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The 
 Daily Pathway 
 
 By 
 
 MARGARET E. SANGSTER 
 
 Author of "Joyful Life " and 
 " Talks between Times" 
 
 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 
 
 150 NASSAU STREET 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
33- 
 
 .571 
 
 1 
 
 ■ 
 
 1904 
 
 CLASS " ; 
 ' COPY B 
 
 .52^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I9O4. 
 IY AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 
 
* 
 
 FOREWORD. 
 
 ^^^HE marching days are beckoning 
 g us on in their train, yet though 
 - they never arrest their progress, we 
 
 sometimes sit down by the wayside to watch 
 and chronicle their passing. The familiar 
 talks which are included in this volume were 
 originally written for the columns of The 
 American Messenger } where they have had 
 their first appearance. They touch in simple 
 style and modest intention on some phases 
 of the life of every day as it is lived in the 
 household. Perhaps they will be best fit 
 into the leisure of the Sabbath afternoon, 
 when tasks are done, and the family group 
 are gathered in the pleasant seclusion of the 
 rest-day that the Father's love has made a 
 gift to his children, week by week. In the 
 hope that they may do good in an unobtrusive 
 fashion, they are sent on their way to another 
 audience of friends and neighbors. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter. Page. 
 
 I. THE MARCHING DAYS 3 
 
 II. MIDWINTER iy 
 
 III. OUR FRIENDS 29 
 
 IV. A COMMONPLACE SAINT . . . .43 
 V. THE THRIFT OF WISE SPENDING . . .57 
 
 VI. A TALENT FOR LOVING 71 
 
 VII. KEEPING ONE'S WORD 85 
 
 VIII. THE PASSING OF GALLANTRY. . . -99 
 
 IX. THE EVERYDAY WOMAN 113 
 
 X. GENTLE FOLK 127 
 
 XL A LENTEN MEDITATION 141 
 
 XII. OUR EASTER JOY 155 
 
 XIII. SUMMER HOLIDAYS 167 
 
 XIV. SUMMER SABBATH KEEPING . . . . l8l 
 XV. NEEDLESS CALAMITIES 193 
 
 XVI. PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS 
 
 FLOW 207 
 
 XVII. SHUT-IN FRIENDS 221 
 
 XVIII. AT CHRISTMAS TIME 233 
 
 XIX. A NARROW NECK OF LAND . . . .247 
 
 XX. THE CALL OF THE FUTURE . . . » 26l 
 
The Marching Days 
 
 " Taking the year together, my dear, 
 There isn't more night than day." 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE MARCHING DATS. 
 
 G\/ UST one day at a time ! The tempta- 
 T" tion, as you and I know, is to forget 
 ^J this, and carry the burden of anx- 
 ious care for a whole year, or a whole life- 
 time all at once. How the morrow looms 
 up, threatening, menacing, when we are not 
 quite well, or the income is inadequate to 
 our needs, or the children are crying out for 
 everything that children in these days want, 
 not only food and raiment, but education 
 along special lines, travel, fine opportuni- 
 ties, and a good start for a successful 
 career. The mother's strength and cour- 
 age are exhausted, not in to-day's house- 
 wifery, but in foreboding about to-mor- 
 row, and the father's head grows griz- 
 zled and his back bowed in overwork for his 
 
4 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 sons, who will not, ten years hence, appreciate 
 his toil. The worry that is an affront to a 
 gracious Providence, the hurry that lays 
 waste our energies and dissipates our physical 
 and mental capital, are the offspring of that 
 jaded temper which loses the power to 
 rebound because it carries dead weight for 
 much of the journey. 
 
 Day in and day out! The Lord whose 
 goodness has thus appointed our stations for 
 labor and for rest, "maketh the outgoings of 
 the morning and evening to rejoice." When 
 we form the habit of living only one day at a 
 time, filling the measure of that single day 
 with duties done as to the Lord, rounding the 
 circuit of the sun with grateful praise, we 
 then tread the pathway of life as victors. 
 How much better than as captives, as work- 
 men weary of their work, or as slaves cring- 
 ing under a taskmaster! It is the part of 
 wisdom to take the road lightly, leaving 
 behind us whatever luggage will prove cum- 
 brous. Some one says, "But how can I help 
 myself? I can overcome the disposition to 
 undue worry over my own mistakes and 
 shortcomings, I can easily leave my personal 
 
THE MARCHING DAYS. 5 
 
 concerns with my heavenly Father, but when 
 the question is of my loved ones, it is more 
 complicated. I look into the pallid counte- 
 nance of a child, destined to years of inva- 
 lidism; I vainly try to arrest the steps of a 
 friend who is treading the down grade of 
 weakness and sin; I stand utterly helpless 
 beside a kinsman handicapped by want, and 
 I think what he might do, if money were 
 not denied him. How am I to escape depres- 
 sion and morbidness, and the wretchedness 
 of hope deferred? Talk of taking the road 
 lightly to some one else, not to me." 
 
 The obvious answer is that our Lord did 
 not limit his command, nor narrow his encour- 
 agement to good cheer, when he bade us 
 remember that sufficient unto the day is the 
 evil thereof. He expressly said, "Fear not, 
 little flock. It is the Father's good pleasure 
 to give you the kingdom." The kingdom 
 of what? Over whatever of earth that can 
 hamper, crush or distress us or our precious 
 ones. When Jesus sent forth his disciples 
 on their first errands of teaching and heal- 
 ing, he made them take the road lightly 
 weighted, without script, without money, 
 
6 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 without two coats. We foolishly allow our- 
 selves to be encumbered by life's superflui- 
 ties, by the things that our fancy longs for, 
 the furniture, the clothing, the luxuries, that 
 we regard as essentials, but which become a 
 source of labor and profitless trouble. Who- 
 ever needlessly incurs debt that can be 
 avoided, whoever voluntarily lives beyond 
 his means, whoever deliberately toils beyond 
 his strength for mere material gain, is walk- 
 ing encumbered on a road where he might be 
 free. Of this encumbrance comes irritability, 
 nervous prostration, sleepless nights, and 
 dreary moods of dark unrest by noonday's 
 light. 
 
 Gray days, white days, rose-hued days, 
 swift days and slow days, silent days and days 
 of melody, days of mourning and of feast- 
 ing, of the desert and the city, and all sorts 
 and conditions of days; from Eden until now 
 they march in endless procession. Abraham 
 knew them, and Isaac and Jacob, Isaiah, 
 Ezekiel and Malachi knew them. The 
 marching days have witnessed the rise and 
 fall of earthly empires, the discovery of new 
 worlds, the amazing results of applied 
 
THE MARCHING DAYS. 7 
 
 science in the latest modern century — the 
 rapid progress of missions in the Far East, 
 the splendid achievements of art, the increase 
 of culture, — these the never-ceasing days 
 have watched as they have gone by. 
 
 "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday, 
 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre." 
 
 wrote Kipling in his recessional after the 
 Queen's great jubilee. Often this thought 
 appalls us, when we give it place — the abso- 
 lute impossibility of catching the skirts of yes- 
 terday, so remote is it, so out of sight and 
 beyond touch. Yet elusive as they are in very 
 truth we possess our yesterdays and are of 
 their warp and woof. The stuff of every yes- 
 terday is in our soul, and the child in the 
 cradle is the child of the past as really as of 
 the present. The days as they have marched 
 from the misty region where our great-grand- 
 fathers wrought valiantly or failed shame- 
 fully have left legacies at our door, and each 
 of us inherits something definite and tangible 
 from the shadows that lie behind us. 
 
 Among the charming features of the days 
 is their quality of unexpectedness, of surprise. 
 
 
8 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 A day begins in somberness, but it turns to 
 brilliance of scarlet and pomp of gold before 
 it is over. A day shines at the window in 
 the early dawn. We open the casement. 
 The day wears an ordinary face; it gives 
 us no hint of radiance beyond the common- 
 place uniformity of existence; yet this day 
 brings us a new friend, and life is perma- 
 nently enriched. To the girl it brings her 
 lover, to the man the sweetheart who is to 
 be his comrade the rest of the way. Perhaps 
 the new day is one of revelation, when we 
 become aware of a gift we did not dream we 
 had, of a strength hitherto concealed. Or, 
 it may be a day of inspiration, a day of 
 suddenly kindled enthusiasm, of altogether 
 new delight. We often mark a black line 
 on our calendar when some great sorrow has 
 crossed our path, but do we as often keep 
 the tally of the days that brought us spoil, 
 that made us happy, that were joyous and 
 triumphant, God having made them extra- 
 ordinary in the fulness of their peace? It 
 is worth while to cultivate a habitual spirit 
 of gratitude for the surprises of loving-kind- 
 ness that make beautiful our days. 
 
THE MARCHING DAYS. 9 
 
 One bright afternoon not long ago, I was 
 walking on a village street when a woman, 
 evidently a mother, passed me wheeling a 
 baby carriage. The baby, a little fellow two 
 years old or thereabout, was crying in' a bit- 
 ter, broken-hearted way that moved me to 
 sympathy, but something had angered his 
 mother, who was probably ashamed of the 
 child's wailing, and she rushed on, pushing 
 the carriage hastily before her, eyes flashing, 
 lips set in a white line, her whole demeanor 
 intensely annoyed and excited. Poor baby! 
 I knew that in some way he had vexed his 
 mother beyond the point of self-control, and 
 I knew as well as if she had told me, that 
 she meant to slap him the minute she was 
 within her own door. Again, I thought, 
 poor baby. Children must be punished, it 
 is true, but alas ! for the little ones whose 
 parents punish them in anger. The pathway 
 of childhood should be much like the foot- 
 path that leads through a meadow with 
 flowers on either hand. Too much repression, 
 too many dont's, too many thoughtless pro- 
 hibitions, and far too much penalty, are the 
 portion of childish life in households where 
 
10 
 
 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 parental ambition, or parental ill-humor, or 
 honestly mistaken parental love, make child- 
 hood's path a hard one to tread. The 
 little feet must be taught obedience, the 
 little hands trained in all gentle service, 
 the youthful will directed in the right way; 
 but this may be done without injustice, with- 
 out prejudice, and without too many tears. 
 Wounded parental vanity is responsible for 
 some childish suffering. Oftener than fathers 
 and mothers think, they are the immediate 
 cause of their children's forwardness, what 
 with foolish indulgence on one hand, and 
 foolish tyranny on the other. 
 
 The daily life of childhood should by 
 insensible pressure mould our sons and daugh- 
 ters into the shape of noblest manhood and 
 womanhood. One step at a time, one hour 
 at a time, one thought at a time, and ere 
 we know it, childhood has gone, and the 
 period of mature life and responsibility has 
 arrived — the youth's flowery path across the 
 fragrant pasture land, the broader by-road of 
 school and college, the thronging avenues of 
 endeavor, and the king's highway trodden 
 by many feet. Then follows a quieter foot- 
 
THE MARCHING DAYS. n 
 
 path, leading down to a dark, deep river, on 
 the farther side of which gleam the lights 
 of home. So time glides into eternity. 
 
 On the day of his marriage, a man, now 
 aged, gave his young wife a watch, on the 
 inner case of which had been engraved the 
 familiar couplet, 
 
 "Taking the year together, my dear, 
 There isn't more night than day." 
 
 Tick-tock, tick-tock, the pendulum swings 
 backward and forward, and there is, so to 
 speak, an evening up of circumstances. After 
 long years, whoever looks back on the course 
 that has been traversed will notice how won- 
 derfully fair has been the average of the 
 lot. Though to some, or to all, there have 
 come occasional griefs and heartaches, there 
 have been continual mercies granted and 
 endless is the tale of daily joy. Most of us 
 with the Psalmist must ever exclaim "the 
 lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places. 
 I have a goodly heritage." 
 
 Though we live only one heart-beat at a 
 time, our ideals should flame before us, as the 
 stars in the sky. Contentment with our 
 
12 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 environment and satisfaction with ourselves 
 are very different states of mind. To rest 
 in supine indifference on a low plane is to 
 ally our natures to beings that creep and 
 crawl. Wings should be the aspiration of 
 the immortal spirit. To follow after a high 
 ideal is to live as the apostle did, whose 
 letters to the early disciples are still our man- 
 uals of daily practice and devotion. Having 
 done all, to stand, was the saintly rule of 
 Paul, but in order to do all there was a 
 pattern to be imitated. That pattern was 
 set us by our blessed Saviour in his simple, 
 unselfish and sinless life upon earth. 
 
 Imitating Jesus, how we learn to forget 
 the glamour of pride and put on the humility 
 of little children. Some there are so like 
 the Master in their daily lives that children 
 run to them, confident of a welcome, expec- 
 tant of a benediction. Some there are who 
 keep to the last day of life and to four- 
 score and beyond, the sweet docility and fear- 
 less trust of the child at the mother's knee. 
 Imitating Jesus, how careful we are to min- 
 ister to his little ones; how we seek our 
 Father in prayer, how we study the word 
 
THE MARCHING DAYS. 13 
 
 of God. Imitating Jesus, how we go out into 
 the wilderness to seek the little lost lamb and 
 bring it back into the shelter of the fold. 
 
 "Spring will follow, the spring of revival, 
 the spring of hope, the spring of vivid bloom 
 and promise." 
 
Midwinter 
 
 M 
 
 11 Spring will follow, the spring of revival, the 
 spring of hope, the spring of vivid bloom and 
 promise." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 MIDWINTER. 
 
 rHE days are at their shortest dur- 
 ing the holiday season which cul- 
 minates with the New Year. Jan- 
 uary first slips over the threshold, and we 
 signalize the advent of another twelve month 
 with joyful ringing of bells, firing cannon, 
 and exchange of friendly greetings, and then 
 we straightway find ourselves in the most 
 strenuous period of the annual round. So 
 much to do and so little daylight in which 
 to do it! But we have the long evenings 
 and the pleasant social gatherings, the charm 
 of the home circle around the lighted hearth, 
 and the feeling of being safely sheltered 
 when the storms rage outside. Winter is 
 not a season of unrelieved gloom. It is a 
 time of pressure and of much activity, of 
 
1 8 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 getting ready for the future too, as Nature 
 does. In her midwinter days, when the 
 fields are shorn and the trees are bare, and 
 the birds are flown, life is not gone. It is 
 merely for a moment hushed, and its outward 
 expression has in a measure ceased. In a 
 thousand subtle ways winter is always getting 
 ready for spring. 
 
 Following this analogy, we find that in 
 the sternest, most relentless and rigorous 
 period of the year, especially in our church 
 life, comes the most pronounced effort and 
 the greatest energy. Unlike Nature, it is not 
 voiceless, however, though whatever is best in 
 the spiritual realm is never obtrusive, and 
 never thrusts itself on the beholder's notice. 
 There is this about it, that meetings and 
 preachings and personal work are all value- 
 less unless accompanied by searchings of the 
 heart in the closet, by the continuance of 
 God's people in fervent prayer, and by con- 
 tinual study of the Word. "Not by might, 
 nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the 
 Lord." 
 
 In these white days of winter, when the 
 drifts lie deep on the meadows and the 
 
MIDWINTER. 19 
 
 streams are frozen, the little country prayer- 
 meetings are centers of spiritual power for 
 the church. *No suspension of life there ! No 
 iron hand of frost and cold on the warm 
 throbbing hearts that call upon God. The 
 little processions over the hills to prayer-meet- 
 ing, men carrying lanterns, women plodding 
 over snowy roads, are pledges of a renewal 
 of spring-time bounty for the church every- 
 where. So with the groups that gather in 
 the city chapels and parish houses, in the mid- 
 dle of the week to praise and pray. So long 
 as Christians thus assemble, in devout con- 
 templation, in hallowed song, and in con- 
 certed petition, making their requests known 
 unto God, no wintry desolation will ever 
 freeze the church. Spring will follow, the 
 spring of revival, the spring of hope, the 
 spring of vivid bloom and promise. All over 
 the Christian world, in the beginning of Jan- 
 uary, men and women are keeping a week of 
 prayer. 
 
 What are they praying for? Primarily 
 for the conversion of the world. We are 
 living in a period of intense conviction, and of 
 intense endeavor. We are realizing that 
 
20 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Satan's kingdom must fall, and the kingdom 
 of our Lord and Saviour triumph. Some of 
 us are doing what we can to help onward 
 the coming of that joyful day, when Christ 
 shall indeed have the kingdoms of this world 
 under his glorious sway, the heathen for his 
 inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the 
 earth for his possession. All of us can help 
 in this magnificent campaign, help by prayer, 
 letting the world's Week of Prayer be for 
 us the opening to more definite praying in 
 our own daily lives. 
 
 "More love to thee, O Christ, more love to thee!" 
 
 we cry, and as we feel the tides of love to 
 our Redeemer flowing over the waste places 
 of our souls, we presently learn that we love 
 his lost ones more. We are anxious to help 
 him seek for those who have gone astray. 
 Fast on our prayers hasten our gifts. It can- 
 not be that a Christian disciple can pray in 
 downright deep earnest, and then withhold 
 time, thought, silver, gold, anything from 
 the One who was wounded for our trans- 
 gressions and bruised for our iniquities. 
 Shall we not expect with confidence that the 
 
MIDWINTER. 21 
 
 coming year may bring us "new supplies of 
 grace," new assurance of our Saviour's pres- 
 ence, new desires to be of use in his work, 
 and new evidences of his love? The prayers 
 of the midwinter days should hallow all the 
 coming time. 
 
 "I don't know how many times I have 
 smiled at the futility of making good reso- 
 lutions at the New Year," said a woman, 
 opening a fresh diary, on the clean pages 
 of which she expected to write a record from 
 day to day. "Yet," she added, "I go on 
 doing it just the same." 
 
 "And do you not keep them?" said her 
 friend. 
 
 "Well, yes, for a little while, but the 
 novelty wears off and I slip back into the old 
 worn grooves. For example, I am very 
 impulsive and impetuous, and am apt to speak 
 hastily and with too much heat and vehe- 
 mence. I greatly admire poise and serenity 
 and a calm composed demeanor. So, when 
 I say 'A Happy New Year' to my family, 
 I am inwardly determined that I will do my 
 best to make it so. I dislike my tendency to 
 exaggeration and fussing, to pressing my own 
 
22 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 way on other people. I start in January try- 
 ing to imitate some very quiet and controlled 
 person, trying to be soft-voiced and lovely, 
 but before February comes, I forget all about 
 it. I am just my old boisterous, clamorous 
 self underneath, and my old, eager impa- 
 tient self outside." 
 
 "I am not sure," said the friend, "that 
 your resolves are in the line the Lord approves 
 of. When he makes a pansy, he does not 
 want it to be a chrysanthemum, and he does 
 not require the eagle to be a dove. Each 
 after its kind is his rule. He gave you the 
 swift, impulsive disposition, the readiness in 
 action, the rush and stir that belong to you, 
 as a personality. Of you, he asks the conse- 
 cration of what you have, not of what you 
 have not. Isn't there too much imitation on 
 our part of others, and maybe not enough 
 acceptance of ourselves as his workmanship? 
 I do think it right to make good resolutions, 
 but I think the better way is to ask for 
 
 ' 'The daily strength 
 To none that ask denied.' 
 
 Just to take each moment as it comes, a gift 
 from our dear Lord's hand, and to take each 
 
MIDWINTER. 23 
 
 sin and blunder and blemish as they come, and 
 beg his pardon, and then to go on, is the 
 wiser way. If we do resolve, should we not 
 do so with God's help ?" 
 
 The friend stopped talking. She had been 
 a learner in God's school, taught by the dis- 
 cipline of sorrow. The lady to whom she 
 spoke made a record in her new diary. It 
 
 was — U F has been a great help to me. 
 
 She brought me a message from the King. 
 I shall try, with his blessing, to serve him 
 well this year, day by day, being myself and 
 not another, and humbly trying to do his 
 will. 
 
 "Content to fill a little place 
 If he be glorified.' " 
 
 Some of us long in these first hours of the 
 year to do good, but our sphere is obscure and 
 our powers are limited. 
 
 Is there, therefore, nothing that we can do? 
 By no means. The little things at hand are 
 to be done by God's people as if they were 
 great things. In his esteem nothing is little, 
 nothing great. He demands only that his ser- 
 vants be found continually faithful. 
 
24 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 We may send good literature as we have 
 opportunity to those who have it not and 
 cannot procure it. Our papers that are 
 clean and whole, when they have been read 
 by the family, should be passed on to other 
 readers, to hospitals, army posts, and prisons. 
 If practicable, we may send a favorite peri- 
 odical to a missionary at home or abroad, 
 or to an invalid shut in from the bustling 
 world. By a trifling self-denial, we may sub- 
 scribe for an extra paper, or buy a book, 
 and send it to some one to whose thirsty soul 
 it will be as a cup of cold water in a desert 
 march. 
 
 If we cultivate plants, we may watch for 
 opportunities when a flower will carry com- 
 fort to some one in deep sorrow. 
 
 If we have a little time at our disposal, 
 we may relieve a burdened mother by caring 
 for her children while she, as a rare treat, 
 gets to church, either on the Sabbath, or 
 to a mid-week meeting. If we sing, we may 
 cheer an invalid by the sweetness of our songs. 
 I once knew a woman who for seventeen years 
 lay on her bed in a room over a cobbler's 
 shop, her one glimpse of the world outside 
 
MIDWINTER. 25 
 
 being from a window which commanded a 
 street corner. It was a very quiet street and 
 she saw very little, but it meant much to hen 
 On Sunday afternoons, a sweet young girl, 
 with a voice like a flute, used to go to this 
 cell where God's prisoner lay in captivity, 
 and she sang to her of heaven. Both are 
 there now, where the unending chorals of 
 the redeemed are lifted up to the praise of the 
 Lord, and there is no more sickness, nor 
 any heartache. 
 
 We may find some little ministry to the 
 old. Aged people are often neglected 
 through the thoughtlessness of busy younger 
 folk, whose intentions are kind, but whose 
 minds are preoccupied. They can hardly 
 crowd into the narrow compass of a short 
 winter's day all that they really ought to 
 accomplish, and they overlook the slowness 
 with which hours creep by when people, once 
 active, are laid aside through infirmity. Deaf- 
 ness is a great burden to the aged. No lovelier 
 ministry can be found than the commonplace 
 one of talking intelligibly and audibly to, not 
 shouting at, a deaf person, who longs to hear, 
 and is outside of everything simply because 
 
26 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 the ears are closed to most ordinary 
 sounds. 
 
 We may be eyes to the blind, as never 
 before. Simply to read to some one who 
 cannot read for herself, may be an errand 
 of love in this glad new year. 
 
