing bush. 
 
 There once lived a man in North Carolina 
 who was working as a farmhand, and on 
 stormy days, when it was impossible to work 
 in the fields, he was set to work under the 
 
 29
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 shed, breaking stones for the purpose of 
 making roads. So all those stormy days he 
 stood there breaking up stones into small 
 pieces. That was a man, with a man's phys- 
 ical power, and it did not require very much 
 strength for a man to do that, perhaps. Even 
 a mule could have done that. But one day 
 there came to him the thought, "This is a 
 very weak, useless thing for a thinking man 
 to do." He said, "I am going to find some- 
 thing else to occupy my mind and my 
 thoughts while I am working." He began to 
 be what Emerson called "a man thinking." 
 It was merely a man crushing stones before, 
 but now the man thinking was seeing the 
 burning bush, was seeing the fire, was seeing 
 the lightning, was seeing something new and 
 fascinating in life, and from that one man 
 thinking there came the great work that is 
 now being done all over the world, wherever 
 bridges are built which are made of concrete 
 in its present patent process. That man 
 breaking stones under that shed was only a 
 poor, miserable man, earning ninety cents a 
 day. Now you build your bridges over your 
 rivers ; you build your great sky scrapers out 
 of concrete which he invented or used for the 
 first time in its present form, and "the man 
 
 30
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 thinking" was equal to thousands of men, as 
 soon as he began to think. 
 
 Moses, looking upon that light that day 
 was like a man who first looked upon the 
 electric light. You look at the electric light 
 now and you wonder where it came from. It 
 came from Edison thinking. Not from Edi- 
 son alone, but from "a man thinking," think- 
 ing how by putting a loop of wires in an 
 airtight space, it would give light. It came 
 from Edison thinking, just as the Moses 
 thinking wrought out the delivery of the 
 children of Israel. 
 
 Mrs. Howe was at a quilting party in Cam- 
 bridge, and I well remember how they used 
 to place the quilt on frames on which the quilt 
 was stretched from one side to the other, and 
 then rolled up as they worked the squares. 
 Mrs. Howe was there like every other woman, 
 perhaps gossiping as the rest did. There 
 was absolutely no special difference between 
 them. She was just a woman sewing, as 
 other women did and mingling socially with 
 the rest. But as she was working upon that 
 quilt she remembered that her husband had 
 been working for twelve years on a sewing 
 machine, trying to invent one that would be 
 practicable. That veiy day they had been
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 obliged to go without a fire because they had 
 no fuel, having spent everything on this 
 patent for the sewing machine. But this 
 woman was changed from a woman only, to 
 "a woman thinking." She took the darning 
 needle and drove the eye of the threaded 
 needle instead of the point down through the 
 quilt. Then a little girl got under the quilt, 
 placed a thread through the loop formed by 
 the thread on the under side of the quilt, thus 
 holding the little bunch of yarn in place. She 
 was changed from a woman only to a woman 
 thinking, and when that quilting party was 
 over, she went home and said to her husband, 
 "Elias, I have found the secret ! I have found 
 what you need to make your sewing machine. 
 You need to reverse the needle; instead of 
 driving the point down, you must drive the 
 head of the needle down through the cloth, 
 and a shuttle may run through the loop as it 
 is drawn back." Only two weeks after that 
 Howe put out the model of the sewing ma- 
 chine, which has changed the civilization of 
 woman's work all over the earth just the 
 difference between a woman thinking and a 
 woman gossiping. 
 
 When Moses faced that burning bush that 
 day, he was aroused. The man who thinks 
 
 32
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 can furnish labour to a hundred hands, and 
 he consequently becomes so much more of a 
 man than he has been before. It is an in- 
 tensely interesting thing to study the great 
 illustrations which refer to Moses and the 
 burning bush, but I have time only to con- 
 dense into the briefest measure my lesson. 
 
 Moses was an Israelite, by education an 
 Egyptian ; was a graduate of the great Uni- 
 versity in Heliopolis probably a teacher 
 there held high military rank; commanded 
 armies; had been victorious in battle; he was 
 one of the scholars, one of the princes of the 
 great Empire of Egypt; and yet one night 
 he made a mistake, and while we may feel 
 that he was justified in so doing under the 
 circumstances, he killed an Egyptian and he 
 felt he was a murderer; his conscience con- 
 demned him : and he ran away. He disap- 
 peared from all these scenes of glory ; he ran 
 away from all this power, and all his wealth, 
 and disappeared in the wilderness, hiding 
 away. He realized he was a criminal, and the 
 consciousness of his criminality hung upon 
 him. He hid far from his friends and ac- 
 quaintances, not even his own brother knew 
 where he was, and there for forty years he 
 secreted himself self -condemned, feeding his 
 
 33
 
 flocks there in the wilderness, living on a mis- 
 erable pittance, taking his flocks wherever he 
 could find grass. One day as he was leading 
 them across the fields, half exhausted for 
 want of food, he came upon this tree, the 
 acacia plum tree, and there was something in 
 it that attracted his attention, and he must 
 have said to himself, "God is in that tree, God 
 is in every tree." Anyhow, He was in that 
 tree, and Moses saw Him, and he became "a 
 man thinking." 
 
 If we will only look, we can see God on 
 many occasions. We may not be able to see 
 Him always, but we can see Him on special 
 occasions, like the man with the red lantern, 
 or the man with the Bible in Chicago, where 
 these things hold a relationship to us. 
 
 How magnificent is that scenery that 
 Moses looked upon as he stood on the moun- 
 tainside of Sinai. There was that great 
 range, on which he could stand and look to 
 the Red Sea; he could look for a hundred 
 miles away to the distant plains, and follow- 
 ing the lines of the river, he could see far 
 away to the cities of Edom. Standing on the 
 side of that mountain, he wrought himself up 
 to the awful sublimity of it all. He sees God, 
 and he recognizes God in the soul, and in the 
 
 34
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 music and sublimity of it all, and he finds that 
 there are times in a man's life when his soul 
 is wrought up to see visions. It is only nat- 
 ural that when we look upon the scenes of 
 God, to find God in them. I have heard 
 many sermons on this text where the idea 
 was emphasized that God especially appeared 
 miraculously to Moses on this occasion, and 
 that interpretation may be true. It has its 
 value if it is interpreted in that way. But 
 it may also be true that God is in that 
 bush every day, as He had been in it all 
 during the lifetime of Moses. Anyhow, it 
 led Moses to thinking; it led him to seek 
 forgiveness of God and man, and turn back 
 again. His conscience began to assume an- 
 other phase; it told him to go back home 
 to his people, and to lead the Israelites out 
 of slavery into the liberty of the promised 
 land. 
 
 Young men and women who will read 
 these words: There is some burning bush 
 right in your path now, and to every young 
 man and woman that will watch for that bush, 
 God will speak to him or her, and tell him of 
 the things he ought to be doing, and no longer 
 waste his time or his life in this foolishness, or 
 that, but press him to determine to face the 
 
 35
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 future with a stronger heart, and make some- 
 thing of himself. 
 
 God said to Moses, "Go back and make 
 something of yourself; be a leader of your 
 people ; take up the cause of the weak and of 
 the poor and demand that they shall have 
 justice." And Moses went back to Egypt 
 and there faced Pharoah, and there led the 
 children of Israel out through the Red Sea, 
 and it was then that his sister and brother 
 came to help him, to help their criminal 
 brother, who had wasted his life; because he 
 was brave enough to face sin and confess it, 
 to go to God for protection, to lead the life 
 as he should have done years before. 
 
 God is in the bushes; God is in the trees; 
 God is in the events that are now going on, 
 and the bush that burns for you may not be 
 the acacia bush. But if we look for it, as 
 Moses did, we shall see it, and if, when we 
 see that warning bush, if we listen, God 
 will speak to the hearts of every one of us, 
 and tell us to go back again and begin once 
 more that consecrated life which we ought 
 to have lived, and that we should no longer 
 pass a mere existence in the deserts of the 
 world. 
 
 36
 
 Ill 
 
 NO OTHER PLACE TO GO 
 
 MY mind has been turning, on the train 
 and in my experiences of the week, to 
 this expression of Jesus Christ, in the 
 words which I read to you this morning: 
 "Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye 
 also go away? Then Simon Peter answered 
 him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast 
 the words of eternal life." 
 
 "To whom shall we go?" 
 
 I have found through the country a very 
 serious decadence of the Christian churches, 
 in membership and in spiritual power. In 
 many places the churches are poor and dis- 
 couraged, and the officers speak with gloom, 
 that "the war is taking the place of the 
 church," and that people talk politics now, 
 and not religion. Consequently they feel 
 that there is a sad outlook for the Christian 
 churches. 
 
 So I have asked myself, "To whom can we 
 go?" If the church does go out of existence; 
 
 37
 
 if it has to disband, "To whom shall we go?" 
 Where shall we turn? What can take the 
 place of the church? Who can do the 
 church's work? 
 
 A year or two ago, there was a town in the 
 state of Washington which has, I think, from 
 eleven hundred to fifteen hundred inhabit- 
 ants, which used to have so many churches 
 they could not find people to attend them. 
 So they disbanded them all and now they 
 have no church, and now they are looking for 
 some one to come in and begin all anew. But 
 the condition of that town without a preacher 
 so strangely disorganized is in the neglect of 
 the Sabbath Day, in its injury to business, in 
 social life of the town ; and its effect leads one 
 to see what would be the disaster to mankind 
 if the Christian church were to be disbanded. 
 Where can you go? What can you set up in 
 place of the church? These people put in the 
 "movies"; they tried to put in "moral in- 
 fluences" that were uplifting to the commun- 
 ity; they have put in baseball and football, 
 they have put in excursions and all sorts of 
 things on Sundays, to take the place of the 
 church. But they did not take the place of 
 the church, and every one felt that they did 
 not. They said they were all disgusted with 
 
 38
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 it, even those who did not go to church. They 
 became anxious about it and came to see me, 
 to find out if it were not possible to send some 
 one from Pennsylvania to open one of the 
 buildings and have a real live, Christian 
 church. To whom can the people go, but to 
 the Saviour of all mankind? 
 
 Organizations like the Y. M. C. A. are 
 doing a great and efficient work in the up- 
 building of manly character, for the winning 
 of victories and the turning of many minds 
 toward eternal things. Suppose the Y. M. 
 C. A. and kindred organizations were to be 
 disbanded, what would you put in place of 
 them? Can you think of anything? You 
 cannot. It would be impossible to find any- 
 thing that could do their work and accomplish 
 what they can accomplish among young men 
 as the agents of the church. They have no 
 place to go but to the Y. M. C. A. and kin- 
 dred organizations only to Jesus after all. 
 
 To what place shall we go if we have no 
 home? You have a place somewhere you call 
 home, and to you it is dearer than any palace 
 on earth. What can you put up in place of a 
 Christian home ? What would become of our 
 schools and our colleges if we were to take 
 Christ out of them and out of the teachers and 
 
 39
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 of those who have charge of those institutions ? 
 Think what it would mean if in the United 
 States Christ were taken out of all these in- 
 stitutions ; if we did not have Him in the char- 
 acter of our great educational work! Think 
 of the almshouses, of the work for the poor 
 and needy, of the money given in the name of 
 Christ and in the spirit of Christ! Think 
 what would become of the work for the poor, 
 the teaching of the ignorant if Christ were 
 taken out. Think of what the nation would 
 be now if, in the midst of this war, it had 
 nothing beyond, nothing religious to look for- 
 ward to! If the President sets forth to the 
 world high ideals, as he does, it is only because 
 he has been taught the truth as it is set forth 
 in Christ's great teachings with reference to 
 the whole world, that the world should be one 
 great family. The Christian is always a law- 
 abiding socialist. Socialism is taught in 
 various forms, and consequently the name 
 may be misleading. But Socialism, the 
 theory of the equality of all men, the right of 
 every child that comes into the earth to have 
 his share of the world's garden, is the Social- 
 ism of the Scriptures. It is his religion that 
 leads the President of the United States to 
 say that all the world shall be more equal; 
 
 40
 
 that the smaller nations shall have the same 
 rights as the larger ones. Where could we 
 go if we did not have Christ? To whom could 
 we appeal? 
 
 During the World War the Government 
 of the United States and the Cabinet officers 
 and others connected with the Government 
 said w r e must not talk peace, and yet peace is 
 the religion of Jesus Christ. We were in the 
 war for peace, or we would have had no right 
 in it at all. And today we do talk peace, and 
 we will talk peace, and American citizens do 
 still reign as kings on the earth, and let them 
 hold that in mind. When we voluntarily sur- 
 render our food, our rights, our liberty and 
 our comforts for the purpose of winning the 
 war which we believe in, no nation on earth 
 has a right to say to us we shall not rule the 
 country still. We are a nation of American 
 free citizens, and so long as this arm can 
 swing, and so long as this heart reveres the 
 old flag, just so long will I be an American 
 citizen and speak the truth as I see it before 
 God. No man shall dictate to me what I 
 shall say, whether I shall pray for peace, or 
 pray for war. It is the right and duty of 
 every American citizen to think and pray for 
 the best things. 
 
 41
 
 We must learn that the American people 
 have religious ideals that they believe in, and 
 that the officials of the Government are still 
 simply our servants, to do what we tell them 
 to do, and they cannot tell us what we must 
 do. Jesus taught that, "Every man is the 
 equal of every other man before God!" 
 Every heart can go to Him; every man is 
 responsible to Him for himself, and Jesus 
 said that all mankind will some time come and 
 acknowledge Him ; that every knee must bow 
 and every tongue confess that Christ is the 
 Lord of all. We cannot have peace until 
 all nations German, Russian, American 
 recognize this one great, central ideal: Jesus 
 Christ and His principles, and His truth. 
 And we will not have permanent peace by 
 treaties that are not founded in Christian con- 
 science; or until the people have determined 
 to obey their agreements. We cannot trust 
 diplomacy ; we cannot trust anything but the 
 consciences of men made clear by the presence 
 of Christ, the Son of God. Let all nations 
 recognize Him! To whom can we go but to 
 Him? There is no other Name; there is no 
 other Spirit; there is no other ideal but 
 Christ. We must call upon Him to maintain 
 L our integrity in His sight, in order that all 
 
 42
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 nations may agree to accept one common 
 standard. 
 
 Which way shall we go if we forsake 
 Christ? Peter and the disciples eleven of 
 them were there, and they did not turn 
 away from Christ ; only temporarily if at all. 
 But Judas turned away from Him. Where 
 could he go when he had no Christ, no Sav- 
 iour? He went out into the darkness, blam- 
 ing himself, cursing himself and hanged 
 himself. Where shall we go but to Christ? 
 Peter was very wise about it. In grief, in 
 sorrow, in trouble, in disaster, we have no 
 place to go but to Christ. There was only 
 one place that Peter desired to go, and that 
 was to his Master. 
 
 I saw a home-sick boy in a station travel- 
 ing alone last week, and I tried my best to 
 comfort him, and I tried to get him to go 
 up town with me, or to look around in the 
 stores; but that poor boy was so broken- 
 hearted, he was so home-sick, that for a long 
 time I could not get anything from him. 
 Finally he told me he wanted "to go home." 
 He did not want anything else but to go 
 home. That was the only place that would 
 satisfy him. 
 
 I saw during the war the great factories in 
 
 43
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 the West let out their men, and what a sub- 
 lime thing it was to stand on the street corner 
 and see the thousands flock from the munition 
 plants on the Pacific coast and see them scat- 
 ter in all the various directions through the 
 city. One takes this street and the other that, 
 and the other that alley ; some homes may be 
 poor and some very humble and small, but 
 each went his own direction to his own home. 
 I have seen The Temple University dismiss 
 its classes and thousands of students come 
 out of its doors, and each goes in his given 
 direction toward one home. One place above 
 all other places! Where could they go but 
 home? And so it is with the Christian. He 
 can go in no other direction but toward the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 They tell us that the Bible is getting old 
 and that people are losing their faith in it and 
 their love for it, and yet it is the only train 
 there is ; it is the only boat there is. When a 
 U-boat sunk a ship there was sometimes only 
 one boat for the survivors to get into; but 
 suppose those men had said, "There is surely 
 only one boat, but we will not get into that; 
 it might be a leaky boat; we will strike out 
 for ourselves and tiy to swim to the distant 
 shore" it would have been just as foolish as 
 
 44
 
 turning away from this Bible, the only boat 
 we have. 
 
 They once told me in Spokane, Washing- 
 ton, that there was only one train to Butte, 
 Mont. There was only one train, and so the 
 agents urged the people, "You must be sure 
 to take that one train." The Government 
 had taken the railroads in hand and ran the 
 trains as it pleased, and often nobody could 
 tell at what time the trains would go. But 
 "that one train is all you shall have; take that 
 train or you will be left behind." He cannot 
 reach his home by any other route. 
 
 The faith of our fathers is the true faith! 
 Grant us the faith of our fathers. Grant 
 unto us that spiritual, wonderful pathway 
 that leadeth unto eternal life. I will walk in 
 that path, for my father believed in it. The 
 centuries have taught that it is the only way. 
 If I be turned off that path, then shall I 
 wander in darkness, and then shall there be 
 annihilation! To whom can we go but to 
 Christ, the only One? There is no need of a 
 new anchor! Men may say, "Here is Christ, 
 and there is Christ, and in the other place is 
 Christ," that there may be a new interpreta- 
 tion of the Scriptures. But the world goes 
 ahead and the Church must keep up to it. 
 