 The chief thing is to be ready for any 
 little service the Lord appoints, and to do 
 it heartily as unto him. 
 
 Oh, for the sunny optimism that finds 
 everything good because God sends it. 
 
 "Some murmur when their sky is clear 
 
 And wholly bright to view, 
 If one small speck of dark appear 
 
 In their great heaven of blue. 
 And some with thankful love are filled 
 
 If but one streak of light, 
 One ray of God's good mercy gild 
 
 The darkness of their night." 
 
 To cultivate a habit of looking on the 
 bright side, to do away with the evil habit of 
 worry, to listen for the angelic harmonies, 
 and to do angel's work in this earth of ours, 
 will make a Happy New Year. 
 
Our Friends 
 
 " Paupers in friendship are more to be pitied 
 than those who have little earthly wealth." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 OUR FRIENDS. 
 
 TJff HEN the patriarch Job was 
 
 y y crushed under the successive blows 
 of terrible and sweeping calam- 
 ity, his three friends came to condole with 
 and comfort him. In this ancient drama 
 of misfortune no description is finer or 
 more eloquent than that of the friends hear- 
 ing of all the evil that had come upon the 
 patriarch, leaving each his own place, and 
 making an appointment to go together to 
 Job. 
 
 "And when they lifted up their eyes afar 
 off and knew him not, they lifted up their 
 voice and wept; and they rent every one his 
 mantle and sprinkled dust upon their heads 
 toward heaven. So they sat down with him 
 upon the ground seven days and seven nights 
 
3 o THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 and none spoke a word unto him, for they 
 saw that his grief was very great." 
 
 Mute companionship in sorrow, the sym- 
 pathy of the personal presence — from the far- 
 off days of Job until now, friendship has 
 found no better expression of fellow-feeling 
 than this. Until the three friends began to 
 talk and remonstrate and advise and com- 
 mend, they made no mistake. 
 
 As they sat in silence they were messengers 
 of consolation. After they began to talk they 
 blundered, and provoked from the suffering 
 Job the most exquisite irony of literature in 
 his retort, "Doubtless ye are the people, and 
 wisdom shall die with you !" 
 
 Our friends make up a very large part of 
 our lives. That is a poverty-stricken life, and 
 a pitifully narrow home, which has in it no 
 room for friendship. Not one of us can 
 afford to be independent of our kind. We 
 need and want friends, and in any event 
 which for the moment disturbs the daily rou- 
 tine, or lifts us to another than the daily 
 plane, we turn instinctively to our friends, for 
 their opinion, their approbation, or their 
 comradeship. Some by reason of individual 
 
OUR FRIENDS. 31 
 
 charm or magnetic manner, or graceful 
 speech, make friends more readily than 
 others. It is a great gift that of attaching 
 people easily, following upon a recognized 
 attractiveness that draws and never repels. 
 In business it assists a man to success. The 
 physician endowed with it is beloved by his 
 patients, and his praises are sung far and 
 wide. When the minister has this fine endow- 
 ment, he is sure of popularity. Consecrated, 
 no element of character carries with it more 
 of power and does more visible good than 
 this talent for affection which aids a man in 
 making and keeping friends. 
 
 You may be disposed to question it, but I 
 have no hesitation in declaring that one's 
 friends often know one very much more truly 
 and weigh one more justly than do one's rela- 
 tions. Kinsfolk — and the nearer the blood 
 tie, the truer this is — often have a precon- 
 ceived notion of a person who has grown up 
 under their eyes that is very far from being a 
 right notion. It is quite possible to be mis- 
 understood in one's own household, as one 
 cannot be in the world beyond one's doors. 
 Your relatives take for granted a certain line 
 
32 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 of conduct on your part and would be sur- 
 prised at any other. Of the motives that ac- 
 tuate you, the principles that guide you, the 
 rules that govern you, relatives are sometimes 
 profoundly ignorant, and to them all they 
 may be profoundly indifferent. This is not 
 invariably the case. Happily, there are fami- 
 lies of one heart and mind on all great ques- 
 tions, and of a swift comprehension and intui- 
 tive sympathy that may always be relied on 
 to bear any strain. In friendship, however, 
 especially in close and vital friendship, there 
 has been choice, the coming together of con- 
 genial people, and the gradual welding of a 
 bond that death itself, for the Christian, need 
 not break. 
 
 Job's three friends were anxious to be at 
 his side when he was grieved, shorn of wealth, 
 robbed of a great estate and bereft of his 
 children. There was the impulse of love to 
 go to him in the hour of sweeping disaster; 
 at least to share his hour of darkness. The 
 story is the most ancient in history. Yet it is 
 as modern as this morning. 
 
 When to any one among our circle of 
 friends there comes, here and now, a sorrow, 
 
OUR FRIENDS. 33 
 
 a shock, the suspense in a dear one's illness, 
 the bewilderment of loss, the pain of loneli- 
 ness, we do not stay away. We go to the 
 shadowed home and sit there and are com- 
 forters, in proportion as we suffer with our 
 friend, and halve his load by bearing it with 
 him. 
 
 A little while ago, a dear woman, whose 
 whole life had been an outgoing of sympathy 
 to those she loved, whose heart was a palace 
 with many doors, went suddenly home to 
 God. Her departure eclipsed the joy of a 
 very w T ide circle of friends who knew not how 
 to do without her cheery presence. In a let- 
 ter written about her, after her home-going, 
 occurred this expression : 
 
 "It was not singular that she could sympa- 
 thize so really with those who had trials, for 
 she had known so much sorrow herself, but 
 the marvel was the quickness of her sym- 
 pathy with those who were young and light- 
 hearted and hopeful." 
 
 I think there is a chord here which vibrates 
 to music. Here is unselfishness that forgets 
 its personal account, and, in the midst of its 
 own heartache, sends flowers to the wedding, 
 
34 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 a little note of cheer to a departing traveler, 
 felicitations on the birth of a child, a word 
 of appreciation when a neighbor's son has 
 taken a prize or an honor at college. This 
 peculiar form of lovely altruism makes a 
 friend most winsome. The friend who stands 
 on the wharf and waves good-by to the happy 
 group on shipboard, goes cheerfully back to 
 his work in the office and settles down to the 
 accustomed grind; the woman whose earthly 
 joy is over, and whose pleasures are in mem- 
 ory and not in anticipation, slips out of self- 
 absorption into the sweetness of the bride's 
 rose-colored day ; and the childless parent, the 
 one who lost his own lad in babyhood, re- 
 joices when another lad, who might have been 
 his, sets out finely on the road that leads to 
 usefulness and success. Every such unselfish 
 act adds to the sum of joy in the world, and 
 helps to lessen its friction and lighten the 
 weight of its burdens. 
 
 For you and me, here is a thought of some 
 importance. What are we worth to our 
 friends? Of how much use? Are we im- 
 pressing them by our sincerity, uplifting them 
 by our hope, sustaining them by our faith? 
 
OUR FRIENDS. 35 
 
 Reverently and gratefully we acknowledge 
 our indebtedness to dear friends whose min- 
 istrations enrich our lives, but, as friends our- 
 selves, how much are we doing to bless and 
 save others? 
 
 First, we are of most value to our friends 
 and associates when we are making no con- 
 scious effort, that is to say, that our simple 
 living, to the best and highest ends, our sim- 
 ple being what we ought in the daily round, 
 assists others without intention. It is like the 
 distinction between manner and manners. 
 The one is the revelation of the inner life, the 
 expression of the soul; it is character, per- 
 sonality. The other is more like dress that 
 may be assumed or laid off at will. One may 
 have careful manners, the result of training 
 and attention to etiquette, and have an un- 
 fortunate manner, showing lack of breeding 
 and an unhappy environment in childhood. 
 Manner is always involuntary. Manners are 
 often studied. Charm is the concrete result 
 of manner, or the reverse is true ; and so, fol- 
 lowing this analogy, we discern how we may 
 add sweetness and courage to those about us, 
 when we are least purposing to produce an 
 
3 6 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 effect of any kind. Or equally we may de- 
 press and injure when we do not mean to do 
 either, and so be foes instead of friends. 
 
 One day set apart for the service and 
 claims of friendship is more than most of us 
 can often spare, but a few minutes in every 
 day might well be devoted to making some 
 lonely or suffering one brighter or easier. A 
 purse full of gold may not be ours to bestow, 
 but who is too poor to give a golden thought? 
 If we are but full of desire, how the fruitage 
 of our lives will grow in those things which 
 love estimates as of more worth than houses 
 or lands. 
 
 Second, and this may come home to some 
 with peculiar force, we are useful to our 
 friends when we make direct efforts to de- 
 velop and influence them, especially when we 
 recognize their shortcomings and needs. 
 Here an almost unerring delicacy of percep- 
 tion is requisite. As a rule it is unsafe and 
 ungracious to tell a friend of his or her faults. 
 In certain relations, as of parents and chil- 
 dren, teachers and pupils, it is permissible 
 and expected, and can awaken no resentment, 
 but if a friend in gentlest candor ventures to 
 
OUR FRIENDS. 37 
 
 criticise or reprove another friend, the at- 
 mosphere is chilled. The spontaneity and 
 bloom vanish. Most people are sensitive to a 
 hair's breadth when one invades their amour 
 propre. So, we are not among our friends to 
 constitute ourselves censors, or to go about 
 with brusque plainness, mentioning what has 
 seemed to us amiss. 
 
 There is a more excellent way. It is found 
 whenever and wherever one lives so near 
 Christ that he or she is not afraid to bring 
 every small matter of daily intercourse to the 
 test of his approval. Then, when oppor- 
 tunity comes, as come it must, there is no re- 
 luctance in saying what one thinks and feels, 
 and no fear of wounding when one tries to 
 lead a friend to shape conduct by the Mas- 
 ter's standard. 
 
 Third, let us strive for a wide range of in- 
 terests in friendship. Catholicity in friend- 
 ship is to be desired. When we restrict our 
 friends to those of similar social conditions 
 and upbringing with ourselves, we are of 
 necessity limited in our comprehension of 
 humanity at large. Why must we have 
 among our friends only those who read the 
 
38 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 same books, attend the same church, hear the 
 same music, have the same round of duties 
 and pleasures, and generally fulfill the same 
 order of obligations — those whose groove is 
 like our own? In a certain sense our inti- 
 macies must be colored by this identification 
 of interests and pursuits, but there are circles 
 in friendship and degrees of affectionate con- 
 fidence, and of limitation comes dullness and 
 monotony. I see no reason why the maid in 
 the kitchen and the man who daily calls for 
 the grocer's order, and the expressman who 
 brings parcels, and the station agent from 
 whom one's commutation ticket is purchased, 
 should not each be a friend. 
 
 Underlying all our relations to friends, if 
 friendship is to be permanent, must be a true 
 and firm devotion to the best friend we can 
 have. Our Lord has called us friends, 
 therefore none who are his in the same bond 
 can be indifferent to us. Where shall we look 
 for his friends ? Where shall we not discover 
 them? In the Home for Old People, often 
 unhomelike, because of its inevitable infelici- 
 ties, we may sit down by some aged one from 
 whom joys and hopes have fallen like with- 
 
OUR FRIENDS. 39 
 
 cred leaves from a tree, and there will be the 
 common love to Christ, giving sunshine and 
 peace, and sending us forth strengthened. 
 On the journey where we are thrown with 
 strangers, on shipboard, on the train that 
 forges across the continent, and in the sani- 
 tarium, where we meet those who are search- 
 ing for renovation and health; in the house 
 of mourning and in the house of feasting, 
 among the learned and the illiterate, we may 
 meet Christ's friends and know them because 
 they wear his likeness and because they are 
 going home to him. 
 
 Paupers in friendship are more to be pitied 
 than those who have little earthly wealth. In 
 making ready for life, let it not be forgotten 
 that "the man that hath friends must show 
 himself friendly." The alphabet of earthly 
 success is in this habit and talent, and it takes 
 hold, too, upon immortality, if we cling to 
 that Friend who sticketh closer than a 
 brother. 
 
A Commonplace Saint 
 
 M 
 
 M She was a saint without dreaming it, for she 
 simpl j lived day by day without a thought of self . " 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 A COMMONPLACE SAINT 
 
 /HAVE been groping about lately 
 among the lives of the saints. I find 
 that in mediaeval days many of the 
 most saintly people revealed their character 
 and asserted their claim by a forgoing of 
 worldly comfort, and a scorn of luxury. In 
 rags, if not in dirt, they walked up and down 
 the earth; they did some kind and self-deny- 
 ing deeds, but their tempers were not always 
 gentle, nor was their demeanor marked by 
 self-control. Asceticism and fretfulness are 
 not invariably divorced, and no man or 
 woman was ever saintly simply through the 
 medium of external sacrifice. As a rule, the 
 old saints were deficient in common-sense, a 
 saving grace that when allied with mysticism 
 produces excellent results. 
 
44 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Thinking of the barefoot monks and veiled 
 nuns who thought saintliness was to be at- 
 tained by mortification of the flesh, my mind 
 was led along a backward path, until I re- 
 membered a commonplace woman whose 
 earthly experience was diversified by many 
 sorrows, but who held on her course bravely, 
 seeing him who was invisible. She was a 
 real saint. 
 
 It was not her Father's will that this child 
 of his love should ever have an easy time in 
 this mortal portion of her life. I have always 
 felt that for her the joys were laid up; that 
 when the hour of departure came she entered 
 into wealth and beauty, and charm and re- 
 pose, all in contrast with what she struggled 
 with in her days in this lower class-room. 
 The problems and tasks here were always 
 hard, but she met them undaunted, and with a 
 faith that knew no wavering. 
 
 To how many, many things she set her 
 capable and most efficient hand! She had a 
 large family, but she taught every one of her 
 children to read, and each of the little tribe 
 early learned by heart many chapters of the 
 Bible. The mother, busy over her sewing or 
 
A COMMONPLACE SAINT. 45 
 
 her cooking, would prop a book in front of 
 her and hear a lesson, or with her foot on the 
 baby's cradle, would explain what was puz- 
 zling to the older child who had the next day's 
 school work to do. Sometimes there were 
 boarders to increase the size of the family. 
 Sometimes the store, which was its main de- 
 pendence, was not doing very well, and the 
 clerk had to be dismissed. Then this busy 
 housemother would go at intervals to keep 
 the books, or wait on customers, and on 
 Saturday evenings the year round she was 
 found behind the counter. 
 
 I remember once hearing one of her sons 
 say, when the brood had grown and most of 
 them had taken flight from the nest, "My 
 mother is the best and bravest and brightest 
 woman I ever saw." 
 
 A young minister, not long out of the sem- 
 inary, had preached a sermon on the sisters at 
 Bethany, disparaging Martha, as I am sure 
 the Master never did. My old friend's son 
 listened with a whimsical expression of pro- 
 test on his face. As we walked home from 
 church he observed, "That young man never 
 had the advantage of an acquaintance with 
 
46 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 my mother. She has been a Martha all her 
 days — some women have to be — but she's 
 been a Mary too, sitting at Jesus' feet." 
 
 A commonplace saint! Are there not 
 many such going quietly about the work of 
 the kitchen and the parlor, themselves unseen 
 forces, making smooth the paths of others? 
 God recognizes their worth, and often gives 
 them to eat of the hidden manna. 
 
 From what springs is every-day religion 
 nourished so that it vitally affects and re- 
 veals life? How may you and I so dwell that 
 we unconsciously illustrate the beauty of holi- 
 ness? The question is a pertinent one, and 
 the emphasis must be put on the adverb, for 
 the instant one is conscious of effort, the value 
 of the example is lost and the picture is 
 blurred. To show forth our Lord, we must 
 actually abide where he does. Aye! there 
 must be something yet more intimate than 
 this. To the Christ lover 
 
 "Closer is he than breathing, 
 Nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 He must live in our souls, and we must live 
 in him. "As the branch cannot bear fruit of 
 itself, except it abide in the vine, no more 
 
A COMMONPLACE SAINT. 47 
 
 can ye, except ye abide in me." The person 
 who longs unutterably to be like Christ, and 
 to so live that the Christ temper will be in 
 him or her, will be often engaged in prayer; 
 there will never be the thing too small to 
 carry to the Saviour; never the thing too 
 great to consult him about, and the times for 
 prayer will not be set times merely; not the 
 two ends of the day, the beginning and the 
 close alone, but there will be little blessed 
 spaces all along the day, marked with a white 
 stone; there will be little visits of a moment 
 or a half hour when the heart will feel that 
 its Beloved is sustaining it; there will be the 
 sweetness that needs no words to translate, 
 the friendship that dares like the dearest dis- 
 ciple to lay its head on the Master's breast 
 and pillow its unrest and its fears and its sad- 
 ness there. And thus leaning, fears will fly 
 away, sadness will be changed into rapture, 
 and unrest will become repose and refresh- 
 ment. One who lives in intimacy with Christ 
 will show forth his goodness and win others 
 to him, because Christ in a human soul is 
 always potential. We are not saintly, we do 
 not invest our commonplace duties and our 
 
48 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 commonplace homes with beauty because we 
 are too far away from Christ. 
 
 We may be commonplace without being 
 saints. There is no special merit in that. Do 
 not let us make the blunder of supposing that 
 there is any particular grace in wearing old 
 clothes, or living in an ugly environment, or 
 in possessing brusque and repellent manners. 
 When we plume ourselves on any deficiency, 
 or are vain of any lack, we show plainly the 
 narrowness of our outlook, the short-sighted- 
 ness of our view-point. Plenty of people 
 never climb out of the dullness of most or- 
 dinary lives because they imagine there is vir- 
 tue in the fact of their narrowness. I once 
 heard a woman excuse herself for her dislike 
 to every variety of Christian work on the 
 score of her extreme devotion to her family. 
 "I have no time," she explained, "for mis- 
 sionary meetings and prayer-meetings. I 
 spend my whole life in making John and the 
 children comfortable. " Naturally the home 
 life of John and the children was in a barrel, 
 a roomy, clean, most luxurious sort of a bar- 
 rel, but only a barrel at the best. They had 
 pies and cakes and clean linen, and a spotless 
 
A COMMONPLACE SAINT. 49 
 
 house, and not one aim beyond being respect- 
 able, and not one impulse toward liberality, 
 and not one scintilla of knowledge about the 
 Lord's kingdom, nor a gleam of interest in 
 what was going on in the great world beyond 
 their doors. A commonplace mother who is 
 not a saint is in danger of degenerating into 
 the drudge of the home instead of ascending 
 its throne and becoming its queen. 
 
 One may be a drudge though servants wait 
 on her; if she have the drudge's temper, she 
 will not escape that fate. No household is 
 permanently benefited by a mother who 
 spends herself exclusively for its material ad- 
 vantage. A less careful, less successful 
 worker along the lower lines, if she have 
 spirituality and broad sympathies and a 
 wholesome intellectual and keen religious life, 
 will do more for her children than the other. 
 For the life is more than meat, and the body 
 than raiment. 
 
 The true saintliness takes note of the things 
 that are nearest. It is a great temptation to 
 us to fancy what we would do if we had 
 larger opportunity, more money, knew more 
 people, had a better education or were placed 
 
SO THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 anywhere except in obscurity, where nobody 
 can see us or hear us. Dear friends, the can- 
 dle that shines in the window in the little 
 cabin on the seashore or down the lane gives 
 as much light and is as beautiful as if it 
 glowed in a palace. In the latter it might be 
 less valuable. It is more necessary where it 
 shines in a poor place for wayfarers on a dark 
 road or in a fishing boat on a dark wave, to 
 catch its golden gleam. Our duty is to shine. 
 Where we are, God has set us. There let us 
 shine for him. 
 
 Often we fail to comprehend the greatness 
 of an opportunity that is very near at hand. 
 Our own brother may be grappling with the 
 adversary. Our own child may be slipping 
 down a road that leads to perdition. Our 
 next-door neighbor may be encumbered with 
 cares, some of which we might lift. Our 
 maid in the kitchen may be in sore need of a 
 helping and sympathetic hand. The blun- 
 ders that we commit through not realizing that 
 the people who surround us are in need, in 
 peril, in straits; that they are interesting and 
 worth cultivating and worth assisting, are be- 
 yond calculation. But our worst mistakes are 
 
A COMMONPLACE SAINT. 51 
 
 made when we look with aversion or con- 
 tempt on some one who has not our standards, 
 or who has not been trained as we have, and 
 refuse to be neighborly and loving and gentle 
 because we do not live on just the same plane. 
 How mean and ignoble and unchristian are 
 sentiments of contempt toward any who may 
 come within our ken, whatever their color, 
 race or condition. Those for whom Christ 
 died are not those whom Christ's disciples can 
 scorn. 
 
 Good people are sometimes so fearful that 
 they may be suspected of Pharisaism that they 
 do not avow their doctrine of Christ-living as 
 fearlessly as otherwise they might. Why 
 should any seek to hide the fact that for him 
 piety is as much the end of endeavor as learn- 
 ing, or renown, or riches is the goal of an- 
 other. The commonplace saint who gave me 
 the text of this talk, as I thought of her gentle 
 and fruitful life, made it very clear to all who 
 knew her that love to God was the first thing 
 in her life. She was brave in physical suf- 
 fering, cheerful in untoward circumstances, 
 ready with alms giving, faithful to every ob- 
 ligation, because back of everything was a 
 
52 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 strong indwelling motive, love to God. That 
 made love to the neighbor easy. And she was 
 a saint without dreaming it, for she simply 
 lived day by day without a thought of self. 
 She spoke often of Jesus, often of his good- 
 ness and the wonderful things in his word, 
 and never once shrunk from such speech, lest 
 some one should sneeringly accuse her of over- 
 pietism. 
 
 One of the blissful features of my friend's 
 character was her readiness to be pleased with 
 little things, and to see the fun in the daily 
 course of the home. Some people are born 
 without the blessed insight which separates 
 fun from the happenings of the hour, as the 
 cream rises to the top of the milk. I am 
 sorry for those who have no innate sense of 
 humor. Such a sense is a great help. To 
 appreciate fun, to sweeten all bitterness with 
 mirth, to brighten as well as to benefit the 
 lives of others, is to command our Christi- 
 anity in a very saintly fashion. That is a 
 flawed ideal which would make every-day re- 
 ligion somber, cheerless, reproachful, grave, 
 a thing from which children run away. The 
 twentieth-century disciple should be the hap- 
 
A COMMONPLACE SAINT. 53 
 
 piest being on earth, a person so radiant that 
 out of the cold, dark, cheerless world every 
 one will hasten to him for warmth and light. 
 If we are to be saints most of us must find 
 the sphere of our efforts in very homely 
 places. In the school-room where we study 
 or teach, in the shop where we buy or sell, in 
 the house where we sit at meals, on Monday 
 as on Sunday, on the street as in pew or pul- 
 pit, in the common ruts where we daily walk, 
 we may be missionaries of Jesus Christ, if wc 
 spend saintly lives in his service. 
 
The Thrift of Wise Spending 
 
 " Our economy should not lose sight of per- 
 manence, and character-building should be of 
 greater account in our sight than present ease or 
 present prosperity." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE THRIFT OF WISE 
 SPENDING. 
 
 rHE desire to save for one's children is 
 among the most natural and praise- 
 worthy of parental instincts. All 
 fathers and mothers who wish to see their 
 houses built on something firmer than mere 
 shifting sand, try as they can, at what cost of 
 labor and self-denial they care not, to make 
 some provision for the rainy day. That day 
 may come at any moment, come with sudden 
 surprise or with specific warning, come with 
 a business reverse, a financial crisis in the 
 community, a long illness or the loss of the 
 bread-winner. It is the part of discretion to 
 be, to some extent, fortified against whatever 
 it may bring. 
 
 Unfortunately, they who save too stead- 
 ily and persistently sometimes overlook 
 
58 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 the fact that frugality has more than one 
 aspect, that economy has more than one 
 phase. 
 
 A thrift of wise spending is as essential to 
 the excellent and altogether successful bring- 
 ing up of children as the reverse, a painstak- 
 ing economy of means and money, can possi- 
 bly be. 
 
 For example: In some families there is 
 not one penny expended in the course of any 
 twelve months for a supply of good reading 
 in the household. Books slip into the house 
 by the back door. Friends occasionally 
 bestow them as birthday or holiday gifts. 
 Occasionally a guest leaves a book that he or 
 she has brought and does not wish to take 
 away. The daughter borrows a volume or 
 two from a neighbor. The son picks up a 
 newspaper abandoned in a public conveyance. 
 The whole intelligence of the daily or 
 weekly paper, in other words, the whole 
 current history of the world in this won- 
 derful age, comes to some people, not 
 especially poor, through the gleaning after 
 other people who drop their papers in cars 
 
THRIFT OF WISE SPENDING. 59 
 
 and boats when they have finished reading 
 them. 
 
 This is mistake number one. In every 
 household lifted above want there should be 
 connection with the living, moving, breathing 
 world of men, through the medium of the 
 newspaper. Nor is this enough. As the 
 spiritual nature needs feeding and strengthen- 
 ing, there should be as well a religious paper, 
 coming with its inspiration of hope and faith, 
 its love of Christ and of humanity, into the 
 sanctuary of the home, read by parents, read 
 by children, discussed at the fireside, and 
 passed on to other hands when all are done 
 with it. 
 
 A thrift of wise spending, too, dictates an 
 annual subscription to a good library, if no 
 free library be near; or, instead, the discreet 
 and carefully considered purchase from time 
 to time of good books for the household. 
 Singularly, people who are most generous in 
 buying flour and meat and furniture and fuel 
 and raiment, are often niggardly when the 
 question is one of buying books. Even 
 school-books seem to them inexcusably expen- 
 
60 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 sive, and books of reference, of historical 
 value, of pure literature, are regarded as 
 luxuries for the rich or the lavish, not necessi- 
 ties in every refined and cultured home. Yet 
 books there ought to be in every house where 
 there are children, as indispensable in their 
 mental growth as the food they eat at the 
 table, and as much considered among the 
 family requisites as the shoes they wear on 
 the daily road to school or play. The young 
 people who live where books are a part of 
 what they daily see and daily hear, absorb 
 culture of the best kind with every breath they 
 draw. 
 
 I have been reading to-day a little book, 
 a wife's tender tribute to a very noble hus- 
 band. Mr. Edward Perkins Clark, a dis- 
 tinguished journalist, passed away, to the 
 grief and loss of many friends, a year ago at 
 his home in Brooklyn. Among other things 
 more or less suggestive, Mrs. Clark mentions 
 her husband's habit of discussing matters at 
 home with perfect fairness and candor. She 
 says, "In his home during the constant discus- 
 sions in progress there, chiefly upon social and 
 political subjects, he never failed to admit to 
 
THRIFT OF WISE SPENDING. 61 
 
 every argument of the opposition in full 
 weight. 
 
 "The training in debating which every 
 member of his family received during these in- 
 cessant, always earnest, but on his part always 
 dispassionate discussions, is gratefully ac- 
 knowledged by them as the chief influence for 
 such success as they may ever have in logical 
 thinking." 
 
 I have quoted this extract because too many 
 of us inevitably lose self-control and grow 
 heated and exasperated whenever we engage 
 in argument, ceasing to approach the subject 
 in hand with calmness and equanimity, and 
 because, also, too many of us never take the 
 least trouble to argue about or even mention 
 themes of grave concern with the young peo- 
 ple in our households. One reason why good 
 talkers are few, and vocabularies meager; 
 why conversation as a game of give and take 
 in fairness and freedom is on the decline, is 
 because the men and women who know, who 
 feel, who can express knowledge and feeling 
 tersely and forcibly, do not trouble them- 
 selves to do so in the home arena. There is 
 an outflowing of personality that is always a 
 
62 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 thrifty form of wise spending for the good of 
 others. 
 
 Hospitality flourishes best in new countries. 
 As we increase in luxury and have more mod- 
 ern conveniences around us, we cease to throw 
 wide our doors that the friend and the 
 stranger may come in. Once every home had 
 its guest chamber. Hospitality is of great 
 antiquity. Abraham hastened to welcome 
 strangers, and thus entertained angels. The 
 Shunamite woman fitted up the prophet's 
 chamber with the requisites still covering all 
 essentials — a bed, a stove, and a candlestick. 
 We do not need lace quilts and pillow slips, 
 nor elaborate furnishings, that we may have a 
 guest room, but in our present scheme of life 
 and our crowded quarters we have not enough 
 rooms for the family, and so there is literally 
 no spare room for a visitor. Nevertheless by 
 some contrivance, some good planning, some 
 self-denial on the part of the children, guests 
 may be sheltered over-night in most homes, at 
 least occasionally, and they may always be 
 made free at our tables if we do not try to 
 serve them too finely and are willing just to 
 let them share what we have ourselves. An 
 
THRIFT OF WISE SPENDING. 63 
 
 extra fork and spoon, cup and plate, and a 
 loving and cordial welcome, spontaneous and 
 full of cheer, are sufficient in houses where 
 reality is as important as display. 
 
 "You are just in time for dinner with the 
 children and me," says the lady of the house 
 — I like that phrase — to the guest who has 
 happened in without previous notice. And 
 she sets before him what she has, pot-luck. It 
 may be cold meat and potatoes, or bread and 
 cheese, a stew, a hash, what does it matter? 
 He is introduced into the home intimacy in 
 the sharing of loaf and cup. As for the chil- 
 dren, they receive impressions from the pleas- 
 ant talk, from the manners of the visitor. 
 They get another view-point, a breath from 
 the outside world blows through their home. 
 The bondage of routine is a trifle less rigid. 
 One may observe the difference in the bearing 
 and speech of children in homes where hospi- 
 tality is common, they are more in touch with 
 people, less stiff, less shy, less reserved than 
 those who never see any except the home folk. 
 In the days to come when boy and girl are 
 thrown out into the world, pushed from the 
 home nest, when they enter on the business 
 
64 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 battlefield with its hurrying competitions they 
 will win or lose largely through their early 
 preparation. A fine manner, genial, self-for- 
 getting and full of charm, is an invaluable 
 preparation for success in professional or 
 business spheres. For this reason, were there 
 no others, it would be well for many a home 
 to widen its scope, and oftener than it does, 
 take in something new from the outside. 
 Ministers' homes are, as a rule, open to many 
 visiting friends and strangers, and though the 
 parsonage is not burdened with worldly 
 wealth, and the slender purse is sometimes 
 sadly strained, the children reap the advan- 
 tage of the interesting and cheering coming 
 and going of those whom the minister enter- 
 tains. Here is facility in adapting means to 
 ends, here the grace that puts aside selfish 
 ease, here the cordiality which makes room 
 for others in the heart as in the house, and 
 the children reap the profit of it all in after 
 years. 
 
 The best investment a man can make is not 
 in land nor in stocks, in mines, nor in enter- 
 prises of any speculative or even real value, as 
 men rate values. It is the investment he 
 
THRIFT OF WISE SPENDING. 6$ 
 
 makes in those who shall follow him and carry 
 on his work when his hands are folded and his 
 tasks are all fulfilled. To educate children 
 well, in such symmetry, in such thoroughness, 
 that they shall grow into rounded men and 
 women, is to serve the present age and insure 
 service for the years of many succeeding lives. 
 For indeed, education, so to speak, runs in 
 families. The college graduate desires that 
 his children shall go to college. On the rolls 
 of the universities the same names reappear 
 from father to son, and, though women's col- 
 leges are as yet comparatively new, one reads 
 there names going down from mother to 
 daughter. The educated alone appreciate the 
 gentleness and the breadth born of a liberal 
 education. 
 
 In our country, every one, however scanty 
 his means and narrow his circumstances, may 
 secure for his sons and daughters a good edu- 
 cation in our free schools, if he will permit 
 them to remain there until the prescribed 
 course is finished. It is, however, a period of 
 specialization, and there are those who wish 
 and need more enlarged opportunities than the 
 free schools can give. I am not urging that 
 
66 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 against their will and simply to pass their 
 time away, reluctant and thankless pupils 
 should be kept in school. This would be 
 folly, and a waste of time. But granting am- 
 bition, ability, conscience and desire, children 
 who long for education as an equipment for 
 life should not be denied it, and though land 
 is sold, or carpets are threadbare, or tables 
 meagerly spread, money should be spent that 
 the due advantages may be given. 
 
 On every mission field, in every army corps, 
 on every hospital staff, almost everywhere in 
 places of prominence and usefulness known to 
 men, we find the children, not of wealth, but 
 of poverty, who having helped themselves, as 
 their parents have helped them, have climbed 
 to the top. Here is a thrift of wise spending 
 that some hesitating parent, wondering 
 whether it is right to let the son in his twenties 
 go on with educational work, when paying 
 business beckons with a hope of immediate 
 profit, may ponder seriously. The shop, the 
 bank, the counting-room, will offer the lad 
 wages at once. The profession has nothing 
 to offer for strenuous years to come. Yet, let 
 the boy choose. There is that scattereth that 
 
THRIFT OF WISE SPENDING. 67 
 
 it may increase. There is that withholdeth, 
 and it tendeth at last to want and penury. 
 
 Whether we live, we live unto the Lord, 
 whether we die, we die unto the Lord. All 
 earthly life takes hold on heaven. We are 
 not sowing seed for time that is transient, but 
 for eternity that endures. Therefore our 
 economy should not lose sight of permanence, 
 and character building should be of greater 
 account in our sight than present ease, or pres- 
 ent prosperity. Looking onward, looking up- 
 ward, let us spend thriftily as stewards of a 
 divine owner. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 A r A LENT FOR LOVING. 
 
 JT) RILLIANT, clever, accomplished, 
 
 JL) witty, learned and profound women 
 are plenty in these days of widely dif- 
 fused education and incomparable social op- 
 portunity. But there is still an old-fashioned 
 type of woman who is dowered with none of 
 those characteristics, who is not quick at rep- 
 artee, whose school-room culture was, on the 
 whole, superficial, and who is not remarkable 
 for her beauty, yet to whom belongs a dis- 
 tinct charm. This sort of woman may have few 
 showy talents, but she has in perfection one 
 that is of purest gold and rings true. She has a 
 talent for loving. Her sunny nature makes 
 her dear ones happy, her gentleness is as a 
 shield for them against sharp arrows of dis- 
 appointment or rebuffs in the world's contests 
 
72 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 and her tenderness enfolds her husband, chil- 
 dren, or nearest of kin, until home seems a 
 real heavenly place. Often her talent for 
 loving widens so that she has sympathy for 
 neighbors and acquaintances in their joys and 
 sorrows, so that old people turn to her with 
 confidence; in their increasing loneliness find- 
 ing in her support and strength; so that the 
 poor understand that she will give them what 
 is more than money, and more than food and 
 raiment — namely, a sister's heart and a sis- 
 ter's helping hand. 
 
 This dear woman with a genius for kind- 
 ness, multiplies her one talent until it becomes 
 ten talents. To her home comes the mother- 
 less boy in his hour of temptation, sits down 
 beside her, confides in her wisdom, and is in- 
 sensibly lifted into a purer air. The people in 
 her church who have been drifting apart, 
 drifting perilously close to the lee-shore of 
 apathy, or of discontent, or of a creeping fog 
 of bitterness meet in her parlor and go forth 
 in amity. She never seems to try, but she 
 brings out the best that is in her friends, and 
 the worst retreats and hides itself from view. 
 
A TALENT FOR LOVING. 73 
 
 The hateful, the mean, the malicious, cannot 
 flourish in her neighborhood. 
 
 Possibly the lady of whom I am thinking 
 is the possessor of abundant means. Possibly 
 she is very poor. It does not make much dif- 
 ference. Wealth and poverty are accidents 
 of circumstances, the enduring things lie 
 deeper and are rooted in the soul; they are 
 independent of mere externals. The woman 
 whose wonderful witch-hazel wand discovers 
 so much that is beautiful in her friends may 
 live in an ample house or in an attic. Where 
 she dwells does not affect the situation. That 
 depends on herself. 
 
 One such woman I knew years ago. She 
 was a tailoress by trade, and, in days that 
 were simpler than these, she went from house 
 to house plying scissors, needles, and thread. 
 We looked forward to her cheery coming for 
 weeks, and, finally, counted the days till the 
 eventful morning arrived. I can see her now, 
 erect, slender, trim, with merry black eyes and 
 a pleasant smile; with quick birdlike move- 
 ments, and a snappy crispness of speech. 
 She always saw that the discarded garment 
 
74 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 which had looked so hopeless could be trans- 
 formed into an elegant coat for a child. She 
 thought it worth while to turn the more than 
 half-worn dress and manage, by sheer pluck 
 and audacity of contrivance, to get for it a 
 new lease of usefulness. She had an amazing 
 faculty for seizing on the best of things and 
 for minimizing discouragements. Going 
 from village to village and from town to 
 town, she told good news or, if there were 
 bad news, her unconquered optimism rain- 
 bowed it with a promise of swift and sure im- 
 provement. 
 
 From youth to old age this indomitable 
 spirit kept its unwavering courage and its 
 dauntless faith. Every door that opened to 
 her did so gladly. Every time she said 
 good-by and went trudging home with her 
 black satchel and her black poke-bonnet and 
 her rolled-up umbrella she left regret behind 
 her. She was one of those rare women who 
 are popular without effort, and are a blessing 
 wherever they go. But she never could save 
 a penny, so many depended upon her for 
 bread, or schooling, or temporary care, and 
 if God had not stooped to take her softly to 
 
A TALENT FOR LOVING. 75 
 
 himself at the end of one of her common 
 working days, she must have spent her last 
 years in an old ladies' home. 
 
 Another friend, with a talent for loving 
 equal to that of the little tailoress, was her 
 life long lifted above the ranks of the toilers. 
 She never even afar off suspected the grinding 
 wretchedness of seldom having quite enough 
 to pay one's way. A childhood of luxury, a 
 girlhood of enchantment, a wedded life of ab- 
 solute satisfaction were hers, and her environ- 
 ment always suited her; she was the queen of 
 a large and stately home, where reverence 
 and affection were her handmaids. She, too, 
 had, above every other talent, that of draw- 
 ing people to her and making men pleased 
 and contented. Never was she too busy to re- 
 ceive her friends, and never too pre-occupied 
 to give them a whole attention. Her friends 
 ranged from great scholars, and men and 
 women high in the ranks of the conspicuous 
 and famous, to the lowly and obscure, to the 
 laundress with the crippled husband, and the 
 lad who sold newspapers and blacked boots. 
 In a hundred little thoughtful ways she made 
 the world brighter and by nameless unnoted 
 
76 THE DAILY PATHWAY, 
 
 courtesies smoothed the paths of her com- 
 rades on the road. 
 
 We care a great deal for those shining 
 qualities which give so much attractiveness to 
 manner, but after all, this special ability to 
 take a genuine interest in others, our brothers 
 and sisters, and this unselfish solicitude to 
 serve them, is the finer acquisition. A man 
 once said to me of his wife with whom he 
 had taken a midwinter journey, when the 
 train had been snowbound, provisions had 
 given out, and everything had been most de- 
 pressing: "Mary was the life of the party. 
 We did not know a passenger when we 
 started. We knew every man, woman, and 
 child on board before our blockade was over. 
 She was gay, resourceful, amusing ; she helped 
 everybody; she knew how to make the dull 
 hours slip away. I tell you I felt very proud 
 of Mary." He had reason for pride. She 
 had not considered herself. She had 
 given of her own blithe good humor and 
 brave good cheer to make that cold, impa- 
 tient and half-famished company of storm- 
 stayed people reasonable, hopeful, and serene. 
 
 I do not so highly prize as some the diploma 
 
A TALENT FOR LOVING. 77 
 
 with the broad seal of a great institu- 
 tion. Such certificates are useful attestations 
 of the fidelity with which young women have 
 studied and striven, but they are of less value 
 than the document, angel-recorded, which an 
 illiterate woman sometimes earns, and on 
 which our Lord has written, "She hath done 
 what she could." 
 
 The late Alice Freeman Palmer, who did 
 so much for womanly enlargement and educa- 
 tion, and whose sudden death in Paris one 
 December day made us all bereft, was noted 
 for her magnetic sympathy and the catholicity 
 of her friendliness. She was the peer of 
 many learned men. Academic honors clus- 
 tered about her name. Her career was one of 
 ministry and blessing, and one of the lovely 
 things about her was that she remembered so 
 affectionately and so individually all her old 
 students. The Wellesley girls who were at 
 college when she was president knew that 
 they might count upon her devotion, her wis- 
 dom, and her personal love to the last bit of 
 her strength and the last moment of her time. 
 
 Far less widely known, dear to a much less 
 extended circle, were two women — one in the 
 
78 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Presbyterian Home Mission work, one in the 
 Reformed Church, in its foreign work, who, 
 in 1902, were called home. Mrs. Pierson and 
 Mrs. Gushing both occupied desks in an office, 
 both knew very well the work of their re- 
 spective boards, and both had large hearts, 
 winsome manners, and deep consecration to 
 the Master. Of each it could be said with 
 most entire truth, "She had a genius for lov- 
 ing." That pure flame of love made the daily 
 work of each a radiant joy, and caused each to 
 diffuse and dispense warmth about her as she 
 did her work. 
 
 Another such woman, Mrs. Kate Brownlee 
 Horton, long identified with the Home Mis- 
 sion work of the Reformed Church, was 
 called home on the day before Christmas, 
 1903. She was a woman of unique strength 
 and poise, of deep sympathies, of immense 
 power over men and women. But the won- 
 derful thing about her was her amazing 
 faculty of loving with Christ-like love, hun- 
 dreds in States situated East, West, North 
 and South. People in frontier parsonages, 
 in the mountains of the South, in the Indian 
 settlements were grief-stricken when she went 
 
A TALENT FOR LOVING. 79 
 
 from us all. She broke her alabaster box of 
 precious ointment literally on the altar of her 
 love to Jesus and his disciples. 
 
 My heart turns back a few summers ago, 
 to watch again for a word from the hill coun- 
 try of Virginia, whence suddenly Lucy Ran- 
 dolph Fleming was called to the presence of 
 the King. Slight, fragile, intense, gifted be- 
 yond most women, a minister's wife with the 
 abundant cares of the parish on her hands, 
 lovely as daughter, sister, wife, mother, and 
 friend, she left the world poorer for me and 
 for many. On her tombstone in the high- 
 lands is the one word "Faithful." It is 
 enough. Lucy had many talents, but her fin- 
 est talent of all was the talent for loving. 
 
 What interferes with us, that more of our 
 Christian life is not marked by this efflores- 
 cence of abundant love? If we pattern our 
 daily lives by that of our Master we shall not 
 only, as he did, go about doing good, but we 
 shall make those whom we meet aware of his 
 divinely affluent spirit of compassion and ten- 
 derness. 
 
 How may we receive in fullest measure this 
 gracious endowment? The chief obstacle is 
 
80 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 absorption in things earthly and material. 
 The medium through which the sweetness of 
 the Christ-life shall be brought into ours is 
 communion with him. Because we do not 
 go to him for new supplies of grace our spirit- 
 ual natures are dwarfed and poor. We have 
 naught to bestow because we have not sought 
 gifts from Jesus Christ in prayer. The moun- 
 tain stream that flows in crystal clearness 
 through the pasture lands has its spring far 
 up in the hills. If we are to refresh those we 
 love we must ourselves be refreshed by him 
 who is all love. 
 
 If I have seemed in this simple talk be- 
 tween times to dwell most upon the oppor- 
 tunities and talents of women, it is not that 
 I fancy they have a monopoly of the exquisite 
 talent for friendship. A man's intensity of 
 pity, of affection, or of unselfishness is as po- 
 tential and beneficent as that of any woman. 
 Fathers are not less devoted than mothers. 
 Brothers are as self-forgetful as sisters. Hus- 
 bands are not surpassed in unswerving tender- 
 ness by wives. The pastor, with his never- 
 ceasing urgency of toil, in his study, by sick 
 beds, in homes of bereavement, in ministries 
 
A TALENT FOR LOVING. 81 
 
 to the afflicted, and in multiform activities, 
 winningly exemplifies this talent for loving 
 much and giving much — the true altruism. 
 
 On stormy and on sunny days, too, I ob- 
 serve the doctor's carriage going down the 
 street. I know with what wistfulness of en- 
 treaty eyes meet his, with what agony of de- 
 sire hands clasp his, as he stands by the couch 
 of the fevered patient, or prescribes for the 
 beloved child. How restrained, how wise, 
 how thoughtful, how generous is this man's 
 loving life, giving alone a service for which 
 money alone can never pay, and entering into 
 households, here, there, everywhere, as auto- 
 crat, as helper, as closest friend ! 
 