 45
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 Yet there is only one Christ, and there is only 
 one Gospel which we must follow. The grand 
 old faith of a hundred years ago believed in 
 the individual rights of every single person, 
 consistent with the rights of his fellowmen. 
 
 If we desire to live the highest life and in 
 the holiest relationship we need to have a 
 model. A painter goes across the ocean to 
 see Raphael's wonderful painting in the 
 Vatican, in order that he may get his eyes on 
 the highest ideal there is in painting. And 
 there is only one painting in all the world that 
 may be called the highest ; only one that is the 
 greatest. If we would be Christians, we must 
 keep our minds on the highest ideal. If we 
 would have the very best character; if we 
 would enjoy the most that life could bring; 
 if we would live the most holy and perfect 
 life, and if we would be most sure of eternity 
 at the end of this life, we must hold those 
 ideals before us which are centered in Christ 
 Himself. 
 
 I asked a girl not long since how she got 
 along with her father. He was cross ; he was 
 jealous; he was lazy; he seemed to have about 
 every bad trait but drunkenness; and I said 
 to her, "How is it that you get along with 
 your father when nobody else can?" and she 
 
 46
 
 said, "Because he is the only father I have, 
 and so I make the best of him." And when 
 Peter asked of Jesus, "To whom shall we 
 go?" he said in effect, "I don't understand 
 Thee; I don't understand all Thy teachings 
 fully; I believe we ought to use the sword 
 when Thou teachest peace; I don't believe in 
 many things Thou hast advanced concerning 
 our religion. Yet Thou only hast the words 
 of eternal life." 
 
 Only one train! Only one home! Only 
 one father ; better make the best of him. But 
 the thought, really, that was in my mind has 
 been this, that I want you to make up your 
 minds that Christ is really the only One to 
 whom you can go. 
 
 I heard in Oregon a pathetic incident con- 
 cerning a family of whom I had known some- 
 thing. A brother and younger sister went 
 out to take charge of a ranch, and there lived 
 together, she keeping house for him. He was 
 a strong, vigorous, determined man, very set 
 in his ways, and she had something of his 
 characteristics, consequently they did not 
 always get along well together. When the 
 brother married and the wife came in to take 
 the work of the sister, it made her very un- 
 happy, and she soon became engaged to a 
 
 47
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 worthless man, a man whom her brother 
 thought was altogether beneath his sister's 
 station. So he turned his sister out-of-doors 
 and told her never "to darker his door again," 
 and she said she hoped she would never see 
 him again. 
 
 They separated. The man she married 
 was a useless, good-for-nothing man, who 
 would not take care of himself and certainly 
 not of her, and into the home they set up 
 there came nothing but quarrels, and finally, 
 one night her husband turned her and her 
 little baby out into the snow and cold. She 
 was four or five miles from her brother's 
 house. But when she was turned out that 
 night into the snow, and the cold north winds 
 swept across those prairies, and she held her 
 little baby close to her breast, she said, "I 
 don't know where to go!" "I don't know 
 where to go!" Where could she go? No 
 house within two or three miles, and her 
 brother's house four miles away! Where 
 could she go? As her brother was sitting by 
 the fireside, he heard a rapping at the door; 
 then there came a scream from the outside, 
 and he arose hastily from the table and rushed 
 to the door, and when he opened it his sister 
 fell in, fainting to the floor, with her little 
 
 48
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 baby in her arms, with her hands so frozen 
 that her fingers had to be afterward ampu- 
 tated, and as she regained consciousness, she 
 looked at her brother, and said to him, "O, 
 brother Jim! I have come to you because I 
 have nowhere else to go ! Nowhere else to go, 
 brother Jim!" 
 
 The lesson taught in this is that the man, 
 with such a great heart, was so broken and 
 touched by his sister's appeal that his wife 
 took her in and made her one of the family, 
 to be comforted and cared for by her brother. 
 The brother thanked the Lord and thanked 
 her for having come to him when she had no 
 other place to go. 
 
 I heard a pathetic and sweet little incident 
 the other day doubly interesting to me, be- 
 cause I had just been reading a dog story in 
 a recently published magazine. They told 
 me out in Bellingham, Washington, that a 
 young woman was studying to be a nurse. 
 When the War came on she was in the hos- 
 pital, when a boy was brought in with a 
 broken hand. With the boy came a little 
 spaniel dog. They tried to keep the dog out 
 of the hospital and did send him away several 
 times, but he still hung around, waiting for 
 his little master. Gangrene had set in, and 
 
 49
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 the little boy soon died, but the dog would 
 still wait around the hospital for his little 
 master. Often the nurse would take pity on 
 him and give him something to eat. But the 
 interesting thing about the story is that one 
 day as the dog was going out of the hospital 
 he caught his paw in the crack of the closing 
 door, as the door shut quickly and crushed his 
 paw. It seems he remembered how the nurse 
 had taken care of his master's hand, and the 
 dog went limping in and whining at her. He 
 went up to the nurse, sat by the bedside and 
 put his paw upon her lap and held it there for 
 her to wrap it up as she had done with his 
 little master. From that time on that nurse 
 and that dog were intimate friends. The dog 
 did not wish to see any one else but the nurse. 
 
 Then came the call to arms, and the nurse's 
 great difficulty was to part with her dog, and 
 when her mother protested that she should not 
 let her affection go out like that to a dog, the 
 nurse turned to her mother, and said, "To 
 whom could the dog go but to me; no one 
 would take the boy's place ; there is no one to 
 care for him but me!" 
 
 When she took the steamer as a war nurse, 
 she entreated the officers to allow her to take 
 the dog with her, and finally she was per- 
 
 50
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 mitted tc take him as a "mascot," and the 
 little dog was with his mistress whenever pos- 
 sible and was always fed by her. On the 
 steamer the nurse was taken sick with a con- 
 tagious disease. She died, and as is the case 
 on steamers when a person dies with a con- 
 tagious disease, they wrapped the body up in 
 a winding sheet, weighted it and let it down 
 over the side of the steamer into the ocean. 
 The dog saw it all, and he sat there whining, 
 filled with sorrow. The next morning early 
 a sailor going around by the taffrail saw the 
 dog come out of the cook's cabin and go up to 
 the railing. As he looked out on the sea, he 
 began to wag his tail, as though he saw some- 
 thing, and then leaped into the sea, and went 
 down, following his mistress' body to the 
 depth of the sea. 
 
 To whom could that dog go? When that 
 old mother heard that her daughter was dead, 
 and heard of the story of the dog, she felt 
 comforted. She somehow could not feel so 
 sad. When that mother, in the sorrow of her 
 daughter's death and of the burial in the 
 awful sea, her heart full of tenderness, turned 
 toward Jesus, she held up her hands in 
 prayer, and she said, "Lord Jesus! to whom 
 can I go? As that dog went to my daughter, 
 
 51
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 'having no other place to go,' so I come to 
 Thee for comfort!" And in times of sorrow 
 and of great distress there is only one place 
 you can go, and that is to Christ the Lord. 
 All things else may fail, and yet it is possible, 
 even in the extremes of sorrow, and disap- 
 pointment, and poverty, and pain to go to 
 the one great Saviour and find that He is all 
 and in all. 
 
 To whom can we go but to Jesus Christ?
 
 IV 
 DISGUISED VICTORIES 
 
 I WANT to say something with reference 
 to what Jesus said in the twenty-first 
 chapter of Matthew, forty-second verse, 
 where He referred to his own position in the 
 world. Referring to Himself with a sublime 
 view of future history Jesus said: "The stone 
 which the builders rejected has become the 
 head of the corner. This is the Lord's doing 
 and it is marvelous in our eyes." 
 
 I was once sitting in the home of John S. 
 C. Abbott, the great biographer, writing the 
 "Lives of the Presidents of the United 
 States." He had written a large book upon 
 it. I had looked up and written minor por- 
 tions of the history, and after Dr. Abbott died 
 I continued the work, and carried the volume 
 on until I came to Philadelphia. Each Presi- 
 dent's life was added to to make a larger vol- 
 ume. But that evening, next to the last 
 evening I ever saw the great scholar, we were 
 talking with reference to the lives of the 
 
 53
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 Presidents in general, and one lesson which 
 he drew from their lives, we did not write out, 
 because it seemed to be too piously religious. 
 Nevertheless, the quotation came to our lips 
 together. "The stone which the builders re- 
 jected has become the head of the corner." 
 That night, as I thought it over, I thought I 
 could recognize the hand of Almighty God 
 going through history and working out con- 
 tinually in the lives of the Presidents. 
 
 The illustration of this fact in the life of 
 George Washington does not come to my 
 mind, but beginning with John Adams, I can 
 follow the line all the way down. In the life 
 of John Adams we found that at twenty 
 years of age he graduated from Harvard 
 University and went out with all the ambi- 
 tions of a young graduate from college, think- 
 ing that he knew more of history, more of the 
 sciences, more of the philosophies and more of 
 literature than any one else could possibly 
 know. It is a very usual thing for a young 
 man who has graduated from college to think 
 he has obtained all the knowledge there is to 
 be obtained in this world, whereas he really 
 has secured only a very small section of what 
 he needs to know. But young Adams went 
 out with very large ideas, and applied for a 
 
 54
 
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 position as teacher in Worcester, Mass. He 
 supposed, of course, that the school commit- 
 tee would say, "Certainly, come right in; you 
 belong to the Adams family, having aristoc- 
 racy behind you and you are a graduate of 
 Harvard College. There is no need for this 
 committee to look any further." When they 
 summoned John Adams to appear before the 
 school committee of Worcester to be ex- 
 amined, he was indignant, and refused at first 
 to go. He said, "I know so much! Those 
 men have no right to examine me. They 
 know far less than I do." Yet his pride 
 began to waver and his father insisted that he 
 should go. Anyhow he did go. They ex- 
 amined the young man and he was rejected. 
 The committee decided he did not know 
 enough to teach school in Worcester. Of all 
 the crushing blows that seemed to come to 
 that young man, that was the severest. 
 Broken down beyond measure, he said, "With 
 all that I know and all that I have inherited, 
 I have been rejected." For a time he aban- 
 doned all his hopes and all his ambitions in 
 life. But the stone which the builders re- 
 jected in Worcester, was afterward to be- 
 come the head of the corner, and some years 
 afterward that same city turned out to ac- 
 
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 " claim him as the President of the United 
 States. The very men who had been on that 
 school committee were now ashamed to see 
 him, even in the distance, because of the fact 
 that he had become "the head of the corner." 
 
 Such was the singular thing in the history 
 of Thomas Jefferson, who was also from a 
 fine family in Virginia. He got into a con- 
 troversy with Governor Dunmore over the 
 Boston Port Bill, passed by Great Britain. 
 Young Jefferson was very open in his decla- 
 ration that Boston should be a free port, and 
 Virginia was secretly mustering its forces to 
 help Boston rebel against Great Britain. 
 But Governor Dunmore, with an ardent 
 friendship for England and King George 
 III, looked down upon the young man with 
 disdain, refused to speak to him, turned him 
 out of his office and forbid him ever to come 
 near him again. The Governor of the great 
 State refused to have anything more to do 
 with him. At that hour Jefferson was re- 
 jected by the builders, and he felt that life 
 was no longer worth living under such dis- 
 grace. Friends also refused to have anything 
 to do with him. The young women turned 
 away from him and would not be seen with 
 him. Friends rejected him when he appeared 
 
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 at any invited occasion. Poor, disgraced Jef- 
 ferson, whom the builders rejected! But 
 there came a day in Philadelphia when Jeffer- 
 son sat at a table drawing up the Declaration 
 of Independence for the coming United 
 States. He had become the head of the 
 corner. That very time he was drawing up 
 that Declaration of Independence, one of the 
 friends who refused to speak to him when he 
 was in disgrace was moving in the House of 
 Burgesses in Virginia, a complimentary reso- 
 lution in favor of the stand that Jefferson had 
 taken. He was the "head of the corner," 
 which only so few years before the builders 
 had rejected. 
 
 John Quincy Adams for three years tried 
 to get clients as a lawyer. People looked 
 upon him as a peculiar individual, not par- 
 ticularly gifted, and consequently, he could 
 get no practice, was disappointed again and 
 again and was going down into poverty. 
 One afternoon the question was before the 
 people of Boston, as to whether they should 
 go into alliance with France in her war with 
 England, just after the Revolutionary War. 
 The American people were so deeply in sym- 
 pathy with France for the help they had 
 given us in the Revolution, that they felt that 
 
 57
 
 we ought to go into immediate alliance with 
 France against England. The prejudices at 
 that time were very strong against England. 
 But young John Quincy Adams took that 
 stand that we ought not to go into alliance 
 with France. He claimed that England was 
 no more to blame than France in the contro- 
 versy; and although we loved France so 
 much and were so greatly indebted to her, we 
 must not do an inconsistent or wicked thing, 
 even in the case of such a friendship as that. 
 He was out-spoken about it. He had opened 
 a little office and started his law practice 
 under Government support. Immediately 
 his clients fell off because of the stand which 
 he took. But the stone which the builders re- 
 jected was later to become the head of the 
 corner. John Quincy Adams sank seemingly 
 out of sight altogether. But George Wash- 
 ington heard of him, and George Washing- 
 ton felt that John Quincy Adams was right. 
 He felt that we ought not to go to war 
 with any nation unless it was for a just 
 cause, no matter what might have been our 
 previous situation, and while Washington 
 sympathized with France and loved France 
 for what she had done for us, he took the 
 stand of John Quincy Adams; and upon
 
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 that thought he was nominated and elected 
 President. 
 
 Adams was appointed immediately as Min- 
 ister to the Netherlands, which was the foun- 
 dation of all his great subsequent career. 
 The hand of God seems to have worked out 
 the same result. 
 
 Jackson seemed to have been disgraced 
 when he married a divorced woman about 
 whom many scandals had been circulated. 
 She had secured her divorce by the acts of the 
 Legislature of Virginia. It was not lawful. 
 He did not know that and she did not know 
 it. Thus they were not legally married, and 
 two years after their first marriage they were 
 married again. Their home life was one of 
 the loveliest in history. She threw a femi- 
 nine influence on his life that was most pow- 
 erful for good. But many people began to 
 criticise their action in living together for two 
 years without being legally married. The 
 scandal circulated and the young man was 
 not received in society, was refused the po- 
 litical office which he had expected ; disgraced, 
 turned aside, hated by every one but his wife. 
 The stone which the builders rejected. The 
 very leaders of that society which refused him 
 admission, and which blamed him unjustly, a 
 
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 few years later sought an interview with Mrs. 
 Jackson to tell her how much they regretted 
 that they ever took any such position as they 
 did, years before. His wife very modestly 
 and quietly stood by him through all the 
 years and at last led him to Christ. The most 
 profane man in the United States became the 
 man of the cleanest language, and Andrew 
 Jackson served the Lord with a devotion that 
 was one of the marvels of our history. "The 
 stone which the builders rejected became the 
 head of the corner." 
 
 But this was especially the case of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln, when in his early life the people 
 rebuked him. It is a most tender and touch- 
 ing story that we read of Lincoln when he 
 was defeated in his first candidacy for the 
 Legislature of Illinois. He was a young 
 man, unknown, brought in from the forest. 
 But he had studied, and read, until he felt an 
 ambition to be in the Legislature. The great 
 majority was against him, and he was de- 
 feated. Poor Abraham Lincoln! He said, 
 "I will go back into the forest splitting rails ; 
 I will have nothing more to do with politics." 
 The builders had rejected Abraham Lincoln. 
 But he became the head of the corner. 
 
 I heard General Garfield relate that when 
 
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 he was teaching school he had no further am- 
 bition; all he expected to do was to make 
 enough to be sure of his board and clothes. 
 He had no appreciation of political promo- 
 tion. When he was elected to the Presidency 
 of Hiram College in Ohio it was a very close 
 vote, only one vote more than necessary to 
 elect him. But afterward, he became the head 
 of the corner. Such was the case with 
 McKinley; such was the case with Harrison. 
 
 The Presidents of the United States in 
 their lives fully illustrate Jesus' great saying 
 that "the stone which the builders rejected has 
 become the head of the corner." When we 
 stand as we do at this point in history, we are 
 reminded of this saying by the continual re- 
 currence of victories after defeats. 
 
 I was consulted concerning the life of 
 Cyrus H. K. Curtis, of the "Ladies' Home 
 Journal," as some business men proposed to 
 make a biographical moving picture of Cur- 
 tis, so that people could look at it from all the 
 different standpoints, and take courage. If 
 we begin on the inside, or at the beginning, of 
 his biography we will be at a very great dis- 
 advantage. We meet a quiet, modest man. 
 But if we would get at the real influence of 
 the greater Curtis, we must go into the homes 
 
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 where his publications go, see the influence of 
 those magazines upon the lives of those in 
 those homes, upon the mother, the father, 
 the children; upon the associations around 
 that home; upon literature; upon science, 
 upon religion. You cannot measure the in- 
 fluence of Mr. Curtis' life by his early life 
 when I used to know him in Boston, away 
 back there in the early years. You must 
 travel slowly down the years to see what has 
 been wrought through his influence day by 
 day, in England, India, Canada and other 
 places; see what he has wrought out by the 
 distribution of his literature through the 
 world, and then turn around and look back on 
 his victorious ascent. 
 