 Certain dumb souls have a great talent for 
 loving-kindness. They are not eloquent in 
 speech. They cannot express all they feel, 
 but their actions speak in their behalf. Of 
 such may be the engineer who dies at his post, 
 but saves the train ; the captain, brief and per- 
 emptory in words and tones, but, fearless and 
 tireless, standing on the bridge through the 
 long tempest, while the great steamer trusts 
 itself with its freight of voyagers to his vigi- 
 lant care. 
 
82 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Of the talent for loving, it may safely be 
 said that it is never a talent for indolent 
 languor or disgraceful inertia. The loving 
 are the giving, in every land, in every age. 
 James Chalmers, dying, after a lifetime of 
 service in New Guinea, at the hands of the 
 cannibal islanders, is a beautiful example of 
 the love that counted no cost too great if the 
 Master might be served. All true love is, in 
 some degree, sacrificial, and offers itself upon 
 the altar a living flame. The love that 
 merely absorbs homage, that demands and ex- 
 acts and refuses to give is not true Christ-love, 
 nor does it have aught of heaven in its es- 
 sence. Our Lord surrendered his life upon 
 the cross for us, and as he loved us, so ought 
 we to love one another. 
 
Keeping One' 's Word 
 
 Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
 As well as want of heart." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 KEEPING ONE'S WORD. 
 
 ^ / ^HE little dressmaker came home late 
 £ one evening, to find her mother anx- 
 iously keeping her supper hot. It 
 was spring, and showery. Amy had hurried 
 off in the morning without overshoes and um- 
 brella, in brilliant sunshine. She had re- 
 turned in a drenching downpour that swept 
 the streets like a cataract, and wet through 
 her thin jacket till it clung to her like another 
 skin. 
 
 "The first thing to do, dear," said Mrs. 
 Kirtchavel, "is to put on dry clothing. I do 
 hope you won't take cold. Here, swallow a 
 cup of tea before you stir a step, this will 
 warm you. Why, child, you are all ashiver." 
 Amy drank the tea and made haste to ex- 
 change her dripping garments for others that 
 
86 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 were dry. She ate her supper with relish; 
 from choice her mother had waited, and kept 
 her company as she did so. There was a bit 
 of broiled ham, and around it were crisp fried 
 potatoes, and Mrs. Kirtchavel had made toast 
 delicately browned. Simple as it was, the 
 meal was delicious. 
 
 "My dear little girl," the mother said, as 
 she made Amy rest in the big rocking-chair, 
 and herself cleared away the dishes. Amy 
 was tired after her long day's work. 
 
 "Did Mrs. Sutton pay you?" asked Mrs. 
 Kirtchavel. 
 
 "Not altogether. She gave me five dol- 
 lars, and told me to call for the rest on Satur- 
 day. That will be in time to help us out with 
 the rent, mother." 
 
 "Yes, if Mrs. Sutton keeps her word." 
 
 The mother's tone implied a doubt. 
 
 "She has plenty of money," said Amy. "I 
 don't see why she pays me in driblets. The 
 house is beautiful. I wish you could see it. 
 One's feet sink into the rugs and slide on the 
 polished floors. The table is rich with cut 
 glass, and china, and silver. Miss Charlotte 
 and Miss Mary have so many dresses they 
 
KEEPING ONES WORD. 87 
 
 don't know what to do with them, and they 
 never stop to think what they spend." 
 
 "Yet, Amy, they never seem to be ready to 
 settle your little bill when it is due. Well, 
 we'll be hopeful that Mrs. Sutton won't for- 
 get about it Saturday. Here are some letters, 
 dear." 
 
 As Amy opened the first, her countenance 
 fell. The expression was literally descriptive. 
 The light went out of her eyes. Gloom set- 
 tled on her brow. 
 
 "Oh, mother," she exclaimed. "Listen to 
 this. 
 
 " 'Dear Miss Kirtchavel: 
 
 " 'Mamma wishes me to explain to you our 
 very great regret that we must cancel the en- 
 gagement we have made with you to sew for 
 us next month. We are going abroad for the 
 season, a very suddenly arranged trip, and 
 are closing our house for the summer months. 
 As we shall be constantly going about we 
 shall not require anything but our old clothes, 
 and so, the four weeks which we had planned 
 to devote to new ones will be left out of our 
 year, and you will not be needed. You have 
 
88 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 so many customers and are so much in de- 
 mand, that we are sure this will not be a se- 
 rious inconvenience to you, and mamma de- 
 sires me to say that she is sorry she did not 
 know of the proposed jaunt sooner. 
 " 'Truly yours, 
 
 " 'Lillian Fairlie.' " 
 
 Mrs. Kirtchavel's face was as blank as 
 Amy's. The four weeks at Mrs. Fairlie's 
 were a matter of anticipation to the little 
 household of two, for more reasons than Mrs. 
 Fairlie dreamed. The work in that house was 
 peculiarly pleasant; it was liberally paid for 
 and payment was prompt. In Mrs. Kirtcha- 
 vel's exchequer, funds at the moment were 
 low as the sands in an expiring hour glass. 
 Long illness of an immediate and helpless 
 relative had depleted their resources, and as 
 the poor are generous to their kith and kin, 
 neither Amy nor her mother had complained. 
 They had, however, been counting on the Sut- 
 ton engagement to replenish the lean purse. 
 The worst of it was, that the season was late, 
 and Amy, expecting to go to the Fairlies', had 
 turned away other applicants whom she could 
 
KEEPING ONE'S WORD. 89 
 
 not now hope to secure. Mother and daugh- 
 ter sought their pillows with heavy hearts and 
 Amy cried herself to sleep in the dark. Next 
 morning found her braver, and she sallied 
 forth to repair the misfortune of this disap- 
 pointment as best she could, but was not 
 very successful. On Saturday, when she 
 called at Mrs. Sutton's, she found no one 
 at home. 
 
 "Was there a note or message left for 
 me?" she asked. 
 
 "No, Miss," said the maid, who suspected 
 the state of the case. She added, "I can give 
 you the name of the hotel where they be stop- 
 ping at Atlantic City." 
 
 "No, thank you," said Amy. "I won't 
 write. You say they'll be at home in ten 
 days?" 
 
 "Yes, Miss," said the maid, beaming with 
 sympathy. Below stairs she confided to the 
 cook her opinion of "foine ladies that does 
 be kapin' back poor folks' earnings. We 
 wouldn't stand it," she said, and Bridget 
 agreed with her. 
 
 The Fairlies, on their part, crossed the 
 ocean with light hearts and untroubled con- 
 
90 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 sciences. It did not once occur to them that 
 they had behaved unjustly to a woman who 
 could not help herself or do without the work 
 they had pledged her. Of the perplexities, 
 embarrassments and real suffering their fail- 
 ure to carry out their contract had caused, 
 they had not the slightest suspicion. 
 
 The Suttons were destined to have their 
 eyes opened, for Amy Kirtchavel and her 
 mother were members of the same church 
 with themselves. 
 
 Shortly after their return from Atlantic 
 City, their minister was calling on them, and 
 he casually observed, as he was leaving their 
 home: 
 
 "I wish, if you can manage it, that some of 
 you, or one of you, would be so very good as 
 to look in on the Kirtchavels. Amy works so 
 hard that she gets run down, and I am sorry 
 that she has among her rich patrons a few 
 who are thoughtless about paying her punctu- 
 ally, or keeping their engagements. Her 
 mother has been ill with pleurisy. They 
 really need a little sunshine, and you girls can 
 give it." 
 
 The good man beamed on them with 
 
KEEPING ONE'S WORD. 91 
 
 a smile like a benediction, and was gone. 
 They looked at each other with crimson 
 cheeks. 
 
 "We owe Amy Kirtchavel some money. 
 Do you imagine she'd be so mean as to men- 
 tion it to Dr. Topping?" 
 
 "Not she," said the mother. "May, run 
 over to Hartt Street at once, and pay her our 
 debt. Now that I think of it, Mr. Fairlie's 
 going to Europe must have crippled the 
 Kirtchavels surely." 
 
 May Sutton was received by Amy with her 
 usual quiet composure, and she would not 
 have guessed that the money she brought 
 meant actual food and other necessities, if she 
 had not encountered the house-agent on the 
 stairs and heard him say to the tenant in the 
 flat below : 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry for those people above, 
 but if they don't pay me, I'll have to dispos- 
 sess them." 
 
 She was an impulsive girl and she rushed 
 back. Entering without knocking, she sur- 
 prised Amy as she counted the bills she had 
 left. 
 
 "Amy, don't be proud, dear. Tell me 
 
92 THE DAILY PATHWAY, 
 
 quick, please. Have you enough there for 
 present wants, rent, and — everything?" 
 
 Amy blushed. "Yes, just enough." 
 
 "Then, come to-morrow, I've two new 
 frocks to be made. You shall never have to 
 wait for our money again." 
 
 And she never did. 
 
 The familiar poetry of Hood tells us that 
 
 "Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
 As well as want of heart;" 
 
 and in multiplied instances this is true. Peo- 
 ple do not mean to be neglectful. They do 
 not fully appreciate the situation of others. 
 Time drifts by, swiftly, noiselessly, merrily, 
 to the happy-hearted, and they do not know 
 how leaden-footed and slow-paced he is to the 
 indigent and the wretched. 
 
 A homily on keeping one's word, is never 
 out of place. One who has pledged herself or 
 himself to any course involving the actions of 
 others, is in honor bound to fulfil his portion 
 of the contract. When the matter is one of 
 apparently slight moment, the obligation is as 
 binding as if in greater things. In ethics 
 there is no distinction between the larger and 
 
KEEPING ONE'S WORD. 93 
 
 the smaller. A thing is right or it is 
 wrong. 
 
 Now that summer is bringing to the lux- 
 urious life of the great cities the annual pause, 
 when hundreds of families disintegrate, when 
 people seek fresh air and repose in the coun- 
 try, it is worse than needless to break a 
 plighted word to a tradesman, a grocer, a 
 laundress, or any member of the toiling multi- 
 tude. Well-to-do people go away leaving un- 
 paid accounts, probably through mere care- 
 lessness, at the very season when business is 
 dullest. The expenses of the poor go right 
 on. Their children are born and die in 
 summer as in winter. Rent must be paid. 
 Old and feeble kindred need attention; 
 nothing stops, except the work that in win- 
 ter brings income in its wake. A word of 
 reminder is therefore not misplaced in this 
 regard. 
 
 Still another suggestion. Obliging people 
 who hate to say no, often say yes unthink- 
 ingly; they promise to go here or yonder, to 
 make a visit, to do a favor, to write a letter, 
 or to read a book, and then — they do not keep 
 their word. Insincerity flaws their character 
 
94 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 like a vein of dross in the mine where one 
 looks for gold. 
 
 In the household, perhaps, some of us need 
 to emphasize this obligation. Mothers be- 
 wail in their children a tendency to untruth- 
 fulness, and wonder where the little ones 
 learn deceit. Are they sufficiently watchful 
 of their own example? Said little Miriam 
 one day to her mother: "You do not like 
 Mrs. C. ; I heard you tell grandmamma you 
 would be glad if she never called on you 
 again; but you kissed her when she came in 
 this afternoon, and said, 'How kind you are 
 to come V " The child was a spectator, an 
 auditor, and a critic, and a scene like this was 
 to her a lesson in hypocrisy, though the 
 mother was far from meaning to give one. 
 Children have quick intuitions. They read 
 between the lines, and discern the false from 
 the true with unerring swiftness. If we would 
 have them true in speech and thought and con- 
 duct, we must ourselves be true, never prom- 
 ising or threatening without performance of 
 promise or threat, even at great personal in- 
 convenience. 
 
 A habit of exaggeration, if indulged in, 
 
 
KEEPING ONE'S WORD. 95 
 
 makes havoc of truth. Heedlessly many of 
 us accentuate our statements by a departure 
 from simplicity. We are lavish in the use of 
 superlatives; we magnify or diminish our 
 accounts of things experienced or dreaded, 
 and the truth in our descriptions is as a grain 
 of wheat in a peck measure of chaff. 
 
 Because of devotion to truth, we need not 
 condemn imagination, or condemn ourselves 
 to a too literal realism. Imagery often 
 heightens truth, as the sunset clouds beautify 
 the light of the western sky at evening. A 
 consecrated imagination finds its path straight 
 and clear to truth and faith. 
 
 Truth is one of the basal foundations of 
 life. No strong sweet Christianity is possible 
 without it. In reliance upon him who is the 
 Truth, as well as the Way and the Life, shall 
 we not try to keep our word, scrupulously, 
 when once it has been given? 
 
The Passing of Gallantry 
 
 " I ask thee for the thoughtful love, 
 Though constant, watching wise, 
 To meet the glad with joyful smiles 
 And to wipe the weeping eyes." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE PASSING OF 
 GALLANTRY. 
 
 r> ESSIMISTS bewail the decline of the 
 jf~ fine old-school manner which lent so 
 much charm to social intercourse, and 
 so pleasantly smoothed away the rough places 
 on the road of life. It was once our American 
 boast that American men were invariably cour- 
 teous to women, and that women, unattended, 
 might travel the length and breadth of the 
 land, finding a squire in every fellow-passen- 
 ger. In public conveyances, a century ago, 
 few men buried themselves in the oblivion of 
 the newspaper, comfortably seated, while 
 women, old and young, tugged at the straps 
 suspended from the car railing that they might 
 not be thrown from an uneasy footing. At 
 
 I f C 
 
ioo THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 present, the rule is that the young man keeps 
 his seat, having paid his fare, leaving the 
 pretty young girl, the weary matron of middle 
 age, or the silver-haired grandmother, to stand 
 or scramble, as best she may, while only elderly 
 gentlemen, trained in a school of finer breed- 
 ing, are deferential to all women near them, 
 and as courteous to a laundress carrying home 
 her laden basket as they would be to a queen 
 were they in her company. Even small boys, 
 of six, seven and ten, stolidly sit or clumsily 
 sprawl, while ladies stand, and their una- 
 bashed mothers sit by them, tranquilly educat- 
 ing them to be little boors now and big boors 
 hereafter. 
 
 Some improvement in feminine manners 
 might reasonably be asked so far as we are 
 concerned with politeness in public and to 
 strangers. The failure to render thanks for 
 small attentions, the freezing demeanor to- 
 wards the garrulous old lady, new to the town 
 and accustomed to friendly sociability when at 
 home, where every one knows every one else, 
 and all are neighborly, the hurrying and push- 
 ing in front of others that a place may be 
 gained in the ferry boat or the street car, and 
 
THE PASSING OF GALLANTRY. 101 
 
 the occasional lack of gracious tact where 
 women encounter those for whom they 
 do not specially care, are all open to criti- 
 cism. 
 
 A party of ladies from a Northern city, 
 some years ago, attended an exposition in a 
 Southern town. They belonged to a patrician 
 circle, and had been educated in the refinements 
 of society; were, in fact, among those who are 
 popularly supposed to dictate the requirements 
 of good form to their less cultured acquaint- 
 ances. Yet so unmannerly were they, so 
 patronizing, so arrogant in their behaviour 
 that a gentle Southern woman remarked pity- 
 ingly to me that she feared they had been 
 badly brought up, and an English woman 
 added that in her home such people would not 
 be tolerated. 
 
 If there is a decline of good manners in pub- 
 lic, the causes for it are patent to every 
 thoughtful student of sociology. Looking 
 back a hundred years, we discover that the 
 ravages of great wars have periodically thrust 
 women, impoverished by the loss of the bread- 
 winners, who have gone down before the 
 sword as grain before the reaper, out of the 
 
102 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 safe shelter of the home and into the fore- 
 ground where competition is fierce and the 
 struggle for existence goes relentlessly on. 
 Applied science, labor-saving inventions, and 
 the march of improvement have added to the 
 condition, primarily due to the fiery sweep of 
 the battle's onset, and wom°n have come out 
 into the open, and entered the lists of wage- 
 earning occupations, on equal terms with men. 
 Yet not wholly on equal terms, since in many 
 lines the payment of women is smaller for the 
 same hours of toil, and the same grade of 
 labor, than to men, so that women actually 
 crowd men out, and form an element of antag- 
 onism, which must be considered in any argu- 
 ment concerned with the social relations of the 
 sexes. How can a man be expected to treat 
 with the respectful gallantry which means de- 
 votion, unselfish attention, and compliment, a 
 being whose hands are as rough with toil as his 
 own, whose wage-earning skill is as great, and 
 whose opportunity to find employment is often 
 greater? Still, let it never be forgotten, that 
 the finest manner on the road to-day is often 
 the manner of the workingman, and that a 
 woman alone and in need of a lift will oftener 
 
THE PASSING OF GALLANTRY. 103 
 
 receive it from the man with the leathern 
 apron and the dinner-pail than from the man 
 in immaculate linen and the latest up-to-date 
 tie. 
 
 At home, at the table, in the domestic 
 forum, politeness should never be suffered to 
 fall into desuetude. We should not be too 
 hurried, or too worried, to treat those we love 
 best with kindly patience, to wait upon the 
 aged, and to bestow loving little attentions on 
 the feeble and the sad. With what sweetness 
 the simplest meal is invested if there be neither 
 criticism nor fault-finding, but instead the 
 honeyed flavor of praise. There are family 
 meals which have about them the suggestion 
 of the battlefield. Scowling faces, sharp 
 words or a silence that may be felt, accompany- 
 ing their progress, and the children who sit at 
 such tables lose an important part of fine and 
 gracious education. Wherever else in the 
 home there is friction, the table should be a 
 place of tranquillity, and peace, if not gayety, 
 should reign when three times a day the house- 
 hold gathers there. 
 
 Allied to courtesy is gallantry, a fine thing 
 and a fine word, debased and degenerate at 
 
io 4 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 times, through having fallen upon evil days. 
 It springs from a French soil, this brave old 
 word, that recalls mediaeval tournament and 
 jousts, knights spurring to the lists, ladies look- 
 ing down from garlanded balconies, and the 
 trumpets sounding splendidly over the affray, 
 the music clamorous and stirring the blood. 
 Valiant deeds, heroic enterprises, chivalric ex- 
 ploits are suggested by the word, itself a syno- 
 nym for youth. Callant, the Scottish word 
 so often used for a lad, half playfully, 
 half lovingly, is a corruption of gallant, 
 and which of us does not associate youth 
 with all things strong, daring, dashing and 
 fearless? Youth earns the Victoria Cross 
 on the battlefield. Youth desperately 
 rushes on in the forlorn hope. Youth, 
 not age, grasps the spears and dies, if need be, 
 to make way for liberty. The gallant tales of 
 history are chronicles of what men do when the 
 heart is young. 
 
 Whatever may be said of courtesy, we can- 
 not admit that gallantry is passing, when every 
 dav the ordinary average man, the common- 
 place, unlettered man shows us by some uncon- 
 sciously grand act an illustration of it. Fire- 
 
THE PASSING OF GALLANTRY. 105 
 
 men scale the perilous ladders to rescue women 
 and children from a burning house. Seafar- 
 ing men buffet wind and wave with a dogged 
 courage that ignores danger and challenges 
 death. The engineer stands fast at his post, 
 though the hissing steam scald and the flying 
 flame blister. The captain goes down with his 
 ship. "Save the women!" is the cry of the 
 men, when all are in extremity. The doctor 
 and the nurse fight the deadly epidemic and are 
 ministering angels in the city stricken with pes- 
 tilence. Tender women, fighting a harder bat- 
 tle than theirs, lie down on the operating table 
 and submit themselves to the surgeon's knife, 
 fearlessly, smilingly, trustfully. No, gallantry 
 is not gone from the earth, though courtesy is 
 less in evidence in our hurrying days of tele- 
 phone and wireless telegraphy and rushing 
 train than it was when we crept along in the 
 leisurely stage-coach, and changed our horses 
 at the wayside tavern. 
 
 It is more than probable that a radical 
 change in our processes and schemes of 
 womanly education has done its share in mod- 
 ifying the manner of man to woman. When 
 a girl has not completed her school education 
 
106 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 until she has reached her twenty-second or 
 twenty-third year, when after this she spends a 
 year or two in post-graduate study, and then 
 teaches, or writes, or paints, or travels, or 
 takes up a learned profession, her thoughts are 
 not occupied with a future husband. The old 
 point of view, very plainly indicated in Eng- 
 lish literature, made it deplorable for a girl not 
 to marry in her first youth. She was openly or 
 covertly commiserated, her mother was pitied, 
 she was in the position of left-over goods in a 
 shop : nobody wanted her. Undoubtedly in 
 the days of our ancestors, girls married simply 
 that they might not become old maids. The 
 term was one of dreaded reproach. No well- 
 educated woman has in these days the faintest 
 objection to spinsterhood, a most honorable 
 and often a most independent estate. A single 
 woman with a fortune of her own may go 
 where she will, and live as she will, when her 
 youth is past. A single woman with brains 
 and the power to support herself may defy the 
 world. She may be lonely, but she is not pitied 
 or pitiable. 
 
 Every large city has its provision for the 
 unmarried of both sexes. The hotel for 
 
THE PASSING OF GALLANTR Y. 107 
 
 women, a feature of the day, is elegant, well 
 appointed and commodious, and it is thronged 
 by appreciative gentlewomen who can pay for 
 its comforts and conveniences. Young wage- 
 earnings girls club together and keep house on 
 a co-operative plan, with an older woman to 
 mother them, and they are so happy, so busy 
 and so ambitious that they are quite indifferent 
 to the coming of any prince, offering to ride 
 with them through the world, and take them 
 to his palace on its other side. Indifference, if 
 not hostility, to marriage is a feature of the 
 period, and it has its share at least, to some 
 extent, in doing away with the old and beauti- 
 ful chivalry which peimeated the manner of 
 man to woman. 
 
 Nature, in the long run, will no doubt have 
 her innings, and the probability is that the old, 
 old fashion of love will never wholly perish 
 from the experience of the race. In this early 
 twentieth century we are in a transition state, 
 and the desire we all feel to be bookish, to dive 
 into science, and — shall we own it ? — to grow 
 rich and be luxurious, has for the moment 
 assumed imperious proportions. But home and 
 love will yet weigh down the scale with their 
 
108 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 purer gold. A woman will not make a less 
 faithful wife, a less devoted mother, a less in- 
 telligent housekeeper, because of college disci- 
 pline and culture, and though marriage may be 
 deferred until a later day, happy homes will 
 not decline. 
 
 In the happy home, in the Christian name, 
 we must find the answer to our question. Cour- 
 tesy will never wane where there is considera- 
 tion for others, and true unselfish zeal for the 
 friend, the kinsman and the neighbor. When 
 the heart's prayer is : 
 
 "I ask thee for the thoughtful love 
 Though constant, watching wise, 
 
 To meet the glad with joyful smiles 
 And to wipe the weeping eyes, 
 
 A heart at leisure from itself 
 To soothe and sympathize." 
 
 there will be individual charity, which is love; 
 individual kindness, which is courtesy, and un- 
 failing politeness in the home, the office, and 
 the street. 
 