 In hard times, when "being rejected by 
 the builders," many opportunities appear in 
 which to become wealthy, opportunities to 
 engage in great enterprises that would not 
 otherwise be possible. It all points to the 
 Christ back of history, that great figure that 
 stands up there by the Sea of Galilee two 
 thousand years ago and whose influence goes 
 out in ever widening circles as the years roll 
 on. "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvel- 
 ous in our eyes." What hath not God 
 wrought out of One so humble, so obscure, * 
 
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 living in lowly Nazareth, out of which no 
 great thing ever came. Yet that man, in 
 that place, rejected by the scholars; re- 
 jected by His neighbours; with no aristo- 
 cratic family connections, becomes the great 
 Corner Stone of the Christian Religion, which 
 has affected every good thing that we see in 
 our civilization. 
 
 I went to the hospital the other day and 
 saw a hundred of those ministering angels 
 the nurses caring for the sick. My mind 
 looked back through 2000 years, along a 
 straight line, to the Sea of Galilee. I thought 
 how what was being done now was one result 
 of the teaching, example and sacrifice of 
 Christ. 
 
 If you go into the great libraries of the 
 World and select from those shelves the 
 choicest of books from the collection, they all 
 point back to Christ. He has now become the 
 head of the corner. Then he was rejected of 
 men. He was cast aside by the builders. 
 
 We are today living in an age of wonders. 
 One of the greatest of all wonders was the 
 Conference at Washington. It is a marvel- 
 ous thing to see coming into that Conference 
 the Spirit of Christ; the Spirit of Jesus; the 
 Spirit of Equity; the Spirit of Friendship. 
 
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 What a great thing it is to see gathered there 
 the Nations of the Earth, Japan, China, 
 England, America and the other Nations in 
 that Council, to see this country trying to 
 do "the fair thing." What a beautiful thing 
 for the Nations of the Earth to do, to find 
 Japan doing the fair thing by China, in 
 mercy; in justice, in kindness. As day by 
 day that Conference goes on there develops 
 more of that Christian Spirit which prevails 
 strongly in this country and which is pointing 
 more and more surely to that greater Confer- 
 ence that will be a fraternal Parliament for 
 all the Nations of the Earth. It is to become 
 the cornerstone, as the once rejected Christ is 
 to become the cornerstone of this new civiliza- 
 tion which is being founded in the City of 
 Washington at this hour. Let us pray for it ; 
 remember it; rejoice over it, and let us be 
 assured that the stone which the builders re- 
 jected at Galilee has become now the head of 
 the corner. Defeats in a righteous cause are 
 victories in disguise.
 
 V 
 POWER TO RISE AGAIN 
 
 IN the tenth chapter of John, we find Jesus 
 explaining His burial and resurrection to 
 the Apostles, but they do not understand. 
 He stated: "I lay down my life that I may 
 take it again. I have power to lay it down 
 and I have power to take it again." 
 
 Every person who visits a church should 
 receive something; and many difficulties pre- 
 sent themselves to the preacher. It does not 
 matter so much what is said from the pulpit, 
 as people can get direct communications from 
 God, get thoughts and hopes and inspirations 
 that the pulpit could not give. It is often 
 only a veiy small part of one's worship to 
 hear what the preacher has to say. You could 
 go to church with no preacher in the pulpit, 
 and there sing and pray and receive spiritual 
 messages that will direct your steps or will 
 do away with your sorrow and care. You can 
 get to the Lord without pulpit ministrations 
 at all; not that the pulpit ministrations are 
 
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 helpless; but that the worship of God does 
 not all consist in listening to some one's state- 
 ment of some theory or doctrine. 
 
 Jesus said, "I have power to lay down my 
 life and I have power to take it again." 
 When Christ said that, no one believed it. 
 Even the men who had traveled with Him all 
 that time; who had seen His wonderful mir- 
 acles; who had never heard Him say an un- 
 truthful thing, and who had never seen Him 
 do an act that was not consistent with a 
 divine, upright life, did not believe that. 
 When He said that He had power to lay 
 down His life, and that He had power to take 
 it up again, no one believed that He meant it 
 literally. 
 
 When He was crucified and His body was 
 laying in the tomb, the disciples assembled in 
 that upper chamber in sorrow and with 
 broken hearts because they did not believe the 
 statement that in three days He should rise 
 again. 
 
 It is only a repetition of a process which 
 had occurred millions of times before and as 
 many times since, in the history of every 
 movement on earth toward God. They have 
 had their gloomy hours; their times of un- 
 belief ; their moments of doubt and you have 
 
 66
 
 had yours, and I have come now to counsel 
 with you about it. 
 
 Many things occur that we do not believe 
 will occur, and it is strange that we do not 
 learn, after them, to have more faith and more 
 cheer. 
 
 When I was born there were no railroads 
 across the country; you could not go at the 
 rate of a mile a minute toward any quarter 
 of the globe When I was born there was no 
 way of crossing the ocean in steamships. We 
 were far, far away from the old country when 
 I was born. When I was born we had no 
 telegraph; no way of sending by wire com- 
 munications from one place to another. Only 
 as recent as when I was born there were no 
 telephones ; no such thing as dynamite. There 
 are a thousand things now that I need not 
 recite that people did not believe would ever 
 come to pass. If Jesus had said you would 
 speak from New York to San Francisco and 
 be distinctly heard there, no one would have 
 believed that then, but miracles are ever re- 
 peating themselves. No one believed that 
 you would travel in the air, but now there are 
 regular airship lines from place to place 
 through the air. 
 
 Who would have believed that in one single 
 
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 epoch we would have made the advance in 
 medical and surgical science, so as to save 
 lives as they were not saved then except by 
 miracle? Who would have believed in the 
 advance of civilization so that millions would 
 dwell together, with consideration for each 
 community's health and safety? Who would 
 have believed that the Christian Church would 
 have reached its millions, with preachers sta- 
 tioned in every quarter of the world? Though 
 Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and 
 preach the Gospel to every creature" no 
 person believed it could be done. 
 
 There are so many things done which we 
 did not believe could be done that it should 
 make us pause. When any person of trust- 
 worthiness makes a statement beyond our 
 present belief, be careful what you say can- 
 not be done. 
 
 It was only a short time ago that a man 
 apparently drowned was dragged out of the 
 sea at Narragansett, and laid down upon the 
 ground for dead. They called a physician, 
 who said he was dead, and they made arrange- 
 ments to carry the body back across the 
 boardwalk and the mother came, an old gray- 
 haired woman, and she said, "Oh, isn't there 
 anything that can be done for him?" "No," 
 
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 they said, "nothing more can be done." Yet 
 there came along a young man who was some- 
 thing of an athlete, an expert swimmer. He 
 said, "Why don't we try; why don't we try?" 
 Maybe he is only insensible not wholly 
 dead." Although they could not detect any 
 beating of the heart. So they began to work 
 on him, trying a method used in cases less 
 desperate, and they worked on him for fifteen 
 or twenty minutes with no signs of life, and 
 every one said, "You cannot do anything with 
 him it is useless," and the old mother knelt 
 upon the sand praying to the Lord to save her 
 son. "Save my son," she cried, and yet she 
 did not believe it could be done. Yet, a few 
 minutes later, there came evidences of return 
 to life, and the lungs were made to expand by 
 artificial process, the heart resumed its normal 
 beat, and the man came back to full health. 
 They did not believe it could be done. The 
 reason I mention this case is because the very 
 next year there was a similar accident at the 
 same place, the same witnesses who were pres- 
 ent at the former restoration did not believe 
 it could be done the second time. The man 
 was saved the second time, and yet the same 
 doubts came to them, "It cannot be done." 
 Yet since that time, by appliances that have 
 
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 been furnished by scientific advancement, a 
 person can be restored who has seemingly 
 been drowned for a long time. I do not re- 
 member exactly the time which the convention 
 of medical men held recently stated in their 
 discussion, within which life could be restored 
 to a drowning person, but I think they men- 
 tioned cases where a man had been seemingly 
 drowned for half an hour who had been re- 
 stored to life. 
 
 The Apostles did not believe that Jesus 
 could descend into the tomb, lay there for 
 three days and then take His life up again. 
 I once had a woman visit me, who wished to 
 know whether it would be right to commit 
 suicide, and she was in such deep despair that 
 I said to my congregation one Sunday, "I do 
 not know where she is tonight, whether her 
 body is floating down the Delaware ; whether 
 she returned to her life of sin, or whether she 
 had reformed; I told them that she had no 
 one to whom she would go for help, no friends 
 or relatives. Since then I received a letter 
 from her in which she states that she had 
 turned around completely, and the thing she 
 most feared did not come to pass at all. Her 
 reformed life was a possibility she had not 
 believed. She was sure it could not be done, 
 
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 and yet in a very few weeks' time she had 
 turned unto the Lord, as she said in a letter 
 to her friend, who thought it was impossible. 
 Nothing is impossible with the Lord. 
 
 A man in a country town in Massachusetts 
 was arrested for breaking into a house, though 
 he did not understand it was burglary. But 
 he broke in with bad motives; and conse- 
 quently he was arrested, tried for burglary, 
 convicted and sent to prison for five years. 
 When that young man, only twenty-two 
 years of age, came out of that prison every 
 one told him, "Your life is blasted for all 
 time." They had said it to thousands of 
 ethers and they believed it, but this young 
 man did not believe it. Not one of his friends 
 would listen to him; no one but his old mother, 
 none of his family relations, would have any- 
 thing to do with him. They told him he had 
 disgraced them all and to get out of town. 
 But he said, "I am going to live right; I am 
 going to stay right here and face the disgrace 
 and live it down." He went to the preacher, 
 and the good preacher said, "I would advise 
 you to go somewhere else; if you come into 
 my congregation the Christian people will 
 shun you. No good family will speak to you. 
 You cannot get along in this town." But the 
 
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 young man, believing that it could be done, 
 said, "I will sit in the back pew or stand by 
 the door; I will go down these streets here 
 where I have lived, and I will go to church 
 every Sunday and win back the respect I lost 
 since I have been in prison." Thousands of 
 men have said, "That is impossible." They 
 have come forth from the gates of the prisons 
 of our own city ; I have seen many of them in 
 the years past when in the sorrow of their 
 irrepressible grief, they say, "There is nothing 
 more for me but go on in crime again or die 
 of starvation." But that young man believed 
 it could be done. He began to live down his 
 old life, and now in the Congress of the 
 United States he has been for fourteen years 
 one of our great statesmen, he has accumu- 
 lated large wealth and rebuilt the very church 
 where people would not welcome him. He is 
 one of our noblest men, although he spent five 
 years in prison for burglary, but he lived it all 
 down because he said, "It could be done!" 
 
 I saw a man one day reeling along the 
 street and said to him, "My friend, you have 
 been drinking too much; can I assist you to 
 your home?" He replied, "I don't drink; I 
 want you to understand that I don't drink." 
 Well, his breath plainly told me that he was 
 
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 intoxicated, and I said to him, "You have 
 been drinking too much; you don't walk as 
 straight as I do, and I have the rheumatism." 
 He turned to me with a smile and said, "Part- 
 ner, I am a disgrace ; a disgrace to everybody; 
 I don't want to go home." When a friend 
 came along and took charge of him, I said, 
 "My man, you don't need to be a disgrace to 
 your family ; you can reform." But he would 
 insist on saying, "I cannot reform; it is too 
 late ; I have gotten such an appetite that there 
 is no use of my trying; I cannot go by a 
 saloon without going in; I would go crazy if 
 1 did not have my drink; it is all too late." 
 Other drunkards have said it continually, "It 
 is too late; it cannot be done," and yet you do 
 not need to go a hundred yards from where 
 you sit tonight to find men who were just as 
 deep under that temptation as any man you 
 know, and yet they sit here, clothed in their 
 right minds, respectable citizens. It can be 
 done. 
 
 Two boys who had inherited a mill stood 
 after the fire on the side of the road not even 
 a wall of the mill left all gone; everything 
 they had was taken away, and the two boys 
 discussed what they would do. They both 
 said, "There does not seem to be much hope 
 
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 for us; not much hope for us." One of them 
 said, "I believe we had better give up the idea 
 of doing anything here better not try, but 
 the other boy said, "I want to think it over; 
 I believe something can yet be done in this 
 place. The two brothers separated, children 
 of the same father and mother, brought up 
 in the same home, having the same education, 
 the same classes in school, the same disposi- 
 tion, the same amount of courage, and they 
 parted company the next morning, one of 
 them to go to the city, and the other stayed 
 where the mill had been destroyed. The boy 
 believed it could be done, and other people 
 said, "No use of your trying it." But the 
 other day when I was passing by on the train 
 I saw fifteen great mills where that mill had 
 stood, and all owned by the boy who had said, 
 "I will stay and rebuild this mill again." The 
 other boy, I don't know where he is; I don't 
 think he even owns his own home; has prob- 
 ably not more than enough to pay his board 
 and his clothes, while the other brother who 
 believed it could be done has an income from 
 millions. 
 
 It has been said that "you cannot cure 
 paralysis; that there is no cure for it; might 
 as well let the children die who have it." 
 
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 Yet we are finding cures for paralysis. Chil- 
 dren who are afflicted with paralysis and are 
 cured right along, perhaps all of them, so far 
 as I know. Anyhow a cure for paralysis has 
 been found, but so long as the doctors said, 
 "It cannot be done," there was no progress 
 made. But now that we have believed it can 
 be done, we have discovered that children do 
 not need to be thus afflicted, and we shall, 
 probably, soon reach a point where we will be 
 able to say when paralysis strikes a child, that 
 if action is taken immediately, the child will 
 never die from that disease. We are coming 
 to that. People say it canot be done "It 
 cannot be done!" We will find an entire cure 
 for it very soon, and the only way to find it is 
 to believe it can be done and go after it. 
 That's the way to find out about it. We have 
 power. 
 
 We are tempted beyond measure; we fall 
 into temptation and we believe we cannot es- 
 cape, and yet the Saviour says that He will 
 come in and help us so that we will not fall 
 into temptation if we do our part. WHOEVER 
 
 WILL MAY BE SAVED FROM TEMPTATION ! 
 
 There is a town in Pennsylvania where fire 
 swept the entire village. Nothing was left 
 but ashes on the sides of the streets, and the 
 
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 people came together and talked it over and 
 most of them said, "Nothing can be done; we 
 have lost all." Nearly every person said, 
 "We have lost everything; there is nothing to 
 build with ; there is nothing here to start with 
 again; no use in trying again." Finally an 
 old lady who had lived in town but a short 
 time made a speech in which she said to them, 
 "Begin now ! Have faith in God and faith in 
 yourselves and begin now all you who be- 
 lieve it can be done start together now." 
 Now no finer streets are walked by the feet of 
 man than those trod by the feet of the people 
 of that noble city, where they returned among 
 those ashes to put up their buildings and 
 begin business again under the greatest diffi- 
 culties. People would not loan them money 
 because there was nothing to give as security. 
 But now that grand and beautiful city stands 
 there in all its activity, with its schools and its 
 business blocks, and its churches sending their 
 spires to the heavens, because the people be- 
 lieved they had power. 
 
 I was once called in to attend a meeting 
 when a large church in Boston had been 
 burned for the second time. I had been a 
 member of the church before that meeting, 
 though I was not a member at that time. The 
 
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 meeting was held in an adjoining hall. The 
 treasurer read a statement at that meeting 
 that the mortgage was so great and the insur- 
 ance so small that the church was in debt to 
 the amount of $118,000. It was a most dis- 
 couraging thing, and many of them felt like 
 running away. But one good old man, God 
 bless him, got up and said, "I believe it can 
 be rebuilt. I believe we have power to raise 
 the money and pay our debt, if we go at it 
 with faith in God and construct another build- 
 ing in its place." Today, that congregation 
 worships in the largest church in all the east. 
 Today that church worships in a building that 
 cost $600,000; today a mighty congregation 
 attends its services because a few men believed 
 it could be done, when many were ready to 
 say, "It cannot be done." 
 
 When our own church in Philadelphia was 
 built people said, "It can never be paid for; 
 it is too great an undertaking for so few peo- 
 ple," and it was hard for us to see that it could 
 ever be done. There were many who said that 
 it could not be done. There were many peo- 
 ple who left the church because they were so 
 afraid we would get so in debt that we could 
 never get out of it. They said, "It cannot be 
 done." But here we are, worshiping this 
 
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 evening, and we have the church so nearly 
 paid for that we will wipe out all the indebt- 
 edness very soon, and we have paid for it 
 over and over again in the work we have done 
 for the world, and yet many people said, "It 
 cannot be done." 
 
 Jesus said, "I can lay down my life and I 
 can take it up again." Many persons who are 
 lost and far from God say, "There is no use 
 of my trying to repent; I have fallen from 
 grace ; it can't be done. But J say to you to- 
 night, "It can be done." We can rise again; 
 man can get up again from the worst condi- 
 tion of sin; from the worst condition of pov- 
 erty ; from the worst condition of ignorance 
 he can rise again. O that I could put these 
 words into the life of every person who hears 
 me, so that he would take them home with 
 him! "I CAN RISE AGAIN!" We may have 
 been discouraged; we may have been de- 
 feated; we may have gone down to sorrow 
 and trials seemingly to their extremes until 
 we said, "We cannot go down any further ; we 
 cannot get back what we have lost, but as sure 
 as God is God and hope is hope, and faith is 
 faith, in every man there lives a resurrection 
 power he can return! If he has lost every- 
 thing he can get it back again. If he has lost 
 
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 anything of worth beyond money he can get 
 it back again, and if he does not live again in 
 this lif e he can live to the perfection of happi- 
 ness in the life over there. 
 