 I would like to put the emphasis on the 
 Christ-indwelling, because none who live in 
 conscious fellowship with Christ can be ruth- 
 lessly selfish or thoughtlessly inconsiderate, or 
 
THE PASSING OF GALLANTRY. 109 
 
 heedlessly indifferent to the rights and privi- 
 leges of those whom they daily meet. In the 
 home and out of it, they who love Jesus Christ 
 must not only be strict in their integrity, but 
 constantly gracious in their deportment. 
 
 A few months ago in this city of New York 
 a lovely woman, after a short illness, passed 
 home to dwell with her Saviour. One who 
 stood beside her, looking at her sweet face in 
 its last sleep, said, "I have known her from 
 early childhood. I have never known her to 
 be other than gentle, kind and womanly. Her 
 life has been a continual oblation. She never 
 said a harsh word. She never did a discour- 
 teous thing. She was a Christian of the high- 
 est type." 
 
 What lovelier thing than this could be said 
 of you or of me? 
 
 We, who deplore the passing of gallantry, 
 ought to watch our own conduct, and see 
 whether we are habitually thoughtful about 
 little things. 
 
 Little acts of kindness, 
 
 Little words of love, 
 Make our earth an Eden, 
 
 Like the heaven above." 
 
no THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Observe the nicety with which the druggist 
 weights the scale that holds some precious com- 
 modity. Just a trifling difference in the weight, 
 but a tiny bit too much or too little might 
 determine the issue of life or death. So, in 
 our home life, in the life of the shop, and the 
 street, the small things weigh heaviest, and 
 are the most important factors in the balance. 
 
The Every-day Woman 
 
 M 
 
 " The every-day woman's life is so happy, that 
 she, the uncrowned queen of a secluded home, 
 need envy no monarch in her royal robes and on 
 her golden throne." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE EVERT-DAY 
 
 WOMAN 
 
 *TT* HE every-day woman, who is she ? Not 
 J[ the fashionable woman with so many 
 engagements that she is as weary on 
 Saturday night as a cook who has been broil- 
 ing and baking since Monday, nor yet the 
 woman at the other end of the plane, wear- 
 ing her life out in the extreme of penury. The 
 woman I have in mind is neither very rich nor 
 very poor, very learned nor very ignorant; she 
 is in the large and respectable class of average 
 people from whom America draws its best citi- 
 zens. Overseeing her housework, supervising 
 her children, looking after the comfort of her 
 husband, taking a more or less active share in 
 the work of her church and of the community 
 where she dwells, the every-day woman is a 
 familiar figure, and we all know and love her. 
 
ii4 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 She is wife, mother, daughter, sister, sweet- 
 heart, friend. Neither ambitious nor aggres- 
 sive, complaining nor dissatisfied, she fills her 
 place, and the candle she holds in her hand 
 sheds light on the circumference of her home 
 and her village. She is simply the dear every- 
 day woman, contented to stay where the Lord 
 has put her, and to her finger tips she is a fem- 
 inine being, satisfied with feminine occupations 
 and fulfilling feminine duties. 
 
 Now, to this woman, as time passes, there 
 comes certain perils and disadvantages. She 
 sometimes finds, as her sons and daughters 
 emerge from babyhood and its consequent de- 
 pendence, that she is growing lonely. Her 
 husband, even if engrossed in business, has, 
 notwithstanding an outlet for any superfluous 
 energy in his interest in politics, either of the 
 State or the country, while, of course, local 
 affairs enlist, to some extent, every good man 
 in a given vicinage. Few women take a deep 
 and direct interest in politics; they merely re- 
 flect the interest of their men-folk. Dress, do- 
 mesticity and housekeeping, after a while, pall 
 on the attention, and a bright, intelligent 
 woman observes to herself that life has lost its 
 
THE EVERY -DAY WOMAN. 115 
 
 flavor. The peril that confronts her is 
 that this condition may cease to be tran- 
 sient and become permanent, and the attend- 
 ant disadvantage is in her poverty of re- 
 source. 
 
 A general opinion has obtained acceptance 
 that schools educate; that if one has gone 
 through a certain course of study and come out 
 on the other side of it, waving a certificate of 
 thoroughness and proficiency, one is thencefor- 
 ward a person of attainments in literature, and 
 a well-disciplined graduate in mental exercises. 
 Never was there a greater error. Schools and 
 colleges do not educate — they prepare their 
 pupils for the education of life. Their pur- 
 pose is accomplished when they make their stu- 
 dents facile in the use of tools. The best col- 
 lege, the best university, can do no more than 
 this. Each of us can remember essentially 
 commonplace, not to say tedious, people, who 
 have had all the culture that the most distin- 
 guished teachers have been able to impart. 
 The woman who has had liberal early train- 
 ing is better off than her sister, whose range 
 has been narrower, only as she has kept on in 
 the use of the means for brain and heart 
 
n6 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 growth with which the schools equipped her 
 before they sent her forth. 
 
 If one would not be dull and rusty in middle 
 life, one must continually take in new stores, 
 and constantly add to what one has already 
 gained. Mastery of weapons is kept by con- 
 tinual daily practice. Some women drop bit 
 by bit their accomplishments, their graces, 
 their charms. One woman is older at thirty- 
 five than another at sixty, because the latter 
 has never had time to spend in thinking how 
 the years were flying. Poverty of resource 
 ages a woman more inevitably than does sor- 
 row, or illness, or grief. 
 
 Think of the women whose mental equip- 
 ment is so scanty that they cannot keep atten- 
 tion steadily fixed on anything higher than a 
 sensational romance; that they fidget if a ser- 
 mon exceeds twenty minutes in length ; that the 
 very newspaper must have glaring headlines 
 and dramatic narrative and a superfluity of pic- 
 tures to be pleasing in their eyes. These are 
 the every-day women who must endlessly talk, 
 talk, over trifles; who cannot sit still and be 
 composed when alone ; to whom solitude is al- 
 ways intolerable, and who expatiate with 
 
THE EVERY -DAY WOMAN. 117 
 
 amazing iteration over the most ordinary inci- 
 dents, such as the breaking of a cup, the irrita- 
 tion of a servant, the tearing of a child's frock. 
 Poverty of resource makes an indolent woman 
 lazy until exertion is almost impossible, con- 
 verts an impatient woman into a shrew, and in- 
 tensifies the morbidness of the melancholy 
 woman. 
 
 Every one of us needs something which can 
 relieve the strain of the daily grind and take 
 us out of ourselves. For breadth and future 
 happiness, every woman should form a habit 
 of daily reading, for profit as well as for pleas- 
 ure. Aside from the Bible, which may be read 
 perfunctorily, or may, on the contrary, be a 
 most fascinating study, the woman at home 
 should take up, with seriousness and intention, 
 some line of work in history, ethics, or natural 
 science, and make it her custom to spend an 
 hour upon it during daylight. The usual 
 method is to work by daylight on the sewing, 
 cooking, visiting, and other absorbing routine 
 engagements, and read by the evening lamp. 
 I am not sure that any except young eyes 
 should read by artificial light. The midnight 
 oil is responsible for many a morning head- 
 
n8 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 ache. I hear remonstrances from this busy 
 housekeeper, and that conscientious mother, to 
 which I reply that I have known a very suc- 
 cessful author who not only kept up her read- 
 ing, but wrote books with her hand on a string 
 attached to her baby's cradle and her ear open 
 to the calls of the older children at play out- 
 side her window. I recall another most de- 
 lightful woman who never hesitated when her 
 nerves began to tire, and she felt her tones 
 sharpen, to stop just where she was in the 
 midst of the ironing or the cleaning and go off 
 with her children on a botanizing excursion 
 in the woods. 
 
 We make too much of our sweeping and our 
 dusting, we have too many pretty things which 
 require solicitous care, and we spend too much 
 strength on pastry. A less elaborate style of 
 house management would enable many women 
 to read more, learn more, and think more than 
 they do. 
 
 If one has an accomplishment, as drawing, 
 painting or music, one should be chary of let- 
 ting that slip away from her. Time devoted 
 to any beloved art or skill, to any handicraft 
 not associated with daily necessity, is time well 
 
THE EVERY -DAY WOMAN. 119 
 
 spent by the woman who would keep health, 
 vigor, and attractiveness as well as a whole- 
 some interest in life, to her latest day. 
 
 Another desirable thing for the every-day 
 woman is hospitality to new ideas. This does 
 not mean that she shall be credulous, that she 
 shall accept every novelty, or that she shall 
 break away from the old safe moorings of 
 faith and doctrine. There are convictions 
 which are founded upon a rock-bottom of be- 
 lief in God's Word, and they can never be 
 shaken. But the every-day woman is a con- 
 servative, and she often recoils from the pres- 
 entation of truth in a new form; she regards 
 anything unfamiliar with suspicion. Over- 
 conservatism is a disadvantage of the every- 
 day woman's make-up. Such a one cannot en- 
 joy the Scriptures in any but the authorized 
 version; the beauties and the new unfoldings 
 of the English and American revisions are not 
 agreeable to nor understood by her; the slight- 
 est change in an order of worship in the sanc- 
 tuary is disturbing to her sense of fitness. Yet 
 the woman who would not be fettered by the 
 despotism of old methods must let herself ex- 
 pand and take in some new ideas. 
 
120 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 And, dear every-day woman, you must 
 widen the circle of your friendships if you 
 would retain the animation of your earlier 
 days. Some of us have many friends; some 
 have very few. She who clings only to her old 
 friends will one day awake and discover that 
 she is solitary for our friends are always leav- 
 ing us. 
 
 Look over the landscape of your life. Ten 
 years, twenty years, thirty years ago, who were 
 the women with whom you took sweet coun- 
 sel ? Take up the catalogue of the old school, 
 of the Woman's Board, of the hospital com- 
 mittee ; how many of the names there recorded 
 no longer respond to any earthly voice. 
 
 "One by one we go," and so mercifully 
 gradual are the changes that our Father ap- 
 points, we seldom recognize their sweeping 
 character until we deliberately take a retro- 
 spective view. It is wise to make new friends 
 on the road, and it seems a pleasant thing to 
 anticipate new friends, to look forward in 
 going to a new place, to an anniversary, or to 
 any gathering of strangers, to the discovery of 
 some one who shall be congenial and stimulat- 
 ing. 
 
THE EVERY -DAY WOMAN. 121 
 
 Another excellent step for the every-day wo- 
 man is to definitely annex herself to some 
 world movement beyond her own door. The 
 woman who belongs to a Home or a Foreign 
 Mission Society, and who lives up to the meas- 
 ure of her obligations and privileges as a mem- 
 ber, is as really enlarging and benefiting her- 
 self as she is sending help to the frontiers or 
 across the sea. A live society, not a formal, 
 half-dead one, is a real school of nurture in all 
 that is good. While hearts are yearning over 
 the suffering women and children of heathen- 
 ism, they grow more tender and compassion- 
 ate for all who suffer at home. The comrade- 
 ship of the society, the fellowship in service 
 which is brought about by the coming together 
 of a half-dozen churches in annual or semi- 
 annual conference, is an uplifting experience 
 for the woman who, but for this outlet, would 
 be drudging or dreaming at home. Drudgery 
 is good and dreaming is good, if either is lim- 
 ited; but neither is profitable if it usurps too 
 large a place, and beneficent work with and for 
 the Lord is the remedy for too much of the 
 fanciful and too much of the realistic in one's 
 progress. 
 
122 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 But more than all else, beyond all else, the 
 every-day woman needs and must have the 
 blessedness of a walk with God. When we 
 consider how accessible our Lord is, how free 
 are his offers of company by the way, how 
 gently he leads us, and how precious are his 
 gifts and favors, what can we do but wonder 
 at his goodness ? Each of us may often, with 
 Mary, sit at his feet; with Martha, serve him 
 in small, homely ways; with Dorcas, make 
 raiment for his poor; with Rhoda, open a 
 door for one of his disciples; with Phoebe and 
 Priscilla and Julia, minister to his saints; with 
 Eunice and Lois, instruct his little ones; with 
 Lydia, gather his people together in our home 
 for prayer; with the woman who loved much 
 because to her much had been forgiven, break 
 an alabaster box in its fragrance to rest his 
 weariness; with watching women we may kneel 
 at his cross still, and find him in the early 
 dawn in the garden of lilies, not dead but risen. 
 Commonplace, everyday women we may be, 
 yet each of us may be our Lord's elect lady. 
 
 Among the joys of the every-day experience 
 common to all, and consequent upon duty 
 faithfully performed, are a thousand little 
 
THE EVERY -DAY WOMAN. 123 
 
 things uncalendared and unchronicled. The 
 morning and evening greetings, the caresses of 
 children, the visits of kindred and friends, the 
 pleasures that spring up like summer flowers 
 in the pathway, the letters from those we love, 
 and the occasional bright surprises of success 
 that dignify and beautify the home, may be 
 counted. More frequent is the bliss than the 
 dole. Taken by and large, the every-day 
 woman's life is so happy, that she, the un- 
 crowned queen of a secluded home, need envy 
 no monarch in her royal robes and on her 
 golden throne. 
 
Gentle Folk 
 
 " The essential quality in man or woman, which 
 makes either agreeable in the intercourse of the 
 family, is politeness which never fails." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 GENTLE FOLK. 
 
 T T ZWO are gentle folk? In the days 
 y fr of the Pilgrim Fathers, when so- 
 cial lines were sharply defined, 
 there were positive distinctions between classes 
 which everybody recognized, and nobody re- 
 sented. The lady was then a step higher than 
 the goodwife, the gentleman was several de- 
 grees more honorable in the public eye than the 
 serving man. Satin and velvet and laces for 
 the one set, homespun and woollen for the 
 other, while yet they lived together in relations 
 free from envy and most cordially kind. As 
 the years have brought changes, the old dis- 
 tinctions have been obliterated, the old lines 
 have been erased. In this land there is no 
 longer an acknowledged aristocracy basing its 
 claims on blood. Sometimes indeed the old 
 
128 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 family names have not lost their spell, and a 
 certain prestige belongs to the ancient house 
 denied to the new, yet a day laborer may bear 
 the name that once belonged to a judge, and 
 his son may sit in the public school beside the 
 son of the judge whose family is one of lately 
 imported stock. Our period is one of inces- 
 sant seeking, startling transition; we have a 
 sort of commercial untitled nobility, it is true, 
 in this time of rapid money making; but we 
 have no gentry in the old English meaning of 
 the word. 
 
 Who, then, are gentle folk, and in what 
 does their peculiar charm consist? The ques- 
 tion is pertinent. In the fierce competitions 
 and headlong rush of city life, gallantry is 
 passing, but good manners still obtain, and are 
 always an evidence of good breeding. I was 
 in a street car the other day, an open car, into 
 which with difficulty climbed an old woman, 
 lame, clumsy, shabby and hampered alike by 
 her feebleness and her avoirdupois. It seemed 
 as if she could not by any effort drag herself 
 up to the seat, but the conductor helped her, 
 and two or three men on their way to business 
 lent willing hands, while one, observing her 
 
GENTLE FOLK. 129 
 
 distress, said soothingly, "Take your time, 
 Madam; there is no hurry." Here were pres- 
 ent gentle folk, considerate of others, compas- 
 sionate and swift with assistance. Every wo- 
 man who goes about much, in a busy town like 
 New York, knows the swift and spontaneous 
 courtesy of the workingman, the man with 
 rough clothes and hard hands. He is gentle to 
 children and old people, and very seldom im- 
 polite. 
 
 Gentle folk are considerate in the small as 
 in the great things, ready and tactful and ten- 
 der in the commerce of the home. They not 
 only refrain from uttering disagreeable ex- 
 pressions and sentiments, but they take pains 
 to be pleasant. I cannot imagine them snob- 
 bish, or capable of currying favor with those 
 from whom they hope for bounty. A gentle- 
 man or a gentlewoman is simple and sincere. 
 When in a home, one hears that sort of criti- 
 cism which hurts, that vehemence of argument 
 which leaves a sting, the element of gentleness 
 is lacking. For without self-restraint, self- 
 mastery, self-effacement and gentle manners 
 cannot exist. 
 
 Another characteristic of the true gentle- 
 
130 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 man and woman is honesty. Truth in speech, 
 truth in thought, truth regnant and profound, 
 scorning evasion and exaggeration, such truth 
 is essential to the development of the highest 
 manhood. Trickery and deceit have no place 
 in the lives of real gentle folk. 
 
 It follows that those who belong to this 
 great order may wear coarse raiment and per- 
 haps be dwellers in huts as often as in palaces. 
 The outside may be plain and they may eat the 
 crust of poverty, but they are "all glorious 
 within." Some of them sit on thrones, some 
 of them sweep streets; it does not matter about 
 their garb or their occupation, they are gentle 
 folk because the spiritual nature is large and 
 fine and clear, and they live in the world and 
 yet are above the world. It is a great thing to 
 be so grand in the citadel that it makes no 
 difference how ordinary looking may be the 
 approaches that guard the door. 
 
 Dropping metaphor, the gentle folk of the 
 earth, wherever we find them, recognize that 
 they have a duty to God, as well as to their 
 fellow-men. Fear God and keep his com- 
 mandments is their motto. They walk in the 
 light, for it shines upon them from heaven. In 
 
GENTLE FOLK. 131 
 
 every clime we discover them, in every land, in 
 all conditions of ignorance or learning, of 
 penury or want, of color and of race. A gen- 
 tleman is of all kindreds and at home 
 everywhere. A gentlewoman in kitchen or 
 in drawing room, on the train, in the ship, 
 in the shop or the factory is queen of the situa- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a familiar saying that it takes three 
 generations to make a gentleman. This is 
 only another way of declaring that fine man- 
 ners are matters of inheritance as well as of 
 ceaseless attention, and that certain advan- 
 tages accrue from living in an atmosphere of 
 sunshine. I have seen boorish rudeness in men 
 of long descent, and an exceeding grace in men 
 whose fathers had been slaves on a plantation. 
 And again and again I have observed in rude 
 and uncultured people the transforming 
 power of grace and the love of Christ as it 
 wrought a complete change in their manner, 
 until tones were softened and behavior was 
 decorous and the life grew wonderfully un- 
 selfish and therefore gentle. Not always 
 are men lovable because of birth and edu- 
 cation, but the Christian, whose life is 
 
i 3 2 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 hid with his Lord, is never else than lova- 
 ble. 
 
 To come to very practical matters, we may 
 well glance at our own conduct in the daily life 
 of the home. Are we gentle folk there? 
 How about the far too prevalent habit of 
 fault-finding? People drift into this before 
 they are aware of it, and are very apt to make 
 those around them miserable over little things 
 that are of no special importance, curiously in- 
 sensible on their own part that they are doing 
 wrong. Nobody is more virtuous than the 
 chronic fault-finder. The man, fastidious 
 about food, who upsets the composure of his 
 wife, because the meat is tough or overdone or 
 underdone, who seldom praises but often 
 blames her conduct of affairs, may be a reputa- 
 ble citizen and a straightforward man of busi- 
 ness, but he is far from belonging to true gen- 
 tle folk. The woman whose irritability and 
 whose moods keep her family in dread of her 
 anger, who says satirical words, and has frosty 
 looks in the privacy of the home, may be 
 clever, capable and learned; but she is not 
 truly and all through a gentlewoman. The 
 essential quality in man or woman which 
 
GENTLE FOLK. 133 
 
 makes either agreeable in the intercourse of 
 the family, is politeness which never fails, be- 
 ing founded upon that charity which thinketh 
 no evil, and envieth not. 
 
 We talk about manners of the old school, 
 meaning manners punctiliously ceremonious 
 and dignified. Such manners belonged to the 
 more leisurely days when we had no telephones 
 nor telegraphs, no flying automobiles nor light- 
 ning express trains. A return to their win- 
 some graciousness might do much to coax back 
 to the world the serenity which was and is so 
 great a charm wherever found. Let us im- 
 agine that upon each of us should descend the 
 quietness of heart which, showing itself in qui- 
 etness of manner and friendliness of approach, 
 would make us invariably amiable to children, 
 to servants, to all whom we met. Fault-find- 
 ing would vanish from the fireside and the 
 table, and suspicion, anger, jealousy, all evil 
 things, would be disarmed. So might this 
 earthly life of ours be patterned after that of 
 another sphere ; take on a heavenly peace and 
 charm. 
 
 In our study of the Master's life with his 
 disciples, andof their life after his presence had 
 
134 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 been withdrawn from them, we are impressed 
 by the beautiful care for little things, and the 
 constant thoughtfulness and grace which were 
 as the stamp upon the coin in that little band. 
 Never rush or hurry or haste in the Saviour, 
 never forgetfulness of the weary, never any- 
 thing but love and tenderness and the sweet- 
 ness of a friend, and the brotherliness of a 
 comrade. And John and James and Peter re- 
 peat this spirit in their epistles. Paul, catch- 
 ing the inspiration from the Lord, who called 
 him out of the rifted skies to be an apostle, is 
 overflowing with love-messages to the saints to 
 whom he writes. In the New Testament, if 
 anywhere, we abide in a great company of gen- 
 tle folk. 
 
 Among unthinking persons there sometimes 
 prevails a little doubt of the sincerity of those 
 who have more manner than themselves, "I 
 am blunt, I speak my mind," I once heard a 
 woman exclaim, as though there were some 
 merit in brusqueness, and as though truth and 
 candor had a quarrel with urbanity. On the 
 other hand, if these people would but notice, 
 truth may be spoken in love, and love can al- 
 ways afford to wear a guise of frankness that 
 
GENTLE FOLK. 135 
 
 is winning. Not long ago in a church where a 
 good deal of work was going on, several wo- 
 men met to discuss ways and means. There 
 were diametrical differences of opinion, and 
 some of the number expressed their views with 
 vehemence, but there was no friction. As one 
 phrased it, they were all ladies, and they were 
 all honorable ; and so, having spoken out their 
 thoughts and wishes, they yielded without a 
 murmur to the decision of the majority. 
 
 In the ordinary conversation of the best 
 bred men and women there should be some- 
 thing uplifting. No reflection on others, on 
 their motives, on their mistakes, on their fail- 
 ures should appear. When we have nothing 
 kind to say, let us keep silence. The path, con- 
 versationally, of the gentlewoman is hedged in 
 from any gossip that is malicious, and of 
 course, from the use of anything that suggests 
 the low plane that is false or unworthy. 
 