 Christ said, "When I la* down my life I 
 will rise again." Ask yourselves why He 
 rose again. It was not necessary to Him to 
 rise again, to come back to this earthly life 
 again and live for forty days among His dis- 
 ciples. For what purpose was it? It was to 
 confirm the truth of what He had said con- 
 cerning His teaching throughout the three 
 years of His ministry. It was to set the seal 
 upon His divinity in the eyes of His disciples. 
 It was to teach them that though we go down 
 to the very depth yet we can rise again. We 
 can do it in ten thousand ways in our daily 
 lives we can live again. If we have lost all 
 we had we can get it back ; if we have lost our 
 property we can get it again ; we can rise from 
 the dead. This is the great lesson for those 
 who do not believe there is a possibility for 
 you to rise to higher and better things. 
 
 But the greatest lesson lies in the fact that 
 Christ rose from the dead and gave assurance 
 to all the world that His teachings were true, 
 and He was the Son of the living God and 
 whom even death could not hold ; to make true 
 
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 His saying that "though I go down to death 
 I have power to rise again," and He said the 
 power He had for Himself He would give 
 unto us, that we should have that power to 
 rise again when we go down to death and to 
 rise in that eternal world. 
 
 My mind has been much centered on the 
 fact that nearly every person that hears me 
 or reads the things I write has met with some 
 disappointment; some trouble; some tempta- 
 tion; given way to some sin, and feel perhaps 
 that there is no use in trying again. But I 
 appeal to you all out of a brother's heart that 
 you turn around and say, "It can be done; I 
 can rise again!" Ask God to help you and 
 will to do it. 
 
 Rise up in Christ Jesus! Be a better 
 Christian if you have professed Christ before, 
 and if you have never professed Christ accept 
 Him. You can rise into His image. You 
 have the power through the overcoming 
 Christ. 
 
 80
 
 VI 
 WILL YOU BE MISSED? 
 
 MY text is in the twentieth chapter of 
 First Samuel, verse eighteen: "Then 
 Jonathan said to David, Tomorrow is 
 the new moon: and thou shalt be missed, be- 
 cause thy seat will be empty." 
 
 The reason why David was missed is some- 
 thing that is worthy of the attention of every 
 man and woman. It contains a great truth. 
 
 A man is known by the company he don't 
 keep ; and he is also known by the things he 
 don't do. We often speak of the converse 
 of this statement, but we do not emphasize 
 this. 
 
 Now David was missed because he was 
 hated by bad men. That was to his credit, to 
 the honour of his position as a young man. 
 He left his home and all hopes of future pro- 
 motion when he had the promise that he 
 should be made the head of the nation, that 
 he should be made King. But he left it all. 
 It is a great thing, young men and women, to 
 
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 be hated by bad men. Woe unto you when all 
 men speak well of you. Woe unto you when 
 you have no enemies, because no man can be 
 right without sometimes crossing the track of 
 those who are wrong. 
 
 David was hated by the politicians; by 
 those wild and savage, those brutal and bar- 
 barous tribes along the shores of the Mediter- 
 ranean. He was hated by them all, for they 
 had tried to rob him, they had tried to murder 
 his people; and no one is injured so much as 
 he who injures another. No man hates a 
 transgressor so much as the transgressor 
 hates his victim. Palestine hated all Israel 
 and all the Jews, and especially hated this 
 young man. To be hated by bad men is a 
 great accomplishment for a young man. 
 
 George B. Angell started the Society for 
 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and he 
 loved the beasts of the field, and the dogs and 
 the cats, and the horses, and he seemed to 
 have a sympathy for them beyond anything I 
 have ever seen; and very frequently in my 
 law office I was called upon to represent the 
 Society when people were arrested for brutal 
 treatment of their animals and George B. 
 Angell was the most hated man in Boston. 
 And after he had carried on that campaign 
 
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 for about ten years he was despised by all the 
 people who had been arrested, and by their 
 friends, and he was feared by all those who 
 did not take care of their animals, and he was 
 in the disfavour of a certain class of people 
 whom he had offended. One day Wendell 
 Phillips, in introducing him on a public oc- 
 casion to speak for the Society, said: "Those 
 who love animals and defend them cannot be 
 defended by animals, but they are attacked by 
 men; and let it be said to Brother Angell's 
 credit that he has more enemies in Boston 
 than any other man I know, and all those 
 enemies are among the worst classes of the 
 city." What a great credit it was to say that 
 of George B. Angell. 
 
 It is not so many years since Anthony 
 Comstock first began to carry on his great 
 campaign in the city of New York against 
 obscene literature, and the low, and the 
 wicked, and the vile of that great city hated 
 Anthony Comstock, and his views were held 
 up to contumely and insult, and he was often 
 mobbed on the streets. Yet what was it to 
 him to be mobbed for a cause such as he 
 represented ! 
 
 A short time ago William J. Burns, the 
 eminent detective, was the most unpopular 
 
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 man in the whole country, because he arrested 
 so many men under various circumstances, 
 and all their friends and all parties connected 
 with them were deeply prejudiced against 
 him; and it took Burns years to overcome 
 those enemies which have arisen against him 
 among the criminal classes of this country. 
 
 Time was when Washington was so un- 
 popular that there was open talk about im- 
 peaching him as President of the United 
 States. He was accused by politicians as a 
 mere schemer, a man whose word could not 
 be trusted ; a man who misused public funds. 
 And yet the men who accused him, when you 
 study the history of their lives, you will find, 
 were a wicked, low class ; many of them ended 
 in the penitentiary, and some of them mur- 
 dered other people, as was the case with 
 Aaron Burr. George Washingtan was hated, 
 and it is to his honour that we speak of it, 
 He was hated by bad men. 
 
 I remember Lincoln's unpopularity at a 
 time when he was endeavouring to make com- 
 promises with the Southern States in order to 
 settle the war; when he was in favour of ex- 
 treme forbearance, and the people of the 
 North as well as of the South seemed to be 
 opposed to that merciful measure; and Lin- 
 
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 coin then hardly dared go down the street for 
 fear of a mob attacking him. 
 
 On Memorial Days, when we especially 
 bring to mind characters like that of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln, let us learn the great truth that 
 he who is hated of bad men will be honoured 
 of God. 
 
 I remember walking over the fields in West 
 Brookfield, Massachusetts, and seeing the 
 homestead of Lucy Stone Blackwell, that 
 great woman advocate of women's rights and 
 that advocate of liberty of every kind for men 
 and women, and it brought to my mind how 
 strangely Christ used that girl in West 
 Brookfield. She was a person of high and 
 noble impulses, of pure mind, of culture and 
 intellect, and she behaved herself like a lady 
 almost at every point. But she did a very 
 unladylike thing so the local people there 
 thought. There was a colored boy who 
 worked around the railroad station at West 
 Brookfield, and when a boy had his arm crip- 
 pled ; and he went out to pick berries, and the 
 white boys and girls also went out into the 
 berry field, and the white boys began to pelt 
 this colored boy with stones and sticks. But 
 little Lucy Stone Blackwell, though small 
 then, saw the injustice of the attack by the 
 
 85
 
 wicked white boys upon this defenseless, crip- 
 pled colored boy and she went out with a pail 
 half full of berries and smashed it over the 
 head of one of the white boys about to throw 
 a stone. From that day on to the end of her 
 life she was honoured by America as one of 
 the most lovely of women. Then there was 
 Lucretia Mott, and she was one of the most 
 loved of women. She gained attention every- 
 where and the respect even of the worst 
 classes of people; but Lucy Stone Blackwell 
 had the enmity of people because of her fierce, 
 open, brave attacks against all things that 
 were wrong, and an illustration that comes to 
 my mind is found in the love letter which her 
 husband before their marriage wrote to her 
 mother, and in that letter Mr. Blackwell said: 
 
 "I love her for the enemies that she has 
 made." 
 
 I remember hearing, not long ago, of a boy 
 who used to stand in front of the Sherman 
 House in Chicago some years ago. He was 
 the only child of a widow, and he was obliged 
 to earn his living by selling papers. But he 
 was greatly disliked by the other newsboys 
 because he went to evening school to learn 
 something and they did not, and he attracted 
 the other newsboys' jealousy for that reason. 
 
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 Another reason why he was disliked was that 
 he often spoke of his mother. The boys made 
 sport of him for being a "mother's boy" and 
 of being tied to his mother's apron strings. 
 Sometimes they invited him to smoke, and 
 then they asked him to play craps. But he 
 would not do either. Because he would not 
 do any of those things that newsboys so often 
 do which are wrong he was disliked by them, 
 and they would not speak to him. When he 
 became Miss Willard's stenographer he was 
 disliked, because he determined in that office 
 to be the very best stenographer in the place. 
 He was so accurate, he was so careful, he was 
 so conscientious and worked often so long 
 after hours that he became very unpopular. 
 All the other stenographers would leave 
 promptly at five o'clock, but he would often 
 stay until half past five, and was assailed 
 before the labor unions. He was so faithful, 
 doing his duty to the full, that he became very 
 unpopular. When he was in college he was 
 at the head of the class because he always had 
 his lessons thoroughly prepared. He was 
 often referred to as authority when any ques- 
 tions between professor and students arose, 
 and he has been for years the head of the 
 State University of West Virginia. He has 
 
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 been known as the youngest of all our col- 
 lege presidents. 
 
 But David was missed not only because he 
 had done his work well and because wicked 
 men were against him, but he was missed 
 because he had so many people dependent 
 upon him. 
 
 J. H. Patterson, of the National Cash 
 Register Company, of Dayton, Ohio, made 
 himself at one time the most unpopular of 
 men by trying to do good. When he started 
 in business he started out with the purpose of 
 employing many people ; he determined to be 
 of more use to his employes than to simply 
 give them wages. So one day he desired to 
 clean up that section of Dayton near his 
 factory, and he went around personally and 
 called on the people, asking them if they 
 would not clean up their front yards and back 
 yards, in order that the town might be more 
 sanitary. Some of them complied with his 
 wishes and others said it was none of his busi- 
 ness, and were offended. But he determined 
 to bring them in time. He secured a photog- 
 rapher to go around the places where the 
 fences were down and the gate was hanging 
 on one hinge and where the rubbish was scat- 
 tered around the yard, and took a picture of 
 
 88
 
 each one of those places and exhibited the 
 pictures as a disgrace to the city of Dayton. 
 It made him exceedingly unpopular for the 
 time ; and if you will go to that great factory, 
 one of the largest on earth, supporting so 
 many families, sending so many children to 
 school, supporting so many churches in the 
 worship of God, you will find there the spirit 
 of the love of mankind which Mr. Patterson 
 put into it. 
 
 When a man enters any political undertak- 
 ing he must expect to have enemies. You 
 cannot be mayor of a city without having ene- 
 mies ; because for eveiy office you will have 
 many people applying. Consequently, you 
 will have five hundred and fifty-nine disap- 
 pointed out of every five hundred and sixty- 
 applicants. Where you keep one friend to 
 whom you gave the position, you will have 
 five hundred and fifty-nine enemies among 
 those who were disappointed in not getting 
 the place. The President of the United 
 States has that difficulty to contend with 
 from those who seek office, both in his own 
 party and by those of the opposing party. 
 He who goes into any public office must make 
 up his mind that he is going to meet with 
 strong, unjust opposition; he must expect it, 
 
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 must be prepared to contend with it and con- 
 tend with it in a reasonable fraternal way. 
 
 Religious undertakings, the reforms for the 
 good of the people in the uplift of their wor- 
 ship, have immediately met with criticism, for 
 all forms of opposition arise in religious work. 
 There is no time when men seem to be so 
 willing to deceive, and lie, and steal, and even 
 murder, as in religious bigotry. Nothing is 
 more bitter, without going back to the days 
 of the inquisition, than the superstitious dis- 
 agreement over some unimportant question. 
 
 David was especially missed because so 
 many people depended on him. What a 
 beautiful picture to see husband and father 
 going away from home in the morning, taking 
 his dinner pail, standing at the door, bidding 
 the child good-bye, leaving his advice and his 
 kiss, turning down the street, and then to 
 watch them looking after him. They are go- 
 ing to miss him all day. They will anxiously 
 wait until evening time comes to hear his re- 
 turning footsteps and see his face. They will 
 come to the front hall to meet him when he 
 comes home, because they have missed him. 
 Oh, man or woman, is there no one to miss 
 you after you go away from home? If there 
 is no one on hand to welcome you when you 
 
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 come home in the evening, to welcome you 
 with a kiss of love when you enter the door, 
 your fate is a sad one. How sweet a thing it 
 is to be missed, and what a duty it is to our 
 Christ and to God that we should live that 
 life from which we will be missed. Oh, the 
 bread winners of the world, who go out to 
 work for their families their wives and their 
 children! When death comes to them, and 
 the coffin is carried to the cemetery, and the 
 family returns to the darkness of that home, 
 oh, how he is missed ! Yet, if we die, and are 
 not missed, we have no claim to eternal life. 
 
 There were many dependent upon David, 
 and the ambition of his life in the hope to be a 
 ruler was that he might have power to gather 
 around him many men and their families of 
 the nation dependent upon him. 
 
 I have been very much interested in the life 
 of Sir Thomas Lipton. He is known best, 
 perhaps, in this country by the fact that he 
 contended for the "America" cup in the great 
 yacht races. But Sir Thomas Lipton's early 
 ambition was to be an employer of other peo- 
 ple. Am I addressing young men now with 
 life before you, not over thirty-five years of 
 age, who are working for some one else, com- 
 plaining about your wages and about the poor 
 
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 position you occupy? You should be an em- 
 ployer! There are many people who are 
 employers now who had less opportunity than 
 you have had, and you should not be in your 
 situation tonight you should be an em- 
 ployer. Sir Thomas Lipton is said to have 
 been a young man in the city of New York 
 who came over from Scotland to seek his for- 
 tune. He sought for work. Lord, pity the 
 man who has struggled for weeks for work 
 and has found it not! Nearly sixteen years 
 of age, he stood there on John Street, in New 
 York, in front of a little grocery store. He 
 had no means to go in and buy the bread he 
 saw in that window; he was so tired that his 
 limbs would no longer carry him, and he sat 
 down in front of that store, homeless, friend- 
 less, out of work. The good man, seeing him 
 there as he closed the store, gave him a piece 
 of bread. He walked away and sat outside 
 all night. But on that night he said, "Lord, 
 give me the opportunity to furnish poor men 
 with work!" 
 
 The ambition came to him then and there. 
 God must have put him through that experi- 
 ence for some purpose ; God must have put it 
 into his mind to help the men who were out 
 of work, and God's providence led him back 
 
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 to Glasgow, where his father assisted him 
 somewhat, and where he worked very late and 
 long in a little grocery store in that city. His 
 desire was to employ people. He had such a 
 passion for it that his father hardly dared 
 trust him to carry on the business, for fear of 
 his paying away all his money to the people he 
 employed. But he was wise enough and care- 
 ful enough to recognize the fact that he must 
 take care of his own capital going to employ 
 more men. He opened one store after an- 
 other, never making any large profits for 
 himself ; but now he has stores in all parts of 
 the world. He owns a great tea plant in 
 Ceylon, and he has owned, they tell me, the 
 very store before which he stood on that dark 
 night, hungry and wanting something to do. 
 He is one of the wealthiest men of the world, 
 yet he employed all his capital all the time for 
 the further enlargement of his business with 
 the desire ever to employ as many men as 
 possible. 
 
 Leland Stanford, who endowed the great 
 Iceland Stanford University, in California, is 
 another illustration of this thought of David. 
 He was born, I think, in New York, and was 
 living in Vermont when he conceived the idea 
 that he would like to give employment to all 
 
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 the school boys who went home with him. He 
 went to his father and urged the father to em- 
 ploy those boys, and his father said to him: 
 "If you want to employ those bright boys, I 
 will give you a chance to do so yourself. I 
 wish to have this piece of land cleared of tim- 
 ber so that I can cultivate it; I will give you 
 the lumber and you may sell it, and you may 
 bring to aid you all the boys you choose, only 
 they must know that I am not responsible for 
 their wages." Those young men began to 
 clear that ground. They cut 1800 ties for the 
 Delaware and Hudson Railroad. He em- 
 ployed seventeen of the boys, and they 
 worked together like grown men. He cleared 
 only $18.50. But that was the foundation of 
 his great wealth. For a little later than that 
 he went to California, and there he adopted 
 the same plan; so that whenever the poor 
 miners came to the city and wanted work he 
 tried to furnish all these poor fellows with 
 work. He realized that the great need in 
 their city life was something to do. That 
 work was enlarged until he had 4000 men in 
 his employ; and when the time came that 
 California must be kept in the National 
 Union or go to the Southern Confederacy, 
 congress voted to aid in building the Pacific 
 
 94
 
 railroads. He saw the opportunity to em- 
 ploy a great many people on that railroad, 
 and it was on the 10th of May, 1869, that he 
 stood at the junction of the Central Pacific 
 Railroad, out at Ogden, where they gave him 
 one spike of gold, another one of silver and 
 another one of iron, representing the Three 
 States centering at that point, and he drove 
 down the last three spikes of that great con- 
 nection between the East and the West. 
 What a great privilege it was for him to re- 
 turn home, having given constant employ- 
 ment to 50,000 people. It did his heart good, 
 and brought considerable profit to himself. 
 It enabled him to give a million dollars to 
 endow the Leland Stanford University. 
 
 It was in Wilbraham, Mass., where my 
 brother and I had to live in the attic of an 
 old, unfurnished farm house, with the rafters 
 of the roof all bare and with only a gable win- 
 dow at one end of the house. When we went 
 there to "board ourselves" we had a little 
 stove, on which we had to cook our own corn- 
 meal, and we found it necessary to have a 
 table. The good old man who owned the 
 place said there was a rough old table in the 
 garret we might have. We brought out the 
 old table, which consisted of one board on 
 
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 three legs, and when we sat down for the first 
 time to eat our cornmeal my brother noticed 
 the name of Charles Pratt carved upon that 
 table. It appeared that Charles Pratt had 
 boarded at the same place when he went to 
 school there, boarded in the same attic. 
 When I was called upon to address the Pratt 
 Institute in Brooklyn, New York, a few 
 weeks ago, I went into the hall where hangs 
 the picture of Charles Pratt, the great bene- 
 factor of Brooklyn. I was standing before 
 it, and there was a sketch of his biography. 
 He had only one year of education at Wil- 
 braham Academy. How it connected the 
 threads of history back to "Charles Pratt" in 
 that old attic ! He could only afford to go to 
 school one year. He went to the library in 
 Boston and there studied evenings such books 
 as he could get; and he secured a very thor- 
 ough education, after all. But he had a 
 passion for employing men. He wanted to 
 employ the boys and girls, and it was such a 
 passion with him that he sought for places 
 where he had no interest to secure employ- 
 ment for them, and he employed personally as 
 many people as he could in connection with 
 his own grocery business in Watertown, 
 Mass. Afterward he went into the produc- 
 
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 tion of oil and became one of the millionaires 
 of that day, and established the Pratt Insti- 
 tute, in order to give all the people the ad- 
 vantage of a practical education. They are 
 doing there now for Brooklyn what the 
 Temple University is doing for Philadelphia. 
 As I stood there and looked on that portrait, 
 I thought how Philadelphia also was in- 
 debted to Charles Pratt for employment of 
 its people in five of the great industries today 
 in which he took much stock in order to fur- 
 nish men with work. 
 
 Charles Pratt, when he died, was greatly 
 missed. The city of Brooklyn went into 
 deepest mourning; on the street corners they 
 whispered his name; over 6000 of his em- 
 ployes stopped work for the day and wore 
 crepe upon their arms. He was greatly hon- 
 oured and loved, because he furnished people 
 with work, and was one of the greatest phil- 
 anthropists of the world. 
 
 David, in the third place, was missed be- 
 cause he was "sincerely loved." Oh. how 
 Jonathan loved him ! Loved him with a sub- 
 limer affection than a woman. He was 
 greatly beloved by men and honoured by them 
 for what he had already done, and more for 
 the promise of what he was to be. Even 
 
 97
 
 Jonathan told him that he was to be King, 
 and Jonathan was willing to take a second 
 place. 
 
 I stood one day in that great palace where 
 William of Orange was assassinated. Few 
 statesmen or warriors were ever so adored. 
 The people of Netherlands, when William of 
 Orange was killed, were so filled with woe, 
 they missed him so sadly, they loved him so 
 much, that they could not work. The histor- 
 ian of the siege of Leyden said that for days 
 the people could not work; that they wept 
 and could not eat they missed their loved 
 prince of Orange so much. He had led them 
 through great religious trials and persecu- 
 tions. He had guided them with kindness, 
 tenderness and unselfishness, and he was con- 
 sequently missed beyond any citizen of that 
 great Netherland nation. No citizen of the 
 world, except Abraham Lincoln, was ever 
 missed like William of Orange. 
 
 I sat on a platform in a town in New Jer- 
 sey one day with Mr. Cattell, who told how 
 he came to the funeral of Abraham Lincoln 
 in Independence Square, Philadelphia, and 
 stood there all night in order to get into 
 that line, pass that coffin and look upon 
 the face of the martyred President. I stood 
 
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 by that coffin before it reached Philadelphia, 
 when it was opened in Washington. Men 
 came up to that coffin with trembling hands, 
 and when they looked upon the face of 
 that great man they burst into tears and 
 loud wails men and women fainted, t filled 
 with grief because of the loss of "Old Abe," 
 "Father Abraham," the true leader of the 
 whole nation, loved in the South as well as in 
 the North, because he was so just and reason- 
 able to the South. Dying as he did, at the 
 time he did, he was wept for in almost every 
 Northern home and in every Southern home. 
 If they did not weep, they treated his memory 
 with profound respect. 
 
 Oh, to be missed! It is one of the great 
 blessings of life to come to the end of it and 
 to be so loved that one will be deeply missed. 
 Why do I speak of this life of David? Be- 
 cause it is a great illustration from the Old 
 Testament of what Christ teaches in the New. 
 It brings out the life of the benefactor, the 
 one who has helped his fellowmen the life of 
 him who lives not for self, but for others. It 
 teaches that he who lives that life wins the 
 favour of Almighty God. 
 
 I want to say it with more emphasis than 
 I said it last week, especially to the young 
 
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 men and women : Will you be missed for your 
 goodness? Will you be missed by those who 
 are dependent upon you for your help? By 
 those who love you? If you were taken away 
 tomorrow, how much would you be missed? 
 If you say you would be but little missed, 
 then turn your mind to greater things. De- 
 termine to be of more service under God, and 
 for Jesus Christ's sake live that life that will 
 in the years to come unroll and develop into 
 that fullness, so that when you die people will 
 weep ; when you die people will stand still and 
 long be sad. 
 
 Oh, to live in this life so that you will be 
 missed when you are gone, for the very fact 
 that you are missed will carry your influence 
 on through the ages. Christ, when He left 
 this world, was missed so missed that the 
 memory of Him remains in mighty power, in- 
 creasing in power through the ages. That 
 kind of life is the life that counts for this 
 world as well as for the life to come. 
 
 100
 
 VII 
 A WELCOMING SMILE 
 
 I WANT to take forcible possession of the 
 eighth verse of the fourth chapter of Sec- 
 ond Timothy: "Henceforth there is laid 
 up for me a crown of righteousness, which the 
 Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at 
 that day." 
 
 And these are the words of my text, "And 
 not to me only, but unto all them that love his 
 appearing." 
 
 Sometimes, with the artistic work of the 
 electrician, elaborate designs have been 
 worked out in lamps of various colors and 
 have been placed in front of some prominent 
 building, and when the darkness was deepest 
 some man turned the key and let on the cur- 
 rent. With one great flood of dazzling light 
 the entire design flashed out upon the aston- 
 ished multitude. So when one goes through 
 this book, this Bible, he sometimes comes 
 upon a thought in a text which seems sud- 
 denly illuminated by a spiritual electric force 
 
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 and flashes out with a superb brilliancy which 
 startles and fills with awe the meditating 
 mind. This text is one of those. In order to 
 get the full sweep of the meaning of these 
 words, "Unto all them also that love his ap- 
 pearing," one needs to go back to the il- 
 luminated words of the Greek language, and 
 when you put them into a reasonable literary 
 rendering, using other English words, you 
 may add something to the language here 
 expressed and take nothing from the origi- 
 nal. "Unto all them who will smile when He 
 comes." 
 
 The language that expresses that simple 
 statement is a language as brilliant as though 
 fire did flash from every letter. Hear it once 
 more, "Not unto me only, but unto all them 
 who will smile when He comes." The literal 
 language properly used may also read, "That 
 will dawn on His morning." The word "ap- 
 pearing" here is used in other places in the 
 Bible to mean the coming of the morning, and 
 the word "love" is often used to express the 
 word "beaming," "smile," as an expression of 
 welcome. 
 
 So this beautiful text, illuminated by the 
 spirit back of it, must have had a stronger im- 
 pression upon those who read it in the Greek 
 
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 language, which so many of us lose when we 
 read it in the English. "Unto all them that 
 love His dawning" "all who shall smile when 
 He comes." 
 
 I wonder if a baby ever lived which never 
 smiled in its mother's face? Did you ever 
 know of one? But suppose that it were 
 possible for a baby to be brought up by its 
 mother, fed from her breast, pillowed upon 
 her shoulder, making its bed in her arms, 
 listen to her cooing, the subject of her cease- 
 less day and night care throughout all its de- 
 veloping years, and never smile in her face. 
 What a deformity such a child would really 
 be. And the thought in my mind is, Could a 
 mother love such a child as that? Would not 
 her heart finally turn? Would not love grow 
 bitter and sour and become poisonous, and 
 would she not regard the babe with hate 
 rather than love? I believe she would. I be- 
 lieve the time would come when that mother 
 love, that inexpressibly strong tie of affection, 
 would turn to hatred if the child never smiled 
 in its mother's face. 
 
 The apostle, in the original language, is 
 touching that very chord of human nature 
 when he says that there is a crown of right- 
 eousness for every soul that will smile when 
 
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 He comes. What makes a mother love her 
 child? It is the smile of the child. If the 
 child looks up from its cradle and smiles in its 
 mother's eyes that mother can sacrifice any- 
 thing for that child. She will go anywhere, 
 through fire and chill, through starvation and 
 exposure, and even death itself, for the child 
 who smiles in her face. That mother who, in 
 Western Pennsylvania, was driven from her 
 father's door with her child in her arms, 
 looked in her child's face as it smiled up into 
 hers, and in the cold, sifting snows of that 
 winter storm, ske took from herself the wrap- 
 pings which she needed to save her life and 
 wrapped the child warmly in them and sat in 
 the snow and died for the child that smiled in 
 her face. You, too, would die for a child that 
 did that. It is the very best part of the 
 human heart that it thus is tied with bonds 
 it cannot break by the smiling face of a 
 loved one. 
 
 Suppose that friend never smiled when you 
 did anything for him. Suppose that you give 
 a Christmas present, and there is nothing but 
 a stolid look of recognition how it hurts; 
 how it curdles the blood; how it stings in the 
 brain to have an obligation unrecognized by 
 even the flitting of a smile.
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 Out in Arizona I saw a young girl, a con- 
 sumptive, who was being cared for by her 
 brother. It was worth a long journey to see. 
 Why, he anticipated everything that his sister 
 wanted. He was a large, strong man, seem- 
 ingly rudely built, but he wholly forgot him- 
 self in the care of his sister. He would wake 
 up at the slightest motion she made in the 
 train, and he was always at hand to see if 
 there was not something that she wanted. He 
 would not leave her in the train at all to go to 
 the dining car, but he had his lunch sent in to 
 him, and he sat there and ate it with her. He 
 tried to feed her ; he would take off her shoes 
 and then replace them with slippers, and then 
 I saw him lift her up tenderly and put her on 
 a couch and cover her up as a mother would 
 a child. When you saw that suffering one 
 smile as she looked up without a word when 
 he laid her so tenderly down you would say 
 that he was well paid for it all. He did not 
 lose anything. He received all that he gave 
 and more, with interest, in the smile of that 
 loving, dying sister. Oh, it makes heroes of 
 men ; it makes noble the lowest grade of living 
 to have that smile of welcome recognition 
 come back for the things that are done. So 
 the apostle, reaching into this inner sanctuary 
 
 J05
 
 of the soul's holiest existence, opens the door 
 enough for us to glance within, and says that 
 Christ, the very heart of love Christ, the su- 
 preme model Christ, will give us a crown of 
 righteousness if we meet Him with a smile, a 
 crown for all those whose faces light up like 
 the morning when they see Him coming. 
 
 So God values that, does He? I am glad 
 that He is so human that I can understand 
 Him. I am thankful that He is so like unto 
 us, after all, that we can really picture our 
 heavenly Father recognizing us as we smile 
 is glad that we smile when He comes. 
 
 I met a husband not long since who said, 
 "My home is so changed. I do not know why, 
 but I am not happy there." When I inquired 
 into that husband's feelings, he said: "For 
 some reason my wife never smiles when I 
 come in." Oh, the wretched home where no 
 loved one smiles when the husband or father 
 enters. Oh, yes, it is putting hell in the place 
 of heaven. It is placing harshness, hardness, 
 stony-heartedness in the place of loving kind- 
 ness. If a husband, going up to his door at 
 night, after his long, weary day of labour, 
 knows that there will be a face at that dopr 
 which will smile to see him come, he will be 
 paid for all his sacrifice and his labour. He 
 
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 may never say anything. Husbands are too 
 reticent, too stony-hearted in appearance 
 when they are the softest-hearted in fact, so 
 that the wife may never know how her smile 
 influences the husband's life. The parents 
 may never know how their smiles have in- 
 fluenced their children's existence. But to 
 feel that when we come home there will be no 
 smile for us, to have them claim to love us but 
 to seem otherwise, is to lose the most precious 
 things in human experience. Better no sup- 
 per and a smiling welcome than the richest 
 feast and to sit down to it opposite a stolid 
 countenance. 
 
 The apostle Paul goes on to argue in this 
 book that the reason why Jesus so appreciates 
 our smile when we meet Him is because it 
 shows that we appreciate what He has done 
 for us. No one can say that he appreciates 
 Christ unless he has studied Him enough and 
 meditated enough upon His existence to be in 
 a condition of gladness when he feels that 
 Christ has come. Do you dread to hear His 
 steps? Do you start back in terror at the 
 thought that He might come in the clouds 
 now? Then you can recognize in the lesson 
 that the Apostle Paul was teaching, that you 
 are not in the right spirit, that you are not in 
 
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 His service ; you are not where you can be and 
 should be, if you would dread His step, and 
 if your face would wear an expression of 
 terror rather than a smile. 
 
 How Christ rebuked the disciples on the 
 Sea of Galilee when they saw Him walking 
 upon the water, and when they arose all af- 
 frighted, with hands raised, eyes and mouth 
 open, and terror on every feature, to see Him 
 coming across the water. He, shouting to 
 them, said, "Be of good cheer; smile; cheer 
 up ; show some cheer in your welcome ; it is I ; 
 be not afraid; welcome me with a smile and 
 not with looks of terror." 
 
 A smile shows our appreciation of what 
 Christ has done for us. Just as in that ma- 
 chine shop not long ago I stood at the desk 
 talking to the proprietor, and the pattern- 
 maker came up and laid on the desk in front 
 of us a number of patterns for some work 
 they were doing. After the conversation with 
 me had practically finished the proprietor 
 took up the patterns, looked at them, turned 
 around and gazed at the pattern-maker with 
 a smile, which lit up his whole face, and said, 
 "Come in again in an hour or so and I will see 
 you about these." His smile had said it all. 
 I saw the pattern-maker go cheerfully back, 
 
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 and I heard him whistling in the other room 
 a few minutes later. 
 
 If we smile we can express our appreci- 
 ation so much deeper than by any language. 
 Hence Jesus said that not every one who says, 
 "Lord, Lord," shall enter. Will you really 
 smile with a sincere, heart-giving welcome 
 when He comes? If you do, then you may 
 be assured that you will have a crown of 
 righteousness. 
 
 General Grant said that the only way he 
 knew whether he had his father's approval of 
 what he did or not was when his father smiled. 
 General Grant himself inherited a very reti- 
 cent disposition. His father was a man of 
 very few words, and his boy only knew when 
 he approved of his behaviour by the smile that 
 came to his father's face. General Grant said 
 that he watched for that smile with all the 
 eagerness of a man "watching for the ac- 
 complishment of his highest ambition where 
 a single utterance is to decide weal or woe." 
 And so a child watches his father's smile for 
 the appreciation which that smile shows. 
 
 But the apostle is speaking, in his dying 
 moments, of greater things, of God's al- 
 mighty love, and is exhibiting here the 
 thought that our welcome not only shows our 
 
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 appreciation of Christ, but our great love for 
 Him. How cruel a loving heart may be to 
 hide its affection under a clouded brow. How 
 cruel it often is in the home, where the chil- 
 dren would live in light and brightness if the 
 mother would but smile upon them. 
 
 And yet there is danger of manufacturing 
 a smile, and that is the worst sham on the face 
 of the earth to put on one that is entirely 
 superficial is the worst possible form of 
 hypocrisy, and is consequently one of the 
 worst kinds of profanity. To profane a thing 
 so sacred as a smile of welcome is to train 
 one's heart into the most vicious ways. It is 
 difficult to avoid it when you go to the door 
 to meet some one you never cared to see and 
 wished would not put his footstep over your 
 threshold ; when you feel that you are obliged 
 to welcome him with a smile. That is indeed 
 a trial; yet it is one of the moral questions 
 that it seems to me we should be very clear 
 upon. To my mind one of the last things that 
 we should be hypocritical upon is a smile of 
 welcome. But that is the way it is the most 
 holy things, the most valuable things are of 
 course the most often counterfeited, and to 
 my mind the false smile of welcome is the 
 most hypocritical thing that we have any 
 
 110
 
 knowledge of. The poet has said that "a man 
 may smile and smile and be a villain too" ; and 
 it is too true. Hence the welcome smile, the 
 dawning face which is here mentioned by the 
 apostle, means one that rises sincerely, from 
 the very depths of the soul a smile that is a 
 real, positive, hearty, spiritual welcome of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 Shall we smile when He comes? It de- 
 pends altogether upon whether we know 
 Him, and the thought that came to me, and 
 which I thought might be helpful to you, is, 
 Would you know Him if you saw Him? 
 