 The manners of little children are so often 
 unconsciously copied from the grown people 
 around them that we need to exercise peculiar 
 care when the wee ones are about us. If we 
 would know the father and mother, we need 
 only study the boys and girls. Quite surely, 
 
136 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 though without knowledge or intention, they 
 reveal the vogue of their home, they are imi- 
 tative and absorbent as we all are, and in ges- 
 ture, smile, tone, and mode they reproduce 
 what goes on around them. We cannot too 
 carefully watch ourselves, we who are parents 
 and teachers, in the interests of those who are 
 carrying on to the future what both directly 
 and indirectly they are learning from us. 
 
 One of these days we shall migrate from 
 these shores of clamor and disturbance and 
 reach a world where ' 'beyond these voices 
 there is peace." It will be a world of strange 
 beauty and sweetness, that beautiful home of 
 the blessed. In it there shall be neither sorrow 
 nor crying nor any more pain; no wars, no 
 confusion, no parting, no disappointment. 
 There the Lord will reign forever, and his ser- 
 vants shall serve him. And that fair harbor of 
 God's saints shall be wholly inhabited by the 
 pure, the pardoned, the sinless, and the blissful, 
 forever doing God's errands, thinking God's 
 thoughts, singing his praises, a world of gentle 
 folk. 
 
 But at present we are pilgrims faring on the 
 road, accepting its rough and smooth, subject 
 
GENTLE FOLK. 137 
 
 to human infirmity and liable to errors of judg- 
 ment and vision. To be good comrades we 
 must needs walk in the steps of our Master, 
 making our daily lives an imitation of Christ, 
 and striving stubbornly against sin. We must 
 have daily re-enforcements from a source that 
 never fails; we must live by prayer and look 
 ever upward. 
 
A Lenten Meditation 
 
 " In our Lenten meditations we may as well be 
 candid with ourselves. God sees us as we are." 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 A LENTEN MEDITATION. 
 
 T/T y /'^ live in a period of intense activity. 
 f/ fr Leisure is the privilege of the 
 few. Work, ceaseless, pressing, 
 relentless, is the obligation of the many. 
 Events are happening all the time, wonderful 
 epoch-making events, and they follow one an- 
 other at intervals so brief, and the pace of the 
 age is so rapid, that meditation has become ex- 
 ceptional. Who has time to sit down and 
 think? Most of us snatch a few fleeting mo- 
 ments for daily reading, and set apart a little 
 longer time for daily prayer; but, even then, 
 the world invades the quiet hour, and we hurry 
 out of the closet and are presently again in the 
 thick of the fight. 
 
 Lent, which is observed definitely by a large 
 part of the Christian Church, and in a less co- 
 
142 THE DAILY PATHWAY, 
 
 herent but sympathetic fashion by individuals 
 and denominations not pledged to keep it, 
 comes with a blessed arresting power in the 
 whirl of our avocations. Thus, in the Middle 
 Ages, might a truce have been proclaimed on 
 the battlefield, while the hosts released from 
 warfare found a space to breathe and be at 
 peace. The modern warfare is as incessant as, 
 and far more pitiless, than were those old con- 
 flicts, and the combatants receive wounds 
 which leave scars. How we long sometimes 
 when "the world is too much with us," for 
 something of the child's freedom from care, 
 the child's joy in mere living, that we so often 
 lose when the battles of life harden and weary 
 us ! Our Lord told us in effect that we must 
 have the child heart if we would enter the 
 kingdom of heaven. And he told us, too, that 
 the kingdom of heaven must be, if we have it 
 at all, within us. 
 
 Lent gives us pause. Let us stop where we 
 are and honestly demand of our own souls how 
 much of the child's sweet truthfulness and of 
 the heavenly kingdom's bliss remains as our 
 precious treasure? What are we striving for? 
 The aims of our conduct are probably not 
 
A LENTEN MEDITATION. 143 
 
 wholly selfish. At least we toil for others. 
 Some of us have children to educate, and we 
 are literally straining every nerve that their ad- 
 vantages may surpass those we had in a sim- 
 pler day. We are so anxious about this that 
 we forget that the education which is forced 
 upon children who reluctantly accept it, will 
 never do them very much good. Some of us 
 are trying to lay away a sufficient provision for 
 old age and the rainy day. This is right, if in 
 doing so we are careful not to atrophy our 
 sense of gratitude to God and our trust in him, 
 by a failure to worship him in giving of our 
 substance. I knew an old lady who wore a fur 
 cloak in July because she was afraid of ulti- 
 mately going to the poorhouse. The connec- 
 tion is not obvious, but she was so parsimoni- 
 ous in her terror of impending want that she 
 would buy no summer wraps, and therefore 
 had to use her winter ones the year round. 
 She died a woman of wealth, in whom hoard- 
 ing had grown to a mastering passion — hers 
 being selfish ends — and she was at heart a 
 pauper. Far otherwise is it with those who 
 toil and save and are anxious that they may 
 clear off a mortgage or pay hampering debts. 
 
144 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 But, for one or another reason, most of us 
 carry so much needless weight that we lose the 
 pleasure of our days; we are not as the little 
 children free from care. 
 
 "Nothing," says Dr. Pusey, u is too little to 
 be ordered by our Father; nothing too little in 
 which to see his hand ; nothing which touches 
 our souls too little to accept from him ; nothing 
 too little to be done for him." 
 
 Let us — 
 
 "Tell him about the heartache, 
 
 And tell him the longings, too, 
 Tell him the baffled purpose, 
 
 When we scarce knew what to do. 
 Then, leaving all our weakness 
 
 With the One, divinely strong, 
 Forget that we bore the burden 
 
 And carry away the song." 
 
 Time will not be misspent in which we shall 
 consider gratefully the goodness of our Father 
 in heaven. Suppose we make a business for 
 the next few weeks of looking up in God's 
 word the promises he gives us of his presence 
 in every hour of need. They gleam like stars 
 in the sky when the firmament is swept clear 
 from clouds. The Father is ever waiting to 
 
A LENTEN MEDITATION. 145 
 
 hear our prayer, ready at every moment when 
 we knock to admit us, and his compassions fail 
 not. Blessed are the Lenten hours in which we 
 leave the world behind and approach "the 
 mercy seat, where Jesus answers prayer," and 
 the Spirit gives us utterance ! 
 
 Another phase of the subject of our per- 
 sonal religion may appeal to us as we sit in the 
 twilight of these days of early spring. A few 
 weeks ago the trees were leafless, the gardens 
 withered, the grasses brown, the birds were 
 silent. Insensibly to our observation a change 
 has begun. The bluebirds are venturing back. 
 The robins will follow. In sheltered corners 
 timid flowers are lifting their sweet, shy 
 faces. Soon there will be melody and 
 verdure and bloom where lately were chill 
 and desolation. The spring is here. Soon 
 her gracious presence will be manifest every- 
 where. 
 
 Analogous to this phenomenon of Nature 
 so familiar, yet so impressive, is that which 
 occurs in many a human experience. A revival 
 of religion transforms the individual. I have 
 heard people declare that they do not believe 
 in revivals. They might quite as well insist 
 
146 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 that they do not believe in the spring. God 
 sends both. When any one has been cold and 
 lifeless in prayer, formal and uninterested in 
 service, apathetic in attention, and careless of 
 love to the brethren, he needs a revival. A 
 new breath of the Divine Spirit quickens and 
 vitalizes him. The spring has found him, he 
 has been renovated. "Awake, O north wind, 
 and come thou south, blow upon my garden," 
 says the Lord of the garden, and then, "the 
 spices flow forth," and there is perfume and 
 gladness. 
 
 The March gales will rage furiously over 
 land and sea; their stormy energy will 
 drive out the rubbish from corners and 
 sweep the earth clean. Some souls need 
 the cleansing processes of a tempest before 
 they are ready to bring forth sweet fruits 
 and flowers. Whether by one form of 
 discipline or another, by the surge of the 
 rough sea or the spray of the fountain, the 
 Lord chooses to awaken and revive us, so that 
 he does it, and we see the realities of things in 
 his illuminating light, all will be well with our 
 souls. 
 
 In a word, let us pray now for a revival of 
 
A LENTEN MEDITATION. 147 
 
 love in God in our heart-life, for more loyalty 
 to Christ, for a deeper filling of the Spirit. 
 "My beloved is mine, and his desire is toward 
 me." If we usk in faith, nothing doubting, we 
 shall not be denied. 
 
 The Lenten season has another aspect, and 
 it concerns what some of us fancy to be the 
 more practical side of our duty. What are we 
 doing for others? The question is objective. 
 It means for the poor, who are always near us 
 — round the corner or across the way, if we 
 live in a city like New York. In this thronged 
 town we watch long processions of sumptuous 
 equipages on one street, women richly arrayed 
 driving in carriages a queen might envy; men 
 hasting from this place to that, wearing the 
 look of prosperity in every lineament; and in 
 the next avenue gaunt and squalid poverty 
 stalks in rags and tatters. We cannot escape 
 the sight of the poor — the repulsive, not the 
 picturesque, sight of the suffering and the beg- 
 gared. 
 
 To relieve, to elevate, to comfort, to sus- 
 tain, our friends who are poor, is but to accept 
 a privilege. "Naked and ye clothed me" earns 
 the blessing of the Saviour's "inasmuch." We 
 
148 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 may take our choice of methods. The Neigh- 
 borhood Settlement offers us an opportunity to 
 help the city poor in the most delicate, loving 
 and good-Samaritan way. Helping them, 
 they will help us. No one can enter into hu- 
 man and brotherly relations with the poor and 
 not discover that they have as much to give as 
 they receive. Their ministrations to one an- 
 other are on a scale of liberality, when com- 
 pared with their narrow means, which shames 
 the grudging generosity of the more fortunate. 
 A poor woman does not stop to ask, "Is my 
 neighbor worthy?" Her inquiry is rather, "Is 
 my neighbor in want?" In these latter days 
 the sack of coals, so hardly obtained, has been 
 shared, and the laundress has halved her scanty 
 fire with her friend; the homeless children 
 have been taken in when the little rooms were 
 already crowded, and the outflow of gentle 
 charity among the tenement dwellers has not 
 been frozen up by zero temperature. By all 
 means, if we love our Lord, let us deny 
 ourselves that we may serve his poor in 
 friendly, not in patronizing or condescending 
 ways. 
 
 In this contemplation of the beckoning 
 
A LENTEN MEDITATION. 149 
 
 hands which lead us into avenues of service, 
 we may take a thought of those who, by 
 reason of age or infirmity, are laid aside. 
 They have the gratification of every material 
 need. They are well clad, well housed, but 
 pain racks their bodies, or loneliness preys 
 upon their minds. I have a sympathy, too 
 profound for words, with a man or woman 
 whose day of activity is over and who realizes 
 that the time has arrived when there is nothing 
 for it but to sit by the side of the road while 
 the procession passes. Undoubtedly some 
 take this position too soon. It is a mistake to 
 withdraw from the occupations of a lifetime 
 before one must. But some are infirm of sight 
 or hearing, or they halt by reason of tottering 
 limbs. The grasshopper has become a burden. 
 And there falls on such a deep shadow when 
 they deem themselves overlooked. At times 
 there is a bitter feeling that they are superflu- 
 ous. Among the most gentle, graceful, and 
 truly Christian ministries open to young peo- 
 ple, or to those who have strength and leisure, 
 we may count visiting the afflicted. How 
 blessed to be a bearer of sunbeams ! 
 
 A young girl went to pay a call upon a man 
 
150 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 in his ninetieth year. She carried flowers to 
 the venerable friend, and sat by his chair, chat- 
 ting with him of the little happenings of the 
 town. When she took her leave, "God bless 
 you, my dear/' he said; "it was lovely in you 
 to come and bring these flowers; you, so 
 young, to me, so old!" 
 
 One other suggestion may be pardoned. 
 Are we as vigilant as we should be in restrain- 
 ing our tendency to fault-finding and quarrel- 
 ing and bickering in the home ? Are we self- 
 controlled and not perverse among our dear 
 ones? Too often the happiness of the house- 
 hold is flawed by the selfishness, the moodi- 
 ness, and the ill-temper of some one in the 
 circle who imposes upon the family states of 
 mind and boorishness of manner which would 
 not be tolerated in the office or in society. 
 Cross-grained Christians blot the brightness of 
 their escutcheon and diminish the honor of 
 their Lord. In our Lenten meditations we 
 may as well be candid with ourselves. God 
 sees us as we are. If he can bear with us, we 
 may thank him and honestly ask him to make 
 us better-natured and more amiable in the 
 home, in the privacy of the domestic group, 
 
A LENTEN MEDITATION. 151 
 
 where we are off guard simply because among 
 our closest kindred and our best beloved. 
 
 "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
 Father in heaven is perfect." The ideal is not 
 too high, nor should we shrink from endeavor- 
 ing to reach it, since it is the plain command 
 of our divine Leader. 
 
Our Raster Joy 
 
 M 
 
 " Oh ! weary heart, forget to sigh : 
 God sends thee Easter Day! " 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 OUR EASTER JOT. 
 
 TyT7"HEN Spring comes back, radiant in 
 y y sunshine, with cheery winds, un- 
 fettered streams, and flowers em- 
 broidering her garments new, we feel the pulse 
 of a gladness that fills the whole earth. 
 
 Easter comes, too, in the Springtime; the 
 coronation of the year, the triumphant festival 
 of the Christian Church, comes, bringing the 
 exultant memories of the Resurrection. What- 
 ever have been our sorrows, we are called in 
 the Easter-tide to rejoice, called with uplifted 
 heart and voice to sing "The Lord is risen." 
 Once again our hearts are stirred by the won- 
 derful story of our Saviour's death upon the 
 cross. On Good Friday we enter again into 
 the gloom and the shadow, realizing how our 
 redemption was won, trying to appreciate, 
 
156 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 though faintly, the price that was paid when 
 Jesus said, "It is finished I" 
 
 Then, in the glory and the gladness of East- 
 er morning we carry our flowers to adorn the 
 church, and our songs arise, in unison with the 
 songs of the ransomed, their burden "He is 
 risen !" 
 
 Many a home has been bereft of some loved 
 one since last Easter shone in the pomp of 
 lilies and throbbed with the splendor of organ- 
 chords pealing magnificent anthems. Over 
 every household in the land hangs always un- 
 seen the suspended sword that may fall at a 
 breath and take hence the most precious in the 
 family — husband, wife, child, parent. Yet we 
 are not unhappy. Neither the shadow of a 
 coming woe nor the weight of a present afflic- 
 tion can depress or crush those who believe 
 with their whole hearts in the Lord, who died 
 and rose again. He tasted death for every 
 man, and when he stepped from the darkness 
 of Joseph's tomb into the dawn-light in the 
 garden where Mary saw his face and heard his 
 voice, he conquered death for every man. 
 Well may we bear our losses and our loneliness 
 when the door that opens outward opens into 
 
OUR EASTER JOY. 157 
 
 immortality, and the Easter-light drives away 
 our gloom and quickens our faith and shows us 
 the Lamb that was slain, the One on whose 
 head are many crowns, waiting to receive 
 his own when they go home, in accord- 
 ance with the words which he spoke to his dis- 
 ciples : 
 
 u In my Father's house are many mansions. 
 If it were not so, I would have told you. I go 
 to prepare a place for you." 
 
 This Easter talk is to concern itself with 
 other than the trials that rend our souls asun- 
 der and change the landscape of our lives. 
 God sends calamity and gives the strength to 
 endure it. But we cannot lay upon our 
 Father in Heaven the blame for the burdens 
 we make for ourselves. 
 
 Take, for instance, the case of a married 
 pair who have lived together, sharing life's 
 ups-and-downs for a quarter of a century. Sud- 
 denly, without reason or excuse, one turns 
 coldly from the other. In a home profaned by 
 this evil temper, I have seen husband and wife 
 sitting at the same table, dwelling under the 
 same roof, warmed at the same hearth-flame, 
 yet hardly speaking to one another for days. I 
 
158 THE DAILY PATHWAY, 
 
 have seen estrangement and feud between 
 brothers and sisters, the relentless grasp of an 
 unforgiven act keeping children of one blood, 
 nursed by one mother, as far apart as East 
 from West. Life's daily path is strewn with 
 wrecks because humanity is so often self-willed, 
 so often unkind, so often deaf to common 
 sense and common justice. Only as families 
 love one another, shield each other from the 
 criticism of outsiders, do all in their power to 
 veil faults and defects, and remain united in a 
 bond that is indissoluble, can they hope for 
 happiness. 
 
 Away with needless distresses from our 
 pathway ! Why do we cumber ourselves with 
 unprofitable luggage? Why are we so ready 
 to suffer human vanity, and selfishness, and 
 foolish caprice ? Why do we take indefensible 
 dislikes, and permit prejudices to erect barriers 
 between ourselves and good people who might 
 become our friendly comrades? Why, in- 
 deed, unless because we are fallible beings, 
 who see only one side of a matter and 
 take little pains to see the view-point of 
 others. 
 
 Peep of day for any who are overborne by 
 
OUR EASTER JOY. 159 
 
 needless distresses, will break when we are hon- 
 estly inclined to repentance, and when we fear- 
 lessly seek the help of our ever-pitiful Friend 
 and Master Jesus Christ. 
 
 Peep of day will never come to any one who 
 stubbornly refuses to concede that possibly he 
 or she may be in the wrong. The people who 
 are always right in their own eyes, no matter 
 how far they have strayed from the straight 
 and narrow path, are almost hopeless. Until 
 one can acknowledge sin, one cannot seek 
 pardon. Until one perceives that he or 
 she is in error, one will not change a mis- 
 taken course by even a hair's breadth. But 
 the day will break and the shadows flee 
 away, soon and fast, for all who are can- 
 did in confession, and who forget the past 
 and begin over; if they have been wrong, 
 begin over — begin lovingly. Not to dwell in 
 love with one's very own is to commit a 
 daily sin against that God whose name is 
 Love. 
 
 The earliest bluebird, brave herald of a vast 
 throng, sings under the window so soon as a 
 mild day pledges other days full of cheer and 
 gay with glancing wings and waking bloom. 
 
i6o THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Back again they haste, the little friends who 
 build their nests in our eaves and make music 
 for us at morning and evening. They have 
 not worried lest Spring should never return. 
 Peep of day fills their tiny lives with such an 
 overflow of sweetness that it arouses an an- 
 swering gladness in us, who do not so quickly 
 acquire the art of resting confidently in our 
 Father's care. He who never forgets so much 
 as the smallest creature he has made will not 
 forget us in our hours of need. 
 
 Nothing in Nature is more exquisite than 
 the tender leafage of the orchards and groves 
 in that ecstatic moment when the new buds un- 
 crease and the earth is all a glimmering vista of 
 green and gold. The miracle of Spring un- 
 folds itself before our wondering eyes, as by 
 thousands upon thousands, like the multitudi- 
 nous sands on the shore, or the innumerable 
 ripples on the ocean, or the countless stars in 
 the sky, the leaf-spray rises into the tidal-wave 
 of Spring. 
 
 It is a pity, is it not, that some of us lose the 
 enjoyment of this most beautiful time because 
 we let utility swamp beauty in our walk and 
 conversation? The first fair days when we 
 
OUR EASTER JOY. 161 
 
 ought to be out of doors breathing deep 
 breaths, feasting our souls, drinking from Na- 
 ture's chalice, we are up in the attic, on our 
 knees before old chests, standing on step-lad- 
 ders and chairs and pulling down cobwebs, 
 delving into closets and investigating nooks 
 and corners, in a fury of spring housecleaning. 
 This, dear women, ye ought of course to do, 
 but not, please note, to leave the other undone. 
 Housecleaning may be deferred without harm 
 to anybody, but Nature will not postpone her 
 transformation scene; and if you would hear 
 bird-songs, and see new leaves, and find violets 
 and trailing arbutus, and watch for snowdrops 
 and jonquils and daffodils, you must choose to 
 enjoy Nature's treat in Nature's time. In old 
 days a fabled fountain of youth allured pil- 
 grims to go on distant journeys, with the daz- 
 zling vision before them of age vanquished 
 and health reinforced. The fountain of youth 
 exists. They bathe in it who live near Na- 
 ture's heart. For them, though the outward 
 man perish, the inward is renewed day by day, 
 and the spirit keeps the gayety of the child, till 
 the flesh falling away leaves it free for the 
 youth of heaven. 
 
1 62 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 I question seriously whether we grown peo- 
 ple play enough for our own good. We work 
 tremendously and rest under protest. We 
 spend so much energy on the machinery of liv- 
 ing, on our money-making, our necessary labor 
 for the support of our families, on the immedi- 
 ate "must-haves" of life, that we get no time 
 to live. A man should not forget that he was 
 once a boy, a woman that she was the other 
 day a girl. Keep the child-heart. Play with 
 the children. Do whatever is for you, as a 
 grown-up person, the equivalent of play. For 
 one it may be going about with a camera and 
 taking pictures; for another, an afternoon on 
 the links playing golf; for another, baseball; 
 for another, a reading circle, where a few con- 
 genial friends meet, read a good book and dis- 
 cuss it. Some one else may find recreation in 
 artistic pursuits, in lace-making, in fancy-work, 
 in painting on china. A hobby or a fad is the 
 usual pastime-resource of those who can no 
 longer play as the children do, but who are not 
 out of the game and never mean to be left out. 
 We cannot be at our best in our work if we 
 never allow ourselves the least relaxation. In- 
 stead of drifting into premature invalidism 
 
OUR EASTER JOY. 163 
 
 and becoming martyrs at the stake of nervous 
 suffering, let us use the measures of wise pre- 
 vention. It is much easier to rest when one is 
 healthily weary than when one is all worn out. 
 Mothers need this caution more than any 
 other people, mothers with their manifold lit- 
 tle cares — the children clinging about them, 
 the house to look after, the thronging petty 
 anxieties that makes such incursions on 
 strength and cheer. When a young mother is 
 taken away from her brood, who are left, like 
 callow fledglings, to the care of other hands, 
 never so tender as mother-hands, one cannot 
 but wonder whether it is always by the dispen- 
 sation of God. It is by the permission of God, 
 or it would not occur. Yet God requires of 
 none of us more than we can give; and there 
 are mothers who toil terribly, who work early 
 and late, making elaborate frocks and keeping 
 a scrupulously tidy home when they ought 
 rather to let things go, and dress the children 
 simply and take better care of their own selves. 
 Peep or day for mothers will break when 
 they rightly value their health, when they save 
 their strength for the adolescence of their chil- 
 dren, and keep mentally and intellectually 
 
1 64 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 abreast of them, at least so far that they may 
 sympathize with them in the race. 
 
 All this somewhat desultory talk fits into the 
 Easter mood. And so let us sing : 
 
 "The golden sun climbs up the sky, 
 
 The shadows flee away, 
 Oh ! weary heart, forget to sigh : 
 
 God sends thee Easter Day ! 
 Long was the night, and chill the air, 
 
 The darkness lingered long, 
 Yet is the morning bright and fair, 
 
 Uplift thine Easter song. 
 
 The cross that bowed thee with its weight 
 
 By strength of prayer is stirred, 
 Until it bear thee soon or late 
 
 As wings upbear the bird. 
 The life that thrills from star to star, 
 
 And beats in leaf and stem, 
 Is wider than the heavens are 
 
 And blesses thee from them. 
 
 "Not held of death, the King went forth 
 From out its shattered prison : 
 Oh, tell it, utmost South and North, 
 To-day 'The Lord is risen !' " 
 
Summer Holidays 
 
 11 May our summer holiday give us more of that 
 dear intimacy with Christ which is the most 
 heavenly experience ever lived on earth." 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 SUMMER HOLIDAYS. 
 
 S~\ NE feature of our present-day living in 
 \^/ America is in somewhat marked con- 
 trast with the practices that obtained 
 a few years ago. We have realized as never 
 before the importance of rest and change of 
 scene. School and college vacations are longer 
 than formerly, and business houses very gen- 
 erally not only accord the weekly half-holi- 
 days, but provide liberally for the respite from 
 toil of their employes. Travel is cheaper, too, 
 than of old, and people of moderate means are 
 able to visit places about which their fathers 
 and mothers read, without the least expecta- 
 tion of beholding them with their own eyes. 
 But this talk of mine is not altogether written 
 for those who enjoy summer holidays; it is 
 partly intended for friends to whom summer 
 
: : 5 THE BAIL Y PJ THJTJ Y. 
 
 IX- 
 
 - -t :.tt 7::-: 
 
 
SUMMER HOLIDAYS. 169 
 
 like crystal, her verandas were spotless, and 
 though she was continually at work, her dress 
 matched her house in its immaculate neatness. 
 But she grew pitifully white and wan and tired 
 out before her ministry to her summer guests 
 came to an end with the crisp autumnal 
 breezes. 
 
 To the overburdened women, of whom this 
 one is a type, I would address a word of coun- 
 sel. It is poor policy to wear out; one should 
 be willing to make a little less during the sea- 
 son of financial harvest and have a little more 
 to show in the item of health when accounts 
 are balanced in the fall. Do not so crowd 
 your houses that you must give up the com- 
 forts of your own room and put up with a 
 makeshift in the garret or the barn. Employ 
 a sufficient force in the kitchen; the man of 
 the house has extra help in times of extra pres- 
 sure, but the wife is apt to fancy that there is 
 praiseworthy thrift in working as hard as she 
 can and getting along with little aid from out- 
 side. Always take an afternoon rest, and 
 though sleep may be coy, for it is not every 
 woman who can take a nap in daylight, un- 
 dress, relax, and lie still in a darkened cham- 
 
170 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 ber for an hour. Never omit the refreshment 
 of a sponge bath before retiring at night. 
 When the Sabbath comes, arrange an easier 
 rather than a more elaborate menu, and go to 
 church. If there were no spiritual elevation, 
 no gain to the soul from church-going, the 
 positive gain to the wearied body would be 
 sufficient to commend church-going to women 
 in the country whose days are one round of 
 care. 
 
 "I've heard folk say they were too tired to 
 go to church," said a dear old lady in a Con- 
 necticut hamlet. "I don't understand them. 
 Why it's the only place where I ever sit still 
 and fold my hands." Church-going on the 
 part of the mistress of the house will set an 
 example that many of her temporary house- 
 hold will be fain to follow, and all will return 
 the happier and the more uplifted for having 
 worshiped the Lord in his own house on his 
 own day. 
 
 Summer holidays attract the tourist who 
 wishes to see something of an unfamiliar coun- 
 tryside in the briefest available space, and to 
 him they bring a temptation to break the Sab- 
 bath. Well for the man whose principles are 
 
SUMMER HOLIDAYS. 171 
 
 so firmly established that he does not permit 
 any specious argument to persuade him to 
 spend any part of the sacred day in traveling. 
 The silent witness borne by the Christian men 
 and women who refuse to take a train or a 
 goat on the Sabbath for any reason connected 
 with business or pleasure is invaluable. In va- 
 cation days most of us, if away from the safe 
 home moorings, may have an opportunity to 
 so spend our Sabbaths that no one may mis- 
 take our Christian character. 
 
 A young girl the other day told me that dur- 
 ing her summer holidays she intended to study 
 a specialty quite different from her ordinary 
 profession. "I shall find rest in a change of 
 employment," she said, u and I feel that I wish 
 to add something to my resources, so that 
 when I give up teaching, if ever I do, I may 
 have another outlet for my efforts." Many 
 teachers are similarly prudent, and they take a 
 portion of their holiday for summer work. 
 What they do that they may be better fitted 
 for the classroom might be done by students 
 in every department and by younger pupils 
 with advantage. There is no adequate reason 
 for dropping out of the working part of the 
 
172 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 year six or eight or ten weeks of summer, if 
 one has so long an interval at command. One 
 may take some new reading, some different 
 line of investigation, to one's pleasure and 
 profit. And the mother with her children may 
 find real joy in the diverting study of nature, 
 in botany or geology, during the summer days. 
 For a boy of twelve or fourteen, or a girl of 
 the same age, to deliberately drop all study 
 during a lengthy vacation, is to lose a habit of 
 attention and to form a habit of wasteful 
 pleasure seeking. 
 
 A good deal is done in these days of practi- 
 cal Christian endeavor to give greater facilities 
 for recreation to those who are in danger of 
 being left out. Who are they? Our Master 
 said, "The poor ye have always with you," 
 and in our thronged cities they elbow us on 
 every side. Walk through any crowded quar- 
 ter in the tenement districts and the needy are 
 there. They do not, however, clamor for 
 alms, nor hold out their hands for charity. 
 Among the poorest there is much of that de- 
 cent self-respect which shrinks from revealing 
 its need, of that proper pride which will by no 
 means ask a gratuity. Also among the very 
 
SUMMER HOLIDAYS. 173 
 
 poor there is an immense amount of cheerful 
 generosity, and of kindness which is unosten- 
 tatious yet bountiful, which asks no return and 
 which costs self-sacrifice. A Christian woman 
 who has a beautiful country home near New 
 York has for many years given a weekly sum- 
 mer holiday to people who could not afford it 
 if it had to be paid for with money. She sets 
 aside one day in the week, and in the family 
 vocabulary it is known as "Friends' Day." 
 Her grounds are breezy and spacious, her car- 
 riages meet at the train the twelve or fourteen 
 invited guests, who, with or without their 
 babies, have come at her expense from their 
 homes, the railway fare being included in the 
 treat; and when the carriages stop and the 
 guests are helped out, they are made at home 
 for the day in orchard, on lawn, on hillside, or 
 wherever they choose to go. During the mid- 
 summer solstice these favored visitors count 
 the weeks until their turn comes for this idyllic 
 entertainment, and surely the blessing of the 
 Lord will abide with her who thus tenderly 
 ministers to his little ones. Those whose privi- 
 lege it cannot be to minister thus personally to 
 Christ's poor may contribute, according to 
 
174 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 their means, to the guilds and fresh-air funds, 
 and other enterprises which assist the feeble or 
 the impoverished during the hot season. 
 
 Among those who may claim from us our 
 tenderest sympathy are some who have no ma- 
 terial lack, who have money enough for their 
 support, and very probably for luxury as well 
 as comfort, but yet who are stranded like dere- 
 licts on the lee shore of life. Old people, last 
 survivors of their own circle, isolated *by reason 
 of infirmity, blind or in fear of blindness, deaf, 
 and therefore excluded from much that is in- 
 teresting, captious or irritable because of an- 
 other generation, and suffering from loneli- 
 ness, are apt to feel the dreariness of the sum- 
 mer. For under all its gayety and gladness it 
 has its undertone of sorrow, and they hear it, 
 like the far-off beat of the breakers on a deso- 
 late beach. 
 
 A young woman never appears more win- 
 some than when she devotes herself unobtru- 
 sively to the amusement or the cheer of some 
 elderly person who is on the edge of every- 
 thing and whose loneliness is a dead weight on 
 the spirit. Attentions to the old must be both 
 sincere and tactful, for anything not genuine 
 
SUMMER HOLIDAYS. 175 
 
 is repulsive, and none so quickly resent super- 
 fluous aid as they who are aware that their sun 
 is declining. 
 
 Among those who seldom have, yet who 
 would appreciate a regular summer vacation, 
 are domestic servants. Of course, the tenure 
 of service is so uncertain and its term so short 
 in many homes, that it does not occur to the 
 mistress to offer the maid a vacation. In 
 households where the bond is one of friend- 
 ship, as well as of wages, and Mary, Jane, of 
 Martha, Norah, or Bridget stays on from year 
 to year, the summer plans should provide for 
 her a summer rest. A whole week to spend at 
 no cost to her purse, with her people at home, 
 the wages paid as usual, but the maid 
 free from the obligation to cook, wash, iron or 
 sweep in her employer's house, would be a 
 boon in a life that has in it much of wearing 
 monotony. In the best conditions, women age 
 very rapidly in service, and some chance 
 should be offered them whenever it is practica- 
 ble to secure variety and relaxation. 
 
 Singularly, the summer holidays that are so 
 buoyant, and so beneficial to the fortunate ones 
 who share their delights, are often periods of 
 
176 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 strain for those who depend for daily bread 
 on the presence of people at home. A good 
 many well-to-do people absent from town 
 means a dull season, and the dropping of other 
 people from certain pay-rolls. Contributions 
 to charities sometimes fall off in summer, and 
 salaries remain unpaid because funds are low. 
 An almost empty exchequer in a settlement or 
 an asylum or a hospital means and causes dis- 
 tress and delinquency in paying those who 
 carry forward the work. Thoughtless people 
 go away for a summer outing, leaving a trail 
 of small unpaid accounts behind them, and so 
 the corner grocer and the butcher and the fish- 
 man suffer. Otherwise honorable persons 
 have no hesitation whatever in leaving a doc- 
 tor's bill unpaid for months, never thinking of 
 this most useful family friend, unless there is 
 illness in the home, when indeed they can 
 hardly wait for his coming. If summer is to 
 bring joy to every one, then every one must *be 
 fair and just. The eternal foundation of hap- 
 piness must be a rock bottom of justice. 
 
 Our summer holidays, whether passed at 
 home abiding by the stuff, or in rambles far 
 afield, whether we hear the music of the s\irf 
 
SUMMER HOLIDAYS. 177 
 
 or the melody of the winds, whether we linger 
 in the valley or climb to the mountain top, 
 should bring us nearer God. In their leisure 
 let us more than ever study our Bibles, and 
 more than ever commune with God in prayer. 
 
 In this world there are disciples who run on 
 Christ's errands and who till his vineyard. 
 There are those who go with Christ into the 
 secret place, and share with him his anxious 
 search for the lost, and there are others still 
 more favored who sit at the table with him 
 and lean on his breast. May our summer holi- 
 day give us more of that dear intimacy with 
 Christ which is the most heavenly experience 
 ever lived on the earth. 
 
Summer Sabbath- Keeping 
 
 " Whoever loves his native land and fears God 
 must be concerned in the question of Sabbath- 
 keeping the whole year round." 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SUMMER SABBATH 
 KEEPING. 
 
 T/TT^ HY there should be a special temp- 
 y y tation to break the Sabbath in 
 summer, rather than in winter, is 
 one of those things that are puzzling on the 
 surface. Winter brings its formidable storms, 
 its rigors of cold, its hardships of many sorts ; 
 why should we not hug the fireside then, if 
 ever, and forsake attendance on the sanctu- 
 ary ? Summer comes with skies of the bland- 
 est, with genial airs, with perfumed censors 
 swinging from a thousand flowers, with more 
 or less relaxation of business cares and bur- 
 dens, yet in precisely these soft and agreeable 
 conditions, in this charming environment, even 
 Christian people with established principles, 
 are apt to let down the bars. If at home, they 
 declare that the day is too hot, or too enervat- 
 ing to stir abroad, or they delay needful prepa- 
 
1 82 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 ration until it is too late to start, so that the 
 pastor must deliver his message to empty 
 pews. 
 
 On the part of the conscientious there is a 
 fiction very generally believed as a verity that 
 those who do not go to church spend the Sab- 
 bath at home in religious reading and devout 
 contemplation. Honestly, a large portion of 
 the remainder-contingent who have not energy 
 to dress and go forth on Sunday, having been 
 compelled to do so by peremptory week-day 
 claims for six days, intend to devote them- 
 selves to the Bible and the sermon-books or 
 missionary biographies in the home library. 
 They read a chapter or two, perhaps four or 
 five chapters, and they dip into the good book, 
 but there are secular papers and enticing mag- 
 azines close by, and insensibly these prove an 
 alluring bait. In days when the rules were 
 more stringent and the atmosphere more tonic 
 than now, mothers used to lay aside the secular 
 literature of the home on Saturday afternoon, 
 and on Sabbath morning it was not to be found 
 by the most diligent seeker. Reappearing on 
 Monday, it brought with it the appropriate 
 week-day dress and tone, but it did not invade 
 
SUMMER SABBATH KEEPING. 183 
 
 the one sweet and hushed rest-day. On Satur- 
 day night, as the mother tucked it away on its 
 shelf, she might have waved her hand and 
 said, "Beyond these voices there is peace." 
 Nobody puts it out of sight or mind now ; the 
 very children in a thousand homes of other 
 and more sacred traditions, look for their own 
 page in the big Sunday newspaper, and the air 
 of sweet and sacred tranquillity has gone 
 from our Lord's day. The people who do 
 not go to church do not spend their hours 
 in any specially religious or spiritually 
 elevating exercises. If they fancy they 
 do, they cheat themselves. After a little 
 they cease to feel uneasiness on the subject, and 
 quite readily yield up the hours that are not 
 their own to the pursuits that are anything but 
 in line with the purpose and meaning of the 
 hallowed day. 
 
 Away from home in an inn among stran- 
 gers, or on beach or mountain top, people who 
 in their own bailiwick permit no license to 
 themselves or their families seem often to feel 
 at liberty to do as they please. There are 
 rural neighborhoods where no sail whitens the 
 waters, and no oar cuts the waves on the Sab- 
 
1 84 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 bath, where men do not bicycle, nor drive, nor 
 ride, nor take out their automobiles, and where 
 a blessed quiet reigns profoundly through the 
 sacred day. But these are rare. In many sub- 
 urban places, a howling, shrieking, shouting 
 crowd of the baser sort comes on trolley and by 
 steam or boat every Sunday, making the pleas- 
 ant places hideous and picnicking in sight of 
 the sanctuary. This would never have become 
 possible had those who reverenced the 
 Sabbath not set an example of indifference 
 first. 
 
 What is the manifest obligation of the 
 Christian, at home, or in absence, in town or in 
 country, if in health, on the Sabbath day? 
 First and foremost to attend public worship. 
 By simply doing this, by taking a seat in a pew, 
 by listening to the preacher, by joining in 
 prayer and praise, he or she ranges as an indi- 
 vidual on the right side; and as an individual 
 without other spoken word, without ostenta- 
 tion or offensive righteousness in assumption, 
 shows that recognition of God's authority is 
 part of his or her very life and soul. Having 
 attended church, the gain that comes from 
 obedience, and from mingling with others who 
 
SUMMER SABBATH KEEPING. 185 
 
 follow on to know the Lord, flows into the 
 life. 
 
 It is a fact that servants find the day that 
 should bring them rest the hardest day of the 
 whole seven. A more elaborate dinner than 
 usual and a very general entertaining of guests 
 on the Sabbath, has doubled and trebled the 
 work of Mary and Bridget in the kitchen. By 
 the time the many difficult dishes are prepared 
 and served, and the ceremonious meal cleared 
 away, the woman is weary, and she hastens, 
 if it be her afternoon out, to imitate her em- 
 ployers, by a round of visiting and perhaps of 
 entertaining in her own circle and her own 
 home. A simpler menu, less formality and no 
 formal visiting or receiving on the Sabbath 
 would greatly improve our home Sabbaths, 
 and this applies rather more to the present 
 warm season than to colder weather, since the 
 trend of the period is to make the Sabbath a 
 day of worldly amusement. The golf-links 
 are visited in the afternoon by those who go to 
 church in the morning, the excuse being that 
 physical recreation is a necessity, and on purely 
 logical grounds it is difficult to see why there 
 is more harm in playing golf or tennis on Sun- 
 
1 86 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 day than in having friends in to purely social 
 teas and suppers. If you suffer license on any 
 point, why not on all? The only real safety is 
 to allow no letting down of the standard. 
 
 Our ideal of the Sabbath as a day of rest 
 from worldly engagements does not permit us 
 to draw a line perpendicularly through our 
 practice, rigidly forbidding us to be occupied 
 with work, and allowing us to work hard at 
 play. The latter is right in its place, but its 
 place is not on the one day set apart for the 
 cultivation of our spiritual nature. Inertia and 
 mere inactivity are not specially commenda- 
 ble either. What we should aim at rather is 
 some employment of Sabbath time that is in its 
 degree not only restful, but also inspiring and 
 stimulating. 
 
 Every household should, if possible, have 
 its service of song on the hallowed day. A 
 daughter who can play the piano may lead 
 the rest, and either in the morning or the even- 
 ing all may gather and sing hymns and psalms 
 to God's praise. 
 
 When, by reason of mismanagement, the 
 Sabbath is a gloomy and tedious day for chil- 
 dren, a great wrong has been done them. And 
 
SUMMER SABBATH KEEPING. 187 
 
 great is the pity of such a blunder. No day 
 should be so happy, so welcome, so eagerly an- 
 ticipated as this. For one thing, the father is 
 at home, and that ought to make the day a fes- 
 tival. On other days the man of the house 
 must hurry off to business, urged by the spur 
 of necessity, bound by the severity of hours 
 that have no elasticity. Blessedly the Lord's 
 day puts an arrest on commercial energy, and 
 stops the law and the anvil, the buying and 
 selling of the ordinary time. The father is at 
 home. This should be the children's red-letter 
 day in consequence. The mother's morning 
 face should wear a most cheery smile. The 
 house, keyed to melody, should seem brighter 
 than on other days. 
 
 Every child in the world loves to hear 
 stories, and on the Sabbath the best and dear- 
 est stories should be told, the Bible stories, so 
 sweet, so thrilling, so eternally fresh and so 
 dramatic in their movement. Too many chil- 
 dren have a very slight acquaintance with 
 Bible stories now. Let the Sabbath bring a 
 revived interest and a new opportunity. 
 
 At morning prayers the Sunday-school les- 
 son for the day may be very profitably read, 
 
1 88 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 verse about, and the father may, if he choose, 
 either give a running comment of his own, or 
 read from some lesson paper or commentary. 
 Several hymns may be sung, and the prayer, 
 having been offered by father or mother, may 
 be concluded by "Our Father," repeated by 
 all. 
 
 Father and children, if in the country, may 
 walk in the fields or gardens at some time on 
 the Sabbath, worshiping God as they see his 
 wonderful works. 
 
 Wise mothers do not forbid little children's 
 play on God's day. They must play. The 
 lambs do and the squirrels and the birds. 
 Why not the babies? But there may be toys 
 reserved for Sundays, blocks and puzzles, not 
 used on other days. The little girl need not be 
 forbidden to hold her doll, but children soon 
 learn that the Sunday play should be of a 
 quieter, less boisterous order, than the romping 
 of the week. 
 
 All social visiting of a purely formal char- 
 acter is inappropriate on the Lord's day. En- 
 tertainment of friends, which implies cere- 
 mony and dress and the pageantry of fashion, 
 is manifestly not in the fashion of worship, nor 
 
SUMMER SABBATH KEEPING. 189 
 
 yet in the line of repose or of spiritual quicken- 
 ing and refreshment. There are other days 
 when people may be asked to dinner and to the 
 evening company. But the latch-string should 
 be loose for friends who have no other day in 
 which to come, for the young man away from 
 home, for the young girl living among stran- 
 gers, for the old lady whose life is behind her 
 and who is spending her declining years in 
 some asylum of charity. An extra plate and 
 cup for these express Christian hospitality. 
 One's own visiting when it takes the form of a 
 call on the aged, or the crippled, the convales- 
 cent or the bereaved, is in the true spirit of 
 Sabbath-keeping. 
 
 Into our city life by little and little, and in- 
 vading bit by bit, circles where other tradi- 
 tions have prevailed, has crept a habit of util- 
 izing Sabbath evening leisure for social func- 
 tions. This is altogether unfortunate, lower- 
 ing the tone of those who are formally "At 
 Home" and of those who attend receptions 
 and fetes, in which worldliness of an elegant 
 and attractive kind is uppermost, and from 
 which religion, formal or informal, is entirely 
 absent. 
 
 Either in the cold season or the hot, the 
 
190 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Sunday journey should be discouraged. The 
 pressure of the times hurries men on at tremen- 
 dous speed. The man who has business on 
 Monday in a distant city uses the Sunday train, 
 or leaves business late on Saturday, arriving 
 at his home on the Sabbath. People start on 
 pleasure jaunts on Sabbath evening. There 
 are hostelries where no arrivals and no de- 
 partures take place on the Sabbath, but they 
 are exceptional. As a nation, we are fast get- 
 ting into a habit of traveling on the Sabbath 
 when doing so suits our convenience. Might 
 we not here, also, with great profit, show an 
 example of strictness, never employing a Sab- 
 bath train unless the life or death of some one 
 dear to us, or a legitimate Christian engage- 
 ment, were our reasonable excuse ? It is pleas- 
 ure-seeking, not any other thing, that makes 
 the enormous railway profit of Sunday, and, 
 incidentally, the urgency of business, that chal- 
 lenges the Fourth Commandment and dares to 
 fracture it, adds to this exchequer. 
 
 Finally, let conscience rule — conscience, 
 God's voice in the soul. Whoever loves his 
 native land and fears God must be concerned 
 in the question of Sabbath-keeping the whole 
 year round. 
 