 A sick little girl a consumptive at whose 
 bedside I had often prayed and sung, told me 
 a great many times about her uncle who went 
 to Australia from England, when her family 
 came to America, She had never seen her 
 uncle, but she felt positive she would know 
 him if she should see him, from what she had 
 heard her mother say about him, and from 
 having looked at his photograph. At last 
 her uncle, who was quite wealthy, did come 
 to visit that family, and while I was not there 
 at the time, I was there shortly afterwards 
 and asked the little sick girl if she knew her 
 uncle when he came, and she said, "Of course 
 I knew him : I had studied so much about him, 
 
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 I had looked at his photograph so often, and 
 read so much about him, and heard mother 
 speak so much about him that as soon as he 
 stepped into the room I knew he was Uncle 
 John." I thought of that uncle's joy when he 
 came into that room where he had never been 
 before, and saw a person who had never 
 looked upon his face who at once lovingly 
 recognized him with a smile of welcome. I 
 thought how Christ, in His higher, diviner 
 and more loving attitude, longs to come into 
 the home of His children here on earth and be 
 recognized as soon as He comes, because we 
 have studied Him so much, because we have 
 read and heard so much about Him. I feel 
 the terrific responsibility which rests upon me 
 as a teacher of the people in this pulpit, that 
 I should show forth the Lord Jesus, and all 
 the traits of His beautiful character, exhibit- 
 ing what He does for us, how He appears, 
 what He thinks, and what He represents, 
 until you shall know Him. Oh, that no per- 
 son who has heard me through all these years 
 shall fail to know Christ when He comes. 
 The prayer of my heart, deep and strong, is 
 that every one of you may hear enough about 
 Him at home, so that when He comes you will 
 know Him and welcome Him with a smile. 
 
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 I saw a consumptive father waiting for his 
 brother to come. He had not seen his brother 
 for many years, and he said he was afraid he 
 would not know him when he came. The poor 
 invalid's time was growing less and less, and 
 he became all the more anxious that his 
 brother should come as he approached nearer 
 and nearer to death. He asked them to hurry 
 and bring Harry to him as he wanted to see 
 him once more before he died. And when at 
 last Harry's footstep came up the stairway 
 the sick man recognized it, and he said, 
 "Harry has come; Harry has come!" He 
 recognized the footstep. There was some- 
 thing spiritual in the loving recognition of 
 human to human, but how much more spir- 
 itual and more acute it may be between the 
 human soul and its Saviour. 
 
 We will know Him when He comes. If 
 we love Him we must so picture Him that 
 we will know Him, and we will welcome Him 
 with a hearty smile. We know that He can- 
 not bring us any sorrow; we know that He 
 cannot bring us any evil; we know that 
 He cannot bring us any pain. Oh, no; that 
 most loving Person, the most ideal, divine, 
 heavenly Saviour can bring us no pain. He 
 loves us, and when we appreciate Him fully, 
 
 113
 
 when we love Him sincerely and have studied 
 His characteristics carefully, when He comes 
 our whole being will light up with a morning 
 smile. 
 
 When He comes He holds the crown of 
 His approval, a crown of salvation and ever- 
 lasting life for every one who has studied 
 Him enough to know Him and who loves 
 Him enough to smile a welcome when He 
 comes.
 
 VIII 
 OUTSIDE AND INSIDE 
 
 I DESIRE to direct your thoughts to the 
 first verse of the eleventh chapter of 
 John: "Now a certain man was sick, 
 named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of 
 Mary and her sister Martha." The words I 
 wish to call your attention to are: "The town 
 of Mary and her sister Martha." Lazarus' 
 sister sent unto Jesus saying: "Lord, behold, 
 he whom Thou lovest is sick." 
 
 Many years ago I was sent across the 
 Arabian Desert by way of Mt. Sinai to Bag- 
 dad. The stately old sheik, who was at the 
 head of his tribe, who guided the party and 
 who commanded its military guard, was a 
 man of unusual ability. In stature he was 
 high and strong, and an ideal athlete. He 
 was made sheik of his tribe because of his 
 superior intelligence, his great physical force, 
 his unusual ability in managing the fiery 
 steeds of the Arabs, and the love for him 
 which all the camels of the caravan expressed.
 
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 He was elected without a formal vote by the 
 love and obedience of the animals and the re- 
 spect of his f ellowmen. All obeyed him with- 
 out question. We first met him at the old 
 city of Edom, wherein great cliffs were carved 
 into palaces ages and ages ago. He was a 
 very rough, and fierce-looking specimen of 
 the Arab tribe; his clothing was very much 
 soiled, his long beard was filled with the dust 
 of the desert, his face besmirched, and his hair 
 disheveled where we could see it under his old 
 turban that had been pulled on one side, the 
 tassel of which was gone. He looked so wild 
 that one would have taken him to be a robber. 
 All the way across the desert he com- 
 manded obedience with dignity and with a 
 self-assertion of strength that made a person 
 feel that he would shoot him on sight. When 
 we crossed a stagnant pool he would dash on 
 his black steed into the mud, and send it 
 flying on every side, and come out himself 
 dripping with mud. He said that was his 
 protection against disease, a kind of mud 
 bath. He was a filthy specimen to look at as 
 he came riding by us from time to time, but 
 we learned to respect his wisdom, and to feel 
 something of his attractive magnetism. His 
 management of the camp was so perfect, and
 
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 his command of the military under his charge 
 was so complete, that we could do nothing but 
 respect him. One day he handed me a book 
 and advised me to read it whenever we were 
 in camp after meals, as it was translated from 
 the Arabic by some of his relatives and 
 printed in English. I was surprised to find 
 what a valuable book it was and how delight- 
 fully it had been written. I returned the 
 book to him with added respect, and he asked 
 me to come and see him at his home in Bag- 
 dad. When he gave me his card printed in 
 Arabic telling me the street and number, I 
 dared do nothing else but promise I would 
 call. Yet, I concluded it would be a very 
 wretched experience. 
 
 After we had been in Bagdad several days 
 the old sheik sent around and asked me to 
 keep my promise to come and visit him, for 
 they think a great deal of being visited in 
 Bagdad. I went around to a narrow street 
 with high, bare walls, with nothing on the 
 exterior indicating what was within. When 
 I reached the great wooden gate that led into 
 the inner court, I rapped upon the door. 
 Soon two servants opened the door slowly 
 and asked me my name, and, taking my card, 
 i an away. They returned and pulled wide 
 
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 open these doors, and, never in the panoramic 
 changes of any exhibit of life, did I ever see 
 anything to equal the transfer from the out- 
 side to the inside of that court yard. There 
 were three fountains flashing in their beauty ; 
 there were flowers of all colours and in all 
 stages of development ; there was green sward 
 around the fountains, and statuary from 
 Greece and Rome. I felt as though trans- 
 ferred instantly from a dirty street to a place 
 in paradise itself, and when the sheik came 
 out to meet me in perfectly pure white attire, 
 his hair so nicely arranged, his beard so care- 
 fully combed, his face and hands so clean, and 
 his slippers so new, eveiything about him 
 looking so fresh and bright, it took me a 
 moment to realize that it could be the same 
 man I had seen in the dirt and filth through 
 the long weeks of travel across the desert. 
 He introduced me to his wife (an unusual 
 thing to do there) and to his children. He 
 had five or six, bright-faced and intelligent, 
 who brought me the trays on which he served 
 the most delicious food. Along in the even- 
 ing he brought in musicians who played with 
 a rich sweetness. They played the American 
 tunes which he had required them to learn 
 because an American was coming. After 
 
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 the "Star-Spangled Banner" they played 
 "Home, Sweet Home," and my soul felt so, 
 so far from home. I was thousands of miles 
 distant, and no person of my relation knew 
 just where I was. If I should die there no 
 one in America might ever know it. As they 
 played, "Home, Sweet Home," how my heart 
 sank and melted under it, the tears came, and 
 he seeing my tears asked them to cease and 
 turn to an Arabian tune. 
 
 The transition from the dirt and filth of 
 that outward life in the travel across the 
 desert, to the beauty in that home, to the holi- 
 ness and sacredness of that domestic circle, to 
 the sparkling fountains of pure water, the 
 flowers, and the skies overhead which could 
 be seen from that courtyard, was no greater 
 than the transition from the outer world in 
 Palestine to that home where Christ led His 
 disciples. How great was the transition from 
 the dusty street of Bethany, from the humble 
 village, into the courtyard of the home of 
 Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus, "whom 
 Jesus loved." 
 
 I have sat upon the stones of the ruins of 
 the old house where Mary and Martha lived 
 in Bethany and gazed upon the few pieces of 
 beautiful marble, so broken, yet revealing 
 
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 such delicate carvings, and tried to imagine 
 the courtyard of that home in Bethany. I 
 have tried to make an imaginary picture of 
 that pavement so wrought out in wonderful 
 mosaics, those carved pillars, those wonderful 
 Eastern arches, the open court to the sky, the 
 flowers, and the furniture of the home that 
 Jesus loved in Bethany. I think of the tran- 
 sition of the disciples and Jews from the 
 dusty street as they entered the vestibule and 
 found servants to wash their feet, to give 
 them new and clean attire, and to think how 
 they sat upon the couches at that table where 
 Lazarus himself was present. I think of the 
 great difference between the outer world and 
 the inner world; between the place where 
 Mary and Martha actually lived and the 
 places where they were usually seen by the 
 world. I think of their mother's grave, to 
 which they must have gone with a daughter's 
 allegiance and love, and of the surroundings 
 of that family within as they cared for their 
 dear old father, afflicted so long with the lep- 
 rosy until Jesus came to heal him. All the 
 domestic arrangements of the house pass be- 
 fore the mind as one sits there and looks upon 
 the ruins that are left of the old house. 
 
 As one steps down the street a short dis- 
 
 120
 
 tance to the tomb of Lazarus, and goes into 
 that tomb, winding down its stairway to the 
 dark depths where the body of Lazarus lay, 
 and feels its chill and dampness, and then 
 cometh forth again into the sunlight and goes 
 back to that home, the transition from the 
 tomb to the home enforces the great lesson 
 that Jesus seemed to be impressing by His 
 wonderful example. The home at Bethany 
 where they lived their inner life, their holiest 
 life, was so different from its exterior that it 
 furnishes a wide contrast, consequently a 
 magnificent illustration of this thought. 
 
 When I worked in the slums of Boston in 
 connection with a temperance society, I used 
 to meet there frequently a very rough speci- 
 men of a boy, some ten or twelve years of age, 
 and he often showed me about in the night, 
 as he knew the names of the people who lived 
 in those cellars, attics, backyards, and on the 
 roofs. He was a very intelligent boy, by the 
 name of Jack. One night I asked him where 
 his home was, and he replied, "Oh, my home 
 is anywhere I can find a place to eat and 
 sleep." I said to him: "Don't you have any 
 one particular place that you like better than 
 any other?" "Well," he answered, "my 
 'sleeping hole' is probably the best of any 
 
 121
 
 place there is, but I would not like to show 
 you that." I said, "Now Jack, that is just 
 the place we want to see. You have shown us 
 eveiything else." The policeman said he was 
 a trustworthy boy, and I finally persuaded 
 him. He took me through a series of by- 
 ways that Boston only can support, which 
 go everywhere and nowhere into a very dark 
 alley that led back into a place so narrow that 
 two people could scarcely pass. Then he 
 showed me a pile of rubbish that had been 
 deposited there by poor people, and which 
 the thoughtless city government had never 
 removed, consisting of barrels, baskets, straw, 
 and all kinds of rubbish which had accumu- 
 lated in the end of that narrow alley. There 
 he had taken a barrel with both ends out, 
 placed it under a lot of this rubbish, and cov- 
 ered it with straw and various pieces of old 
 carpets and things that had been thrown out ; 
 and that he said was his " sleeping hole." 
 
 When the policeman with his dark lantern 
 let the light into that "sleeping hole" it was a 
 wretched looking place. I asked Jack how he 
 could sleep there, and he got down on the 
 ground on all fours, slid feet first back into 
 the barrel until it covered all but his head, 
 took a piece of carpet that was over the top 
 
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 and let it down in front, and then put his 
 arms on the pavement and said that was his 
 pillow. "This is my 'sleeping hole' and I 
 sleep very well." That boy's life was brighter 
 outside than inside. To go inside of that 
 "sleeping hole" with all the filth and stench 
 and sleep was a dreadful thing to do, and 
 when we saw the inside of Jack's life, when 
 we saw his most domestic spot, we found it 
 was a place more dreadful than the exterior. 
 It was far better for him in his dirt and rags 
 to pick a little food from the old boxes and 
 out of the ash barrels along the sidewalk than 
 to be in his "sleeping hole." Yet how many 
 thousands are in their "sleeping holes?" In 
 our own city, for that matter, when we get 
 into the inner part of their lives we find that 
 which should be the most sacred is really the 
 most filthy. 
 
 In Paris I went once to visit the keeper of 
 the morgue, who lived next door to it. We 
 found that a door opened into the morgue, 
 and that the keeper in order to be sure that 
 all things were in place, slept with his door 
 half-open into the place where lay the bodies 
 of the dead those who had been drowned in 
 the Seine, who had been assassinated, those 
 who had been poisoned, and those who had 
 
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 committed suicide. Rows of them were 
 placed there before the glass cases that in the 
 day-time the procession of people might go by 
 and recognize any relative or friend there. 
 The keeper took us through his door into the 
 morgue room itself and led us from body to 
 body that we might look on the different faces 
 in that awful scene. We said to him: "Do 
 you really live there?" "Yes," he replied, "I 
 have lived here for many years." "It is a 
 dreadful thing," we said, "to live here." 
 Said he, "I have got so used to it that I sleep 
 through the night just as regularly as I would 
 anywhere else." He really slept with dead 
 bodies so near him, and this also illustrates 
 how dreadful may be, after all, the inner home 
 of a man's experience. His home itself may 
 be a morgue. 
 
 The movement in favour of a clean home is 
 one of the very best of this age, for the social 
 uplift of humanity. The necessity of a better 
 home, of having one place of all others that 
 is out of the world, out of the different move- 
 ments of society, in which a person can dwell 
 in cleanliness, in peace, in honesty, is ap- 
 parent. Jesus answered the question with, 
 "Come and see," when the visitor said: 
 "Where dwellest thou?" 
 
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 Let me ask that question: "Where dost 
 thou dwell?" and then imagine what must 
 have been the domestic surroundings of His 
 Dwelling Place. It seems to have been such 
 a sacred matter that the Scriptures did not 
 even describe His home, though they do tell 
 us about the homes He blessed and the homes 
 He visited. It seems to have been a holy of 
 holies into which even the apostles did not 
 venture. What a scene presents itself to the 
 imagination of any man who loves Jesus, and 
 who tries to picture His home in Capernaum 
 of Galilee, and in Nazareth. 
 
 We are trying in these days to remove the 
 boys and girls from the jails and prisons 
 where they are associated with older crimin- 
 als, and get them into better environment. 
 Boys will be sent to jail, having committed 
 some one offense, and being there thrown all 
 together, into acquaintance with the worst 
 criminals of twenty or twenty-five years' ex- 
 perience, they come out of it, degraded, dis- 
 graced, and hopeless for reform, because they 
 have lived in jail, and that has been their 
 home during the time of their sentence. A 
 young man told me once that he had left the 
 hospital in which he had been studying be- 
 cause it had such an influence upon his mind, 
 
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 He said there are so many people get into the 
 hospitals because they are criminals or be- 
 cause they have done wrong, and there is such 
 an atmosphere of evil connected with so many 
 people in the public hospitals that he could 
 not any longer stand its influence upon him. 
 He said it was making him feel that all the 
 world was bad, and that there were no sacred 
 things ; but that disease, sin, and wrong were 
 prevalent everywhere, with every one. I can 
 see the selfishness of his thought, and believe 
 if he lived nearer to God he could have over- 
 come it all, but it illustrates well the influence 
 environment may have upon us. 
 
 The thought that Jesus is continually 
 pressing on us and which we wish to get from 
 His table this morning, is that the environ- 
 ment also of our soul's home is an important 
 matter for us to consider and protect. Sir 
 Walter Scott, when he was first married, 
 moved into a little cottage in a small village 
 of Lasswade, only six or seven miles from 
 Edinburgh. Two little willow trees grew 
 near the front of that cottage, and he and his 
 wife tied the tops together to get an artistic 
 arch with a little wooden cross, and thought 
 that was a superior ornament. Afterwards 
 when his love for flowers and the fields grew, 
 
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 and when his name became a household word 
 through the writing of his books, he decided 
 to build a great palace at Abbottsford like 
 unto a king's, to equal Holyrood itself, and 
 securing the money by mortgaging almost 
 everything he owned, and running wildly into 
 debt, he built Abbottsford, that wonderful 
 palace so connected with the scenes and stor- 
 ies of the greatest of Scottish localities. 
 There is no place that is so interesting to me, 
 and I wish I could speak longer about it. 
 
 While he was in Abbottsford writing the 
 "Waverly Novels" at his desk in those mag- 
 nificent apartments, filled with a costly col- 
 lection of the antiques, enjoying honour on 
 honour, he said he did not live there. When 
 they asked him about his grand home, and 
 said: "What a great thing it must be to live 
 in a palace like this, decorated with every 
 kind of art," he replied: "I do not live here." 
 When they asked him where he did live, he 
 said: "Up at Lasswade." Years had gone 
 but he still lived in the old cottage, and amid 
 all these magnificent surroundings his mind 
 and heart were up there at Lasswade, that 
 dear, little home which was really his only 
 home in heart and remained so until the last. 
 
 You remember when Miss Helen Hunt 
 
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 wrote "Romona," how she described the little 
 home which the Indian and his wife made in 
 the valley; their arrangements for their do- 
 mestic household ; and how to them ever after 
 it remained their real home, their soul's home. 
 So Jesus is saying to us, "Your soul's home 
 is of the very first importance. It does not 
 matter how much into the dust and dirt you 
 may go in the travels of life, your domestic, 
 heart's, soul's home is the chief thing." In 
 what kind of an inner home do you live? 
 What kind of a palace is that which our souls 
 occupy? Today this is the serious question 
 of life; for we are, especially now, what we 
 are thinking about. We are what we imag- 
 ine. We live, not in the house that covers us 
 from the rain, but in the house of the soul, the 
 house made by ourselves with the help of God 
 Himself. Every soul has a home. It may be 
 a "sleeping hole" into which we go when we 
 retire from the public, it may be a degraded 
 cave filled with vermin, and snakes, and all 
 forms of things that chill with horror. But a 
 Christian's home is the soul-home that he with 
 the help of the Lord Jesus Himself makes. 
 
 You cannot tell as you look at his smiling 
 face, at his neat attire, or by the company he 
 keeps, what kind of a real home a man lives 
 
 128
 
 in, what sort of a soul's home his is. The im- 
 portant thing is to have a soul's home, a home 
 of the heart into which we can retire, where 
 all things are clean, where everything is pure, 
 where it is open to the sky, and into which no 
 man from the exterior can ever intrude with- 
 out permission. Have a soul's inner dwelling 
 decorated with everything that is glorious, 
 with every beautiful spiritual comfort that is 
 heavenly, a home into which the angels of God 
 can come, a home into which Jesus will gladly 
 come ; so clean, so pure that He will come and 
 sup with you. It is not so important what 
 homes our bodies have, though that is in itself 
 worth attention; but the highest, the greatest 
 thing is to have a soul's clean home of your 
 own. Don't live in a morgue; don't live in 
 the dirty street; don't live amid the serpents 
 of a cave, but have a home to which Jesus will 
 assist you whenever you ask Him, into which 
 you can retire, where the sunshine beams in 
 glory, where the flowers bloom in beauty, 
 \\here fountains flash around you with their 
 suggestions of musical peace, and where 
 your associations are all pure as the angels 
 of God ; a place into which Jesus can always 
 be welcomed! 
 
 129
 
 IX 
 THE OPEN DOOR 
 
 IN the tenth chapter of First Corinthians 
 the thirteenth verse reads thus: "There 
 hath no temptation taken you, but such as 
 is common to man: but God is faithful, who 
 will not suffer you to be tempted above that 
 ye are able to bear ; but will with the tempta- 
 tion also make a way to escape, that ye may 
 be able to bear it." 
 
 Only one single thought out of this won- 
 derful collection of suggestions, shall I bring 
 to your attention. God makes a way of es- 
 cape ; so that when we are tempted or tried in 
 any manner, the Lord always finds some 
 ether way in which to reward or answer us. 
 
 A very simple, but a very impressive illus- 
 tration has come down through the years 
 from my childhood and appeared to me 
 recently. I recall going home late at night, 
 or in the early hours of the morning, from a 
 neighbour's, where as a boy I had gone on an 
 evening's visit. The farm was over the moun- 
 
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 tainside in the Berkshires. I managed to 
 force a passage through the deep drifts of 
 snow on top of the mountain where the high- 
 way was overfilled with snow. I was obliged 
 to take a detour through the pasture in order 
 to reach home. And when I looked for my 
 mother's light in the window, it was not there. 
 It had never failed me in all my childhood 
 before. Our cottage was across the valley 
 and I had to walk far to reach it by the road- 
 way. The light had always been left there 
 when father and mother went to bed. 
 
 But that night it was not there. I won- 
 dered what could have happened, as I man- 
 aged with difficulty, to get through the drifts, 
 climbing the fences, and wading through the 
 banks of snow in the fields. When I came up 
 to the front of the house where the light had 
 always been I beat my way over to the usual 
 door, which led into the kitchen, and I rapped 
 upon the door. There was no light inside and 
 there was no indication of a light anywhere. 
 All was silent; the wind whistled, and the 
 snow cut my face as it drifted from the north- 
 east. I rapped again, and then three times I 
 whistled through my fingers; and then I 
 heard the window overhead being raised and 
 the voice of my father overhead saying, "Son, 
 
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 go around to the side door!" Then I turned 
 indignantly and went around the house to the 
 side door, and when I turned the corner, there 
 was my mother's light in that window. When 
 I approached the light, I found that the door 
 had been left to be easily unlatched, so that I 
 could easily open it. 
 
 When I entered the room I found the log 
 burning cheerfully in the old fireplace and 
 mother's cakes were set out there on the cen- 
 tre table. But I was too angry that they did 
 not admit me the usual way and I did not eat 
 the cakes. I went to the bedroom feeling 
 angry, and when I arose in the morning I 
 must have shown a sour face. I muttered 
 that "my mother had no right to put the light 
 on that side of the house; she "had no business 
 to order me to go around to the side door!" 
 When I went out to milk the cows my father 
 came to me and putting his hand on my shoul- 
 der, said: "Your mother put that light in the 
 window because she loved you; and because 
 she wanted you to take the path that was 
 clearest and safest for you! If you had 
 sought for the light, you would have come the 
 easiest road. Your mother has always been 
 patient with you, and she wanted to open the 
 door for you that it was best for you to take ; 
 
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 and she put the light where you could see it 
 when you looked for it." I do not think I 
 have ever recovered from shame of my in- 
 gratitude. But many years have gone by, 
 and her face comes back to me again, and I 
 think how her mother love shut that front 
 door, locked it tight ; but she opened another 
 door, and she put the light where I could see 
 it, if I had only opened my eyes and trusted 
 her to prepare for such a helpful change. 
 
 We are studying continually on prayer and 
 on the power of prayer with God, and we are 
 so slow to learn the great important truth 
 that when God shuts one door, he always 
 opens another. When in His great love He 
 sees it best for us not to receive a direct 
 answer to our petitions, He then, still respect- 
 ing our prayers, will not force us into obedi- 
 ence to Him; but drawing us with those 
 chords of love, He opens another place; He 
 shows us another way if we will but look for 
 it. But many of us think God does not 
 answer our prayers, because we insist on stay- 
 ing at that same front door and looking for 
 the light at one window only. 
 
 I recall another incident that of a neigh- 
 bour that illustrates my thought. He 
 owned a dog that we all loved. It was very 
 
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 faithful to us all, and had great knowledge. 
 It was especially loved by its little master 
 who lived in the home, but was an orphan. 
 There was one door which was always used to 
 admit that dog to the house. A storm came 
 late in the year, when the snows drifted high 
 on the mountain side and piled up as high as 
 the roofs of the houses. The dog dug out his 
 path to the usual door and the door was 
 shut. The dog must have whined and howled 
 through the weary hours of the night and 
 way into the morning. But when morning 
 came, they saw his frozen body there, laying 
 in the snow, with his paws on the threshold of 
 the usual door by which he usually entered. 
 Yet his master had taken great pains to ar- 
 range it so that he could come around and 
 enter another door. When that dog found 
 that door was shut, he could have gone in by 
 that other door and have been well sheltered. 
 But because of the dog's insistence on stay- 
 ing at that one door, because of his lack of 
 knowledge, or lack of faith of his master, he 
 stayed there until he was frozen to death. 
 
 There are many Christians whose faith has 
 been frozen because they found one door shut 
 and concluded that was the only way to enter. 
 They happened to go the usual way, and f or- 
 
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 got that God in His great wisdom will never 
 leave us alone. My father said, "Your 
 mother put that light in the window because 
 she loved you; she would not fail you, and 
 she would not fail to open the door which is 
 best for you" ! And so it is with our Heav- 
 enly Father. Our Heavenly Father opens 
 the door that is best for us; and he who, be- 
 cause he does not get the exact answer in 
 one way, stands outside the door and freezes 
 to death, seems to have only knowledge of 
 animals. 
 
 Here is a beautiful story told by one of our 
 poets I wish I could recall who it was that 
 wrote it. It is something like this: In the 
 early part of the war, before Russia came into 
 it, there were a number of men in prison in 
 Siberia and they were very carefully guarded. 
 One night, according to the story, a conspir- 
 acy had been arranged among the prisoners 
 confined there because of political offences 
 and they assembled together and decided that 
 cne of their number should go up and in some 
 way capture or kill the guard, then open the 
 gate and so enable all to make one general 
 rush for that open gate. According to the 
 poet's account, one of the bravest men went 
 and captured the sentinel, and swung open 
 
 135
 
 wide the door. When he opened the gate, 
 there was a general movement, all rushing f or 
 liberty. But as they were rushing toward the 
 open door together, a strong breeze of wind 
 sprang up and shut the door through which 
 they were about to escape. They were unable 
 to open it again. The door was shut ! 
 
 But some wise man among the number said, 
 "I feel a breeze from the west; the breeze 
 which shut that door is blowing this way, and 
 it could not enter the prison unless it had 
 blown open some other door." So, feeling 
 their way, by the draft of air, they found that 
 the wind which had shut one door had blown 
 open first another door, which opened out on 
 the parade grounds, giving them the liberty 
 they were seeking. The other door, which 
 had been shut before their face, was a very 
 dangerous exit and might have cost them their 
 lives even if they had succeeded in getting out 
 at all. The same breeze that shut one door 
 opened a safer door and gave them their lib- 
 erty. God often sends breezes to His follow- 
 ers, and the same winds that shut the door in 
 the face of him who would escape that way 
 opens another door which furnishes a far bet- 
 ter method of getting one's liberty. 
 
 This is a wonderful saying.of the Apostles', 
 
 130
 
 in which he says that God will "find a way of 
 escape"; that he will find some other method. 
 
 I remember having a talk with Spurgeon, 
 in which he said he had often wondered at the 
 providence of God, inasmuch as that ship on 
 which he intended to sail away to Australia 
 left the wharf a day ahead of schedule time; 
 and when he arrived at the pier, the boat had 
 sailed the day before, leaving him in London. 
 He said that he often wondered whether it 
 was God's own hand that dealt with him, 
 keeping him in London to preach the Gospel, 
 and to do the work he did at the Tabernacle. 
 God shut one door, and yet He opened a 
 greater one to him. 
 
 I do not think we go to a point of extrava- 
 gance in saying that when we have prayed 
 for something that is reasonable for us to 
 obtain, and it is denied us, it is absolutely sure 
 that the better thing is within our reach, if we 
 will only look around to find it. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln said that when he was 
 defeated for the United States Senate he was 
 utterly broken; that he went home feeling 
 that republics were ungrateful; that the peo- 
 ple were unwise who put any trust in any 
 republic whatever. He was altogether dis- 
 couraged. He had been defeated after a very 
 
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 long campaign. It was an awful defeat, a 
 door slammed in his face, by the providence 
 of God. But the shutting of that door to the 
 Senate unquestionably brought him to the 
 presidency of the United States and made 
 him the great martyr for human freedom. 
 
 I recall an ascent of the Alps made with 
 some friends of mine some years ago. I 
 walked on in advance up the side of Mount 
 Blanc, and left them far behind. I felt that 
 I must wait at every cross road to tell them 
 which way they must go, as they were trust- 
 ing on me as their guide. But at every cross 
 road I came to I cut off limbs of trees and 
 placed them across the road which they were 
 not to enter, so that they might not make any 
 mistake. I had not told them anything about 
 it, but they very easily recognized the hint 
 that the tree limbs across the paths meant 
 that they were not to go that way, and they 
 soon overtook me. They could not make any 
 mistake because I had put something there to 
 show them which way to go. 
 
 So the Saviour, in guiding us through life, 
 puts along the path He intends us to take, 
 something at each cross road showing that we 
 are not to go that way. 
 
 It is the history of prayer in this congrega- 
 
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 tion, and it is the history of prayer every- 
 where, that we are sometimes helpfully de- 
 nied. A most remarkable example of this 
 once came to my attention in connection with 
 the after-services. A lady asked the prayers 
 of my congregation that her nephew might 
 be reconciled to her. The nephew had left her 
 in anger and had said he would never return, 
 and she had felt that he never would ; and she 
 asked the church to pray for her and pray 
 with her. One Sunday night, this woman, 
 though not belonging to my church, came to 
 the service, and at the close went down to the 
 after-prayer service. She took a seat in the 
 Lower Temple, which w r as already well filled. 
 In came her nephew to the prayer meeting, 
 because he did not wish to go to his own 
 church for fear of meeting his aunt there, and 
 he took the only seat that seemed to be left in 
 the entire building, and that was right along- 
 side of his aunt! Imagine their surprise as 
 they looked into each other's faces, and imag- 
 ine the delight of the aunt that the boy was 
 returned to her under such circumstances. 
 The young man said to me and aunt and 
 nephew had their arms around each other 
 when they came to talk to me, "I have been 
 a miserable sinner ; pray for me that I might 
 
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 be forgiven." That is all I know of that 
 story, except that a good Christian lady of 
 many years of service, who overheard the con- 
 versation, said to me, "My prayers are never 
 answered like that ; I never get such answers ; 
 the Lord does not seem to reply ever to my 
 prayers at all." There is the chief difficulty 
 in our praying. We pray for something, and 
 if we do not get the exact object we refuse to 
 take something in its place. 
 
 I am reminded of an incident I once heard 
 an evangelist tell. He said that down in 
 West Virginia he, or some other friend, was 
 visiting and at night time they came down to 
 the stream where a large plank was removed, 
 which in the darkness they were unable to 
 find, and they said, "We must travel miles 
 and miles to get around this stream"; and 
 they said, "Father took away that plank!" 
 Then his friend said, "If father took away 
 that plank he put it down somewhere else. It 
 must be somewhere up the stream where it is 
 not so dangerous. I am sure that father 
 would not take that plank away without leav- 
 ing us something in its place with which to 
 cross the stream." When they investigated 
 further they found the plank was moved only 
 a few feet down the stream where they could 
 
 140
 
 cross in safety. And when our Heavenly 
 Father takes away a plank, He naturally puts 
 it somewhere else, in some safer place for us 
 to cross. Oh, that I could say it over and 
 over until all of us could get this great truth 
 into our characters. 
 
 Mark Twain, in the account of one of his 
 travels up the Mississippi River, tells of the 
 dredging of a new channel above St. Louis 
 with which the steamer captain was not well 
 acquainted. One night one of them ran his 
 vessel aground because he had not paid atten- 
 tion to the lights which showed the new chan- 
 nel. They had been so in the habit of going 
 straight up the river that they kept straight 
 on instead of following the new channel. For 
 years the boatmen passed the wreck of that 
 boat and pointed it out as a warning, and 
 said, "If the captain of that boat had paid 
 attention to the new light, and had been 
 guided thereby, following the new channel 
 which the Government provided, there would 
 have been no stranded ship." 
 
 Years ago when I was in Massachusetts, I 
 saw the great building of Tremont Temple 
 burn down. When fire destroyed Tremont 
 Temple, the people came together with tears, 
 said, "It is of no use trying to reconstruct
 
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 that building; the undertaking would be too 
 great; it would cost half a million dollars; 
 there is no way to do it." I remember it was 
 almost unanimous in Boston with the Baptists 
 that Tremont Temple could never be recon- 
 structed because it was too great an undertak- 
 ing, and the risk was too great, and I remem- 
 ber one man saying that it was "tempting 
 God" to try to rebuild and that he would have 
 nothing more to do with it. But now, because 
 that door was shut, because the old building 
 burned down, because of the inadequacy of 
 that building for the work it had before it, 
 they are now doing a much greater work. 
 God shut one door, burned down one building 
 that they might build up another for the 
 greater work that they had to do, one of the 
 greatest in the United States, and in the 
 world. Tremont Temple stands today with 
 its magnificent buildings because God pro- 
 vided another door and they were wise enough 
 to see that door was open. 
 
 Many Christians are like a friend who a 
 few years ago, in the summer time, came 
 home to the city and rapped at my door late 
 in the night. When I went to the window he 
 said, "I came to see if I could not stay with 
 you; I cannot get into my house." He in- 
 
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 sisted on sleeping on a sofa instead of ruffling 
 up a bed, and early in the morning he arose 
 and sent down to his sea-shore place for the 
 keys to his house in the city. Instead of get- 
 ting the keys, he received a note from his wife 
 saying, "I put the key in your trousers 
 pocket." But to him it was a strange key. 
 He had found it in his pocket but did not 
 recognize it as the back door key. He had 
 tried it only at the front door, and as it was 
 not the key to that door, he concluded it was 
 no key to his house at all. 
 
 The Christian has keys to God's plans ; to 
 God's house ; to God's home, but we are carry- 
 ing them around in our pockets and do not 
 use them, or we try them only on the front 
 door, when we should try them on other doors 
 for which God has given them. 
 
 God respects our liberty, our education, our 
 moral forces, and He does not act with that 
 lightning-like force which characterizes some 
 of the laws of nature. But, as a kind, heav- 
 enly Father, He always answers our prayers. 
 If you have not been able to find the answer 
 in one place, it is because if you will look 
 around you will find that God has been 
 answering you another way. 
 
 143
 
 IN the ninth chapter of First Corinthians, 
 the Apostle Paul, writing to the church 
 at Corinth, which was in a sense the apple 
 of his eye, said to them: "Do ye not know that 
 they which minister about holy things live of 
 the things of the temple, and they which wait 
 at the altar are partakers with the altar? 
 Even so hath the Lord ordained that they 
 which preach the gospel should live of the 
 gospel. But I have used none of the things : 
 neither have I written these things, that it 
 should be so done unto me : for it were better 
 for me to die, than that any man should make 
 my glorying void. For though I preach the 
 gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for ne- 
 cessity is laid upon me; yes, woe is unto me, 
 if I preach not the gospel." 
 
 I desire to consider the thought in the 
 fourteenth verse together with the first line 
 of the fifteenth: "The Lord hath ordained 
 that they which preach the gospel should live 
 
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 of the gospel. But I have used none of these 
 things." 
 
 No great thing was ever done by a man 
 who was working for pay. None of the great 
 deeds of earth were ever done for a reward in 
 money. That life is a wasted life that is sim- 
 ply lived for wages. That man is a hindrance 
 to the world, and his life is but a waste of 
 time, who, having the necessities of life, is 
 living to earn money. 
 
 The church at Corinth was Paul's especial 
 care. It was in a great central city, next to 
 Rome the heart of the commerce of the known 
 world. It was a very difficult place in which 
 to establish a church of Jesus Christ because 
 the world had brought in all its temptations 
 into that center, and every inducement for 
 people to leave the gospel and to live an un- 
 righteous life was there exhibited. But the 
 Apostle Paul determined there should be a 
 church in Corinth, and he entered upon that 
 work without thought of earning anything for 
 himself. He says here that although God had 
 ordained that a man should live by the gospel 
 which he preaches, yet in Corinth he had never 
 received anything from them. It was Paul's 
 great work : it was the crown of his life. 
 
 A great deed was that. He earned his own 
 
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 living working with the needle upon tents. 
 He cared for himself by the assistance of 
 friends, in other places, but in that one city he 
 would receive nothing. He set forth by his 
 example the great truth that Jesus was ever 
 teaching, that we are not to be anxious for 
 our food or clothing, but that we are to chiefly 
 think of some one great call of God to do 
 some great duty to the world, without per- 
 sonal reward for ourselves. That is Chris- 
 tianity. That distinguishes a Christian from 
 other people, in this, that he hath something 
 to live for beside earning his living. 
 
 Those of you who have been agitated by 
 the labour questions of the country and they 
 are serious find your solution of the great 
 question in the teaching of the gospel con- 
 cerning the relation of employer to employee 
 or master and servant, as the translation 
 puts it, in Paul's letters. The servant was to 
 be as a brother, not to be looked down upon 
 and rejected, for having a certain duty to do, 
 he should be honoured in doing that duty. 
 
 One of the greatest achievements of mod- 
 ern days was the building of the Panama 
 Canal. It is the wonder of our age. It has 
 been an accomplishment which has astonished 
 the most scientific and the most optimistic 
 
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 people. It has been accomplished by working 
 out the gospel in the employment of labour. 
 The most marvelous thing about that canal is 
 not so much the great ditch, not so much the 
 transference of great men-of-war and ships 
 of merchandise from one ocean to the other, 
 as it is the solution of that great question of 
 the relation of labour to capital, of employee 
 to employer. When Colonel Goethals went 
 down there, a large-hearted but decisive 
 soldier, he adopted a principle that sets forth 
 just what Paul is teaching here, that men 
 should not labour for their wages, that wages 
 should be entirely a secondary matter. That 
 it is a necessary matter we all must confess 
 because persons must live in order to work, 
 but that their work should be for their em- 
 ployer and not for their wages is clear to us 
 all. To get out of those men the utmost of 
 their endeavor Colonel Goethals adopted a 
 very simple but effective plan. Why did the 
 people working on the Panama Canal ask 
 Colonel Goethals for the privilege of working 
 two hours longer a day? Why did some of 
 them insist that they would work until eleven 
 o'clock at night for the same pay? Why did 
 those workmen leave their work with such re- 
 luctance? Why did some of them work on 
 
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 through the lunch period? Until Colonel 
 Goethals forbade it they often worked with- 
 out their dinner. Why did they do all these 
 things with no extra pay? 
 
 It occurred in this wise : He divided up the 
 canal into three sections. Then he put the 
 same number of men on each section, gave to 
 each section an excellent, noble Christian man 
 in spirit, as a leader, and set them in compe- 
 tition with each other to see which party 
 should do the most. Colonel Goethals put 
 that in force there, and each section of that 
 canal has been anxious to throw out a greater 
 number of shovelfuls of earth each day than 
 the other sections. The competition in the 
 building of the canal has become so exciting, 
 as two of the workmen write me, that they all 
 of them are full of enthusiasm and determin- 
 ation that each section shall at least equal the 
 other, and exceed it if they can. In this build- 
 ing of the canal there are valuable life experi- 
 ences. They are so bound together that they 
 will be the closest of friends all their lives, 
 just as soldiers in war, when marching to- 
 gether through years of experience, meeting 
 the same battles and in the same dangers to- 
 gether, sleeping in the same tents and eating 
 the same food, love each other though they 
 
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 may never have personally met until fifty 
 years have gone. 
 
 When we meet a soldier at once to our 
 hearts he comes as a brother. There is 
 nothing more sweet to us old men than to 
 meet comrades who were in the Civil war, not 
 for money, not for pension, but to serve his 
 country. So in the building of the Panama 
 Canal each division got into such friendship 
 with each other, each watching the other and 
 helping the other in his work, and being very 
 careful of the machinery of the United States, 
 that they built the canal for at least $80,000,- 
 000 less than it would have cosi without that 
 competition, and not only saving the people 
 through taxation, but bringing friendship and 
 love into the building of the canal. For fifty 
 years to come the friendships made there in 
 that competition will affect the interests of 
 our country, and certainly the interests of 
 the people who are there. Fortunate the 
 man who has had an opportunity to work 
 digging on the Panama Canal because of 
 that very good natured but hearty and earn- 
 est competition. 
 
 Now that is the way to settle the labour 
 question. It must ultimately come, that the 
 workman will work for his employer, and will
 
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 be ambitious that his employer should suc- 
 ceed beyond other employers. There will be 
 a spirit of competition about the factory or 
 shop, and he will take such an interest in it 
 that he will watch his fellow workmen, en- 
 courage them, help them, and try to work 
 with the greatest efficiency in that place, 
 thinking first of his employer all the time. 
 
 On the other hand, when Christianity has 
 its way, the employer will think entirely of his 
 employees. The whole matter of profit will 
 become secondary. He won't need to think 
 about it because the profit will take care of 
 itself. He will have one of the most profit- 
 able shops in the world, and will not need to 
 worry about that. The finances will take 
 care of themselves if he seek first the kingdom 
 of God. Show me the employer who works 
 with his own hands, who visits his workmen 
 when they are sick, is anxious about the edu- 
 cation of their children, and is determined that 
 his employees shall have the greatest oppor- 
 tunities in the world, or as good as any other 
 employees in the country, and I will show you 
 a man and you know I will that will pros- 
 per in all that he undertakes. 
 
 It is the principle laid down by the apostle 
 that a man should labour not for wages, for 
 
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 he is a contemptible, mean soul, unworthy of 
 a place on the face of God's earth, who works 
 for a salary alone. 
 
 The greatest monumental deeds of the 
 world are those that have been done by men 
 outside their profession or business, aside 
 from their daily occupation. The one great 
 address which made Daniel Webster the idol 
 of America and the admired of the world as a 
 mighty orator, was made at Dartmouth Col- 
 lege. He was but thirty-five years of age, 
 and had begun to get his education very late 
 in life. He was an unknown lawyer, and had 
 but a few clients, and he was too poor to buy 
 an overcoat when he went to Dartmouth Col- 
 lege. They asked him to come as a lawyer 
 because he was a graduate, and when by 
 God's providence the senior counsel could not 
 go, Daniel was obliged to carry the brunt of 
 the entire case. When he was there as a poor 
 man they offered him a fee, and he said, "I 
 will not work for my alma mater for money. 
 I will have no money in this case. I am here 
 because I love the old college, and because 
 my heart is here. Don't offer me any money, 
 not a penny, not even my expenses." 
 
 He then delivered that great oration on 
 Dartmouth College, before the Supreme 
 
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 Court of the State of New Hampshire, and 
 he so delivered it that the judges wept on the 
 bench, and the audience sank into a reverent 
 silence, as he reached the peroration of that 
 magnificent address which gave him a name 
 and fame that lasted even against his faults 
 until the day he was buried, years afterwards. 
 The great thing that Daniel Webster did was 
 that which he did without pay. It was his 
 great monument. The same could be said of 
 the spirit in which he answered Hayne, when 
 in the United States Senate he defended 
 Massachusetts. It was the same spirit of giv- 
 ing up one's self, abandoning of selfishness, 
 forgetting everything only the cause which he 
 represented, and throwing himself into it with 
 an entire abandon of all his thought of other 
 things, that made Daniel Webster the mighty 
 orator. If he had worked for Dartmouth 
 College for money, and if in his poverty he 
 had thought of the money he would have been 
 a failure, as thousands of other men have been 
 who have attempted to do the same thing. 
 
 Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, was a 
 man who in the days of my youth I frequently 
 saw. He was a very dignified, aristocratic 
 kind of a man. Indeed people laughed at 
 him after he had graduated from college, for 
 
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 his foppish manners. He was a dude of the 
 extreme order. He dressed in flashy attire, 
 and associated only with the exclusive set as 
 he was of a wealthy family. He went to 
 England, where he was proud to be intro- 
 duced to lords and ladies, and he came home 
 and looked down upon the people of the 
 United States as being very primitive and 
 hardly fit associates for men like himself. 
 There was no more foolish aristocrat in the 
 entire State of Massachusetts than Charles 
 Sumner. He was laughed at, and hated 
 by the common people so far as they knew 
 him. 
 
 One day he saw the soldiers arrest a colored 
 man by the name of "Sim," and he followed 
 the crowd down State Street in Boston, until 
 they took the man and put him on board a 
 vessel for Savannah, Georgia, which took that 
 slave home. That night an indignation meet- 
 ing was held in Faneuil Hall, and he went to 
 the meeting, though not by invitation. He 
 had become so aroused by seeing the behav- 
 iour of the police and the soldiers, and had 
 become somehow so sympathetic that he arose 
 in the meeting to make some remarks. They 
 called for him to go to the platform. He 
 went up to the platform in his dudish attire, 
 
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 with all his foreign accents, and his attempt 
 to be like an English lord. But before he had 
 spoken for fifteen minutes his natural heart 
 swept away all those barriers. They went 
 down before his real soul, and Charles Sum- 
 ner swept out into great-hearted manhood as 
 he addressed that people, and gave his cele- 
 brated "Mark Antony speech." 
 
 He was honoured throughout all his life 
 during his wonderful service of his country 
 for that Mark Antony speech. It was deliv- 
 ered without pay, without previous medita- 
 tion, without expectation of delivering such 
 a thing, that was the end of all his boasted 
 preference for the lords and ladies of Eng- 
 land. He broke out for the poor slave, and 
 swept to the other extreme, and became the 
 leader of anti-slavery in Massachusetts. 
 Then he became the senator from Massachu- 
 setts, then the leader of the great party that 
 ruled the country, and then the most intimate 
 friend of Abraham Lincoln, all through that 
 Mark Antony speech. He made many other 
 speeches in other places. He wrote with 
 great care, he used English with great precis- 
 ion, nicety, and artistic beauty. But those 
 addresses no one remembers. It is the one he 
 gave without hope of pay, abandoning him- 
 
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 self entirely, which lives in the memory of his 
 countrymen. 
 
 By what do we remember William of 
 Orange, Prince of Nassau, whose romantic 
 history in saving the Netherlands from the 
 Inquisition is still the admiration of the 
 world? Is it because he was a prince, inherit- 
 ing a throne? Is it because he was an edu- 
 cated man? Is it because he bore titles? Is 
 it because he fought great battles? Is it be- 
 cause he saved Holland from the Inquisition 
 and the flood? It is because the man gave 
 himself utterly to it. He gave up everything 
 personal for the cause of religious freedom, 
 and surrendered his estates to be sold. He 
 assailed Charles V and met him with triumph 
 on the fields of battle, until the assassin struck 
 him down in that palace in the Netherlands. 
 We remember him for his unselfish devotion 
 to a mighty cause, and because he received 
 no money. 
 
 The Apostle Paul is setting forth this 
 thought, and we too in our conscience have a 
 call of God to do something unselfish. Breth- 
 ren and sisters, however humble you may 
 think your life is, however retired it may be, 
 as sure as God is God, just so sure the call 
 of God comes in your conscience to do some- 
 
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 thing special, something for which you are not 
 paid, that will require some sacrifice of yours 
 in order that you may obey the call of God. 
 Every man's conscience is the voice of God, 
 and when your conscience tells you that you 
 ought to do this thing, you should do it how- 
 ever humble it may be. It is the call of God to 
 , do these greater things, these unselfish things. 
 
 You have often heard of Professor Agas- 
 siz, the great Christian scholar, the keenest 
 scientist Harvard College has ever seen. On 
 one occasion he was invited to lecture, and 
 he wrote to the committee that he had no 
 time to earn money. His heart was with the 
 students, and his desire to cultivate in the 
 students a Christian knowledge of God's laws 
 in nature. They offered him large sums if he 
 would go and lecture, and he said, "No time 
 have I to earn money." Harvard College has 
 its greatest treasure, not in its immense coli- 
 seum, not in its wonderful buildings, not in 
 its twenty millions of endowment, but in the 
 life and reputation of such great men as Pro- 
 fessor Agassiz. 
 
 If I were to search the history of the world, 
 and ask you to examine it, you would find the 
 apostle was right, that the greatest things are 
 done by those who do not work for pay.
 
 UNUSED POWERS 
 
 If you look at the history of the great men 
 and women of the world you are finding ever 
 that the chief thing they did was something 
 entirely outside their usual calling. Such was 
 the case with Mauritius and Leonidas of 
 Greece, such the case of Fabius, and Scipio of 
 Rome, of Wallace and Bruce of Scotland, of 
 Tell and Huber, of Joan of Arc, Hemy IV, 
 Lafayette, Cur ran, Emmett, Grattan, Pirn, 
 Hampden, Washington, Adams, Hamilton, 
 Grant, Lee, Lincoln, Garfield. All are noted 
 for doing something they were called by their 
 consciences to do that required them to leave 
 the usual occupations of their lives. 
 
 Girard College stands out there as a mag- 
 nificent monument to Girard. What is it but 
 a monument to what he did on one side? It 
 was not his business to educate orphans. It 
 was not connected with it, it was outside, it 
 was something his conscience called him to do. 
 It was a distinct call of God. The great 
 monument to him is not the business he did, 
 not the ships that now have decayed, not the 
 money that he had invested in other enter- 
 prises, but entirely on that side issue. 
 
 If we look at it we find the same was true 
 of Andrew Carnegie. He was not a manu- 
 facturer of steel. He knew nothing about the 
 
 157
 
 manufacture of iron, having attained wealth 
 in other directions. He turned into that busi- 
 ness with sympathy, as he says, for the work- 
 ing people, and the great opportunity he saw 
 to furnish countless thousands with occupa- 
 tion, although it turned out in the end, as is 
 often the case, that without any effort on his 
 part, without any other different labour, it in- 
 creased his millions, yet it was an attempt to 
 do something outside of his previous profes- 
 sion. Then he spent his days giving away his 
 money. 
 
 I have read the story of James Lick, of 
 California, and I have been interested very 
 much in that, having been to the wonderful 
 observatory which he set up fifty miles south- 
 east of San Francisco. The great Lick tele- 
 scope, which was the largest in the world, was 
 built by him by money he gave to it while he 
 lived. James Lick was a very plain, earnest, 
 self-giving man, who was curious and ec- 
 centric in many ways, but when he had at- 
 tained unto wealth, he said, "I want to do 
 something different from business. I want 
 to be something different from a miller, some- 
 thing else than a merchant or manufacturer." 
 
 I can use but one other illustration, because 
 I believe in closing on time always, but in 
 
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 connection with this it comes so prominent 
 that I need to mention Leland Stanford, who 
 established the Leland Stanford Junior Uni- 
 versity that has $20,000,000, in California, 
 near San Francisco, at Palo Alto. He was 
 an acquaintance of Lick's, and when Lick 
 began to give toward different things Leland 
 Stanford began to be interested in it. Again 
 and again Leland Stanford, while he was a 
 Senator of the United States, was saying to 
 himself, "I have nothing to live for. I have 
 no children." Having nothing to live for, he 
 did not spend his millions, and they accumu- 
 lated very rapidly. He put a million of dol- 
 lars into a private house, and dwelt in it, but 
 it was not a home to him. "Nothing to live 
 for." 
 
 But one night in a dream if it was a 
 dream his son appeared to him by the early 
 morning light, and said: "Father, never say 
 again that you have nothing to live for. Live 
 for humanity, live for other people's chil- 
 dren." Then the vision disappeared. Stan- 
 ford always believed to his death that he had 
 seen the spirit of his son. Then the call of 
 God came to do all he did, as he did. I have 
 not time to go further, but you can read the 
 life of Leland Stanford, who established the 
 
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 Leland Stanford Junior University, with its 
 $20,000,000, in California. It is an institu- 
 tion that is a model, with all that is advanced 
 and best in education. Stanford built it from 
 an unselfish desire to serve humanity, and he 
 put his son's name upon it because he believed 
 that his son did call upon him to love human- 
 ity and to take other people's children into his 
 heart as he had done his own son. He and 
 Mrs. Stanford were the devoted Christian 
 servants of the poor, the orphan, and the suf- 
 fering, and left all their property to go on 
 doing good to the rising generation. That 
 great Leland Stanford Junior University, the 
 admiration of all the educated world, and an 
 honour to the United States of America, was 
 an outside deed, done as the Apostle Paul did 
 at Corinth, not for pay, and without hope of 
 earthly gain, but because in his conscience he 
 heard the call of God. None of you are an 
 exception to the call. 
 
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