Needless Calamities 
 
 To life's very last ember, 
 Life's crowning is Love." 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 NEEDLESS CALAMITIES. 
 
 rEARS ago I knew intimately a young 
 couple who set out on their married 
 life together with favoring winds 
 and all sails spread. Both were of excep- 
 tional charm, and had been more than ordi- 
 narily fortunate in the circumstances of their 
 childhood and upbringing. The man was an 
 ardent student of nature, was peculiarly en- 
 dowed with talents of so high an order that 
 they amounted to genius. The woman was 
 rarely magnetic and rarely beautiful. They 
 were sincere Christians, and when they began 
 their new home the voice of prayer and praise 
 linked it morning and evening to the home 
 above. 
 
 As years slipped away the friends who were 
 oftenest in that house were pained to see a 
 
194 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 subtle but gradual change creep over it. Lit- 
 tle by little the husband let go of his early 
 moorings, and the wife, adoring him, accepted 
 his views, and ceased to hold fast to her faith 
 in God. They dropped out of their habit of 
 church-going, not all at once, but inevitably, as 
 in each change of local habitation it became 
 less and less their desire to have a church- 
 home. In worldly affairs they prospered ex- 
 ceedingly, becoming wealthy and giving their 
 children every educational and social advan- 
 tage. Yet there was poison at the core of their 
 lives. The Christian who lets go of Christ is 
 a pitiable failure, let what may of earthly pros- 
 perity and gladness fill his cup. At the last 
 there must be a great bitterness, and this was 
 the case with these apparently happy people. 
 One, becoming the victim of well-nigh inces- 
 sant physical pain, resorted to opium for ease, 
 and presently was fast gripped in the clutches 
 of a habit more despotic than any other known 
 to man. The other, turning to society for re- 
 lief from ennui, discovered that there was no 
 cure there for a broken spirit and a disap- 
 pointed heart, and to both came the pang of 
 enduring the coldness and ingratitude of sons 
 
NEEDLESS CALAMITIES. 195 
 
 and daughters who made money and luxury 
 their ultimate ends, and despised the simple 
 traditions of an honorable and God-fearing 
 ancestry. 
 
 It was an obscure disaster, never in the 
 press, nor leading to any separation or scandal. 
 But it blighted a home, and brought to the 
 golden eventide of age two who might have 
 been beautiful and blessed to the end, shorn of 
 power, bereft of influence, defeated in the 
 realities of existence, and fated to shipwreck 
 at last. Saddest of all tragedies is the tragedy 
 of those who lose faith in the Unseen, who 
 cease to walk with Jesus in the way, and who 
 fancy that the glare of earth's footlights is 
 brighter than the clear shining of heaven's 
 stars. Money is not everything. Both must 
 be as dust and ashes when they are put in the 
 place of God. Christ pity followers so weak 
 and erring ! 
 
 A situation not dissimilar exemplified in 
 every community is illustrated by the story of 
 another married pair, in which the two drifted 
 insensibly even farther and farther apart, 
 while both remained individually pure and 
 high-minded. The husband, a physician, was 
 
196 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 absorbed in his profession. Science had no 
 more diligent devotee. He so labored, so ex- 
 hausted himself in watchings and cares, so in- 
 creased in skill and learning that his name was 
 known in remote places, and truest test of 
 fame, people came to him from every quarter 
 of the land, that he might minister to their 
 needs. Nobody who sought this man as a phy- 
 sician found him other than courteous, tactful 
 and considerate. His compassion was bound- 
 less. His tenderness was spontaneous. It was 
 only in the home life that he forgot to be gra- 
 cious, only to his own wife, to whom he was 
 often brusque, and whose paling cheek and 
 haggard air gave him no concern. When she 
 one day realized that, though John loved her, 
 he treated her wishes with indifference, and 
 never found a moment to keep an engagement 
 with her, she came to a fatal decision. 
 
 "I will live my own life in independence. I 
 will cultivate my own talents, and have my 
 own circle of friends. My husband shall not 
 find me wanting as his housekeeper and mis- 
 tress of his home. I will pay him all honor, 
 and do what I ought for our children, but I 
 am entitled to a career of my own, and I will 
 
NEEDLESS CALAMITIES. 197 
 
 seek it. John and I are each strong enough to 
 stay together and live our separate lives." 
 
 Here was the beginning of a gap that 
 widened into a gulf, and was never bridged. 
 Outwardly, the two stood in the relation of a 
 loving husband and wife, and the world did 
 not suspect that there was alienation in the 
 home; but the home itself was a changed and 
 marred spot, no longer sweet, no longer a 
 refuge, no longer a haven of peace. The great 
 surgeon in his later life was an unhappy and 
 disappointed man, and fame's laurel was to 
 him a withered and useless wreath, not worth 
 the possession of a man. His wife, who had 
 been a sunny-hearted, blithe girl, gained lit- 
 erary distinction, and discovered that it could 
 not cover an aching heart. The tragedy was 
 commonplace, and of their own making. It is 
 eternally true, that "he that saveth his life 
 shall lose it." The husband who treats a wife 
 with indifference, as husbands sometimes do, 
 often does so through sheer preoccupation and 
 the confidence of assured fidelity on the 
 wife's part. From his very certainty that his 
 love is unfaltering and that hers is constant 
 and unchanging in character, a husband may 
 
198 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 grow superficially negligent. Women prize 
 little attentions, little compliments, occasional 
 small gifts and trifling courtesies quite as 
 highly after marriage as before it, and their 
 absence may deeply pain a very affectionate 
 nature. Here enters the husband's peril. 
 When the wife deliberately accepts her 
 lot and becomes resigned to negligence, 
 and sets out to find compensations, however 
 innocent in themselves, she meets her peril. 
 Though there may be common interests and 
 common memories to bind them together, the 
 crystalline perfection of their union is flawed, 
 and they cannot have it mended without the 
 fracture showing a scar. 
 
 When young lives reach the parting of the 
 ways, where the decisions that affect maturity 
 must be made, it is well for their elders to re- 
 frain from meddling. A man may with pro- 
 priety give counsel to his son, advising him 
 what profession to select, or what business to 
 adopt, but he should beware of unduly urging 
 him, or of arbitrarily compelling him to a 
 course that may not be in the line of his ability. 
 A father who, by pains and labor and sagacity? 
 built up a great business, naturally hopes to see 
 
NEEDLESS CALAMITIES, 199 
 
 his eldest son carry it forward, and has visions 
 of what the house may reach if the boy puts 
 into it the energy and vitality of his youth. 
 The boy, on the other hand, may not have in- 
 herited his father's tastes and talents; may 
 have in his blood a roving drop,, and wish to 
 become an explorer; or an inventor's genius, 
 and yearn to make new combinations; or an 
 artist's touch, and wish to paint or to play. In 
 any of these instances, the blunder that forces 
 the younger man into the place where he must 
 always be a wretched misfit is likely to be an ir- 
 reparable one, to have far-reaching effects that 
 may be ruinous. 
 
 We must learn in the current of home life 
 to avoid reefs and shoals. It takes skilful 
 management and careful handling to keep the 
 little ship of home safe on the seas of life. 
 
 Because at some point or other a mistake 
 has been made, it is not worth while to go on 
 heaping further mistakes on the pile. The 
 blessed thing about domestic life is that love 
 suffereth long and is kind, and that if there be 
 honesty and candor, losses may often be trans- 
 formed to gains. There are curious idiosyn- 
 crasies in some families which crop out in 
 
200 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 foolish contentions over trifles. Money some- 
 times causes disruption among kindred, a thing 
 to be regretted when one remembers that ma- 
 terial wealth is so mutable and family ties so 
 strong. Surely the disposition of an estate 
 ought not to set widely apart those whom God 
 meant to be near one another in the ranks of 
 life. My point is that no one should be too 
 proud or too stubborn to acknowledge him- 
 self or herself in the wrong if convinced that 
 wrong has been done ; that no one should hesi- 
 tate to receive and pardon an offender who is 
 sorry for an offense. Our Lord's teaching is 
 very plain here. "How often shall my brother 
 sin against me, and I forgive him?" "I say 
 unto thee," was Christ's answer, "not until 
 seven times, but until seventy times seven." 
 Forgiveness to the erring indefinitely is the law 
 of the Master. In households where strife 
 and bitterness have unfortunately entered, let 
 love and pardon bring back peace and sweet- 
 ness. Do not wait till the grave covers the one 
 estranged, to hold out love's green olive 
 branch, for it will then be too late. The 
 golden time for reconciliation is to-day. 
 
 Many a tragedy has its origin in a hasty 
 
NEEDLESS CALAMITIES. 201 
 
 word. If people would only repress the word 
 of irony, the shaft of sarcasm or the thrust of 
 reproach, and wait until they are calm and self- 
 restrained, before speaking in anger or re- 
 proof, hearts would escape needless wounds. 
 It is so easy to misunderstand our nearest and 
 dearest. We do not always understand our- 
 selves. Our very motives are so mixed, our 
 impulses are so surprising, our acts are so un- 
 foreseen, that we baffle our own explanation, 
 and if this is so, surely we should not sit in 
 judgment on our neighbors. At least, we 
 should be reluctant to pronounce sentence too 
 soon. In the intimacy of the household, where 
 we are off guard, it is especially a very needful 
 thing to guide well our daily course, and to re- 
 frain from speech that may wound another 
 child, or an aged one under the roof. 
 
 That everywhere there may be gladness, 
 that life may blossom as the world blossoms 
 in the May sunshine, we must lend a hand. 
 Said Dean Stanley, "Who is thy neighbor? It 
 is the sufferer, wherever, whoever, whatsoever 
 he be. Wherever thou hearest the cry of dis- 
 tress, wherever thou seest any one brought 
 across the path by the chances and changes of 
 
202 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 life, that is, by the Providence of God, whom 
 it is in thy power to help, he is thy neighbor." 
 Taking this view of life and opportunity, we 
 may avert many catastrophes, and bring to 
 pass many delights. 
 
 "When you sum up the year 
 
 With its glory of leaves, 
 Its seed-time and harvest, 
 
 Its buds and its sheaves ; — 
 When you get to December, 
 
 You sing the same tune 
 That 'twas sweet to remember 
 
 And carol, in June. 
 
 "From the day of your youth 
 
 To the day of white age, 
 Through the book of your life 
 
 To the very last page, 
 When comes a great angel 
 
 The 'Finis' to write, 
 The same true evangel 
 
 Is aye your delight. 
 
 "There be those who will tell you 
 
 Of jewels and gold, 
 Of investments, a story 
 
 Of wonder unfold. 
 One dividend never 
 
 Will fail to impart 
 The self-same wealth ever, 
 
 To dower the heart. 
 
NEEDLESS CALAMITIES, 203 
 
 'Let the spring zephyrs blow, 
 
 Or the winter winds howl. 
 Let fortune smile blandly 
 
 Or sullen fate scowl. 
 From June to December, 
 
 What sky arch above, 
 To life's very last ember, 
 
 Life's crowning is love." 
 
Praise Go J from JVh 
 
 YjW 
 
 All Blessings FIozl' 
 
 "".Ihem we axe candid with ourselves in 
 
 : -"- :.r_i: i... : _r '..--- r..i-t ;.e-tr. : .t-.vf t-i -;:.:. : : r. 
 tinnal acts of favor undeserved, sent lis by ©tit 
 1 ovine F2.1r.rr 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 PRAISE GOD FROM 
 
 WHOM ALL BLESSINGS 
 
 FLOW. 
 
 " jT) RAISE ye the Lord. Oh, give 
 jf thanks unto the Lord, for he 
 is good, for his mercy endureth 
 forever." 
 
 The swiftly revolving year reaches one 
 period when we are reminded by those in high 
 places of the duty to render thanksgiving. 
 Looking up the subject in the Bible, we are 
 impressed with the ecstasy of gratitude which 
 fills the sacred writers with such rapture of 
 delight that it continually breaks out in accla- 
 mations of exulting melody. Praise is the 
 burden of many a noble psalm. Praise is the 
 love song of the prophets. Praise is the dom- 
 inant note of the apostles. The Book is a 
 grand litany of triumphant praise. 
 
208 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 Then we turn to Nature and we realize that 
 all God's works, the light, the darkness, the 
 sun, the stars, the dew, the frost, the storm, 
 the rejoicing river, the unresting sea, the lofty 
 mountain, the waving harvest, everything com- 
 bines to praise the Lord. 
 
 "The spacious firmament on high, 
 With all the blue ethereal sky, 
 And spangled heavens, a shining frame, 
 Their great Original proclaim. 
 
 "The unwearied sun, from day to day, 
 Does his Creator's power display, 
 And publishes to every land 
 The work of an Almighty Hand. 
 
 "Soon as the evening shades prevail, 
 The moon takes up the wondrous tale, 
 And nightly to the listening earth 
 Repeats the story of her birth ; 
 
 "While all the stars that round her burn, 
 And all the planets in their turn, 
 Confirm the tidings as they roll, 
 And spread the truth from pole to pole. 
 
 "What though in solemn silence all 
 Move round the dark terrestrial ball? 
 What though no real voice nor sound 
 Amid their radiant orbs be found? 
 
PRAISE GOD. 209 
 
 "In reason's ear they all rejoice, 
 And utter forth a glorious voice; 
 For ever singing, as they shine, 
 'The Hand that made us is divine.' " 
 
 Now, let us turn to David's psalms and 
 again lose materialism, sordidness, and com- 
 mercialism, in a sense of the majesty of crea- 
 tion. 
 
 What are some of the features in our lives, 
 that lead us, at this good time, to give God 
 thanks ? 
 
 One is, that we know him as our Father. 
 Into every conception of fatherhood, person- 
 ality enters and abides. Not as a dim, vague, 
 distant and all-powerful ruler of the universe, 
 do we approach our God. No, we say in 
 childlike confidence, "Our Father which art in 
 heaven!" — the prayer which our Elder 
 Brother taught us. "We have erred and 
 strayed like lost sheep, we have followed too 
 much the devices and desires of our own 
 hearts," but God is our Father! He knoweth 
 our infirmities, he remembereth that we are 
 dust. Like as a father pitieth his children, so 
 the Lord pitieth them that fear him. 
 
 A father here on the earth stands between 
 
210 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 his children and their own inexperience, wil- 
 fulness and wickedness. A father, here on 
 the earth, pardons and restores to favor the 
 child who, having transgressed, is penitent 
 and seeks forgiveness. Shall our Father in 
 heaven do less? 
 
 The realization of our Divine Father as a 
 person whom we approach continually with- 
 out fear and in utter trust is our greatest 
 reason for thankfulness. Unhappy indeed is 
 that lonely lost child who has gotten away 
 from this blessed reality. 
 
 Another precious reason for thankfulness is 
 that we may be intimate with Jesus Christ. 
 When he was here on this earth, the 
 disciples were intimate with him. They 
 walked with him, heard him speak, 
 talked freely with him, saw his mira- 
 cles and broke bread with him. Some 
 were more intimate than others. At times he 
 selected two or three to go with him into the 
 deeper mysteries, to share the heavier pangs. 
 One lay on Jesus' breast — think of that daring 
 act of love, which let John thus lean on the 
 Master, pillowing his head above that beating 
 heart of Christ! 
 
PRAISE GOD. 211 
 
 We may have such intimacy now. The 
 Comforter has come, and, leading us into the 
 realms unknown of men, he enables us to find 
 our Master in every vicissitude, to seek him in 
 every emergency. Some care more for Jesus 
 than others do. They have more of his light 
 in their faces. We jostle one another on the 
 high road, we meet in crowds and apart, we 
 are never mistaken when we see in any human 
 countenance the peculiar radiance which 
 speaks of an indwelling Christ. Friends, if 
 you and I are intimate with Jesus Christ, our 
 cup of thankfulness this year may well over- 
 flow. 
 
 Naturally when we begin to count our bless- 
 ings, the home dear ones come first. I wonder 
 if we are grateful as we ought to be for the 
 great circle of these loved ones whom we have 
 not yet met, great grandparents and remote 
 kindred who have transmitted to us the quali- 
 ties that make us what we are, but concerning 
 whom we have as little thought as if they had 
 never existed. You know, do you not, that 
 practically very few people realize in daily life 
 that they ever had ancestors of four, five, six 
 generations ago ? But we would not be what 
 
212 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 we are, any of us, if they had not lived and 
 wrought manfully. So, if they have be- 
 queathed to us vigorous health, hopefulness, 
 courage, tenacity, ardor in pursuit, strength in 
 possession, a stainless name, lofty ideals, clean 
 traditions, we may well thank God for them, 
 our home dear ones, whom we shall meet and 
 love by and by. 
 
 For the precious ones in the family circle, 
 fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sweet- 
 hearts, friends, and the great beautiful throng 
 of the children who brighten every day and 
 sweeten every cup and ease every hardship, we 
 must evermore be thankful. If we are thank- 
 ful we shall be just, gentle, considerate and 
 self-denying. Every noble virtue flourishes in 
 the soil of thankfulness. 
 
 Many a time we ought to praise God and 
 we fail to do so, just because nothing happens. 
 It is our impulse to say "Thank God!" when 
 we escape accident and are aware of it; when 
 other homes are burned to the ground and the 
 fire leaps over ours; when our children come 
 through fevers to convalescence. Ah, should 
 we not be deeply grateful night after night, 
 when the latch key turns and the man of the 
 
PRAISE GOD. 213 
 
 house comes home safe, when trains do not 
 run off tracks, when nobody is ill, when noth- 
 ing out of the blessed ordinary course of the 
 daily routine occurs to startle or make us 
 afraid? 
 
 Prominent among causes for daily praise is 
 the fact that our lot is cast in a Christian land. 
 The land is not altogether what we wish. On 
 this side and that, vice uprears its head, and 
 Satan spreads his snares. The presence of the 
 saloon and the menace of a violated Lord's 
 day detract from the land's well-being. Not- 
 withstanding all, this is a land that on the 
 whole is pledged for righteousness. God-fear- 
 ing people dwell here. Church spires dot every 
 valley, gleam from many a hill. Home mis- 
 sions are striving to redeem the communities 
 that are farthest from the influences that bless 
 and save. On the frontier, in the mining 
 camp, among the red men, the white banner of 
 the cross is borne high by heroic and devoted 
 men. Ask any foreign missionary, and he will 
 tell you that in lands where idolatry prevails 
 the very air is polluted, that the depression of 
 wickedness, cruelty and malignant evil is as a 
 dead weight upon the heart, a blight on every 
 
2i 4 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 prospect. Thank God we dwell in a Christian 
 land. 
 
 Whenever the temptation to fret against 
 the daily allotment of duty and task surges in 
 upon you or me, is it not a healthful thing to 
 count up our mercies? They exceed our 
 trials. Not one of us but has a hundred occa- 
 sions for comforting recognition of God's 
 goodness, for a single one of distress under 
 some grievous discipline. When we are can- 
 did with ourselves we must own that all our 
 lives have been blessed with continual acts of 
 favor undeserved, sent us by our loving 
 Father. 
 
 Has your memory no record of days that 
 brought sudden surprises of blessing? Just as 
 now and then in traveling we turn a corner, 
 and lo! a glimpse of unspeakable beauty 
 makes us catch our breath in delight, so there 
 flash upon us on life's road great and over- 
 whelming beams of light. And all that was 
 clouded is forgotten in the fulness of the 
 glory. Mounts of transfiguration are given 
 to many disciples, even yet, and they never 
 climb them except in the company of Jesus. 
 Therefore, it is well to be constantly close to 
 
PRAISE GOD, 215 
 
 him, and to live in that state of communion 
 where he can grant special unfoldings of 
 vision, to show us heaven as near at hand. 
 For these surprises of blessing, how our souls 
 lift up their joyful songs. 
 
 We sometimes with profit read an old-time 
 anthem. Let us quote — 
 
 "If any one would tell you the shortest, 
 surest way to all happiness and all perfection, 
 he must tell you to make a rule to yourself to 
 thank and praise God for everything that hap- 
 pens to you. For it is certain that whatever 
 seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank 
 and praise God for it, you turn it into a bless- 
 ing. Could you, therefore, work miracles, 
 you could not do more for yourself than by 
 this thankful spirit, for it heals with a word- 
 speaking, and turns all that it touches into 
 happiness." 
 
 Seldom are we able, in the first anguish of 
 bereavement, to rejoice that our kindred and 
 our friends have finished their warfare and 
 reached the shores of peace. We want them 
 here where we can see them, talk to them, feel 
 the cheer of their companionship. Yet 
 mothers have lived long enough to understand 
 
216 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 that it was better for their children to have 
 been taken in the dew of the morning, and 
 children have thanked God, later on, for 
 parents removed before a wind of calamity- 
 smote the four corners of the house. In the 
 orderly sequence of incident and event, most 
 of us learn that the plan of God for our lives 
 was a much better plan than any we could 
 have made for ourselves. The outcome of 
 the most afflicting occurrences is blessed to the 
 believing heart, in the end. Therefore, there 
 is true piety in being thankful, let whatever 
 may befall us. 
 
 The charm of our American Thanksgiving 
 Day lies in its character of a family festival. 
 Sons and daughters go home for Thanksgiv- 
 ing. Scattered clans are brought together. 
 Large families, rarely able to surround one 
 table, meet in a central home, and the family 
 bond is strengthened. In old homesteads, 
 where parents are left with remnants of a once 
 merry group, a maiden daughter, a bachelor 
 son, a grandchild or two, through the twelve- 
 month, there is great gladness at Thanksgiv- 
 ing for every train and boat and stage and 
 carry-all that drops passengers at wayside sta- 
 
PRAISE GOD. 217 
 
 tions will help to bring the children home for 
 a day of mirth and reunion. "Praise God 
 from whom all blessings flow." Let every- 
 thing that hath breath praise him, and all 
 nature join in the hallelujah chorus. 
 
Shut-In Friends 
 
 " Pray for and with the sick, but do not forget 
 that their want and pain are prayers that are 
 never unheard at the throne of divine pity." 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 SHUT-IN FRIENDS. 
 
 /AM writing on a winter's day, and this is 
 to be a winter's tale. The white gar- 
 ments of the newly fallen snow are 
 lying warm and soft over the fields where next 
 year's bread is growing; the wind is very still, 
 as if hushed by a mother's voice, the brooding 
 skies are gray. Every bush and tree and fence 
 and roof so far as I can see has its burden of 
 Nature's ermine, and the day is tranquil and 
 beautiful, though cold. 
 
 In a house that I note from my window, 
 one of God's dearest saints is drifting out, 
 it would seem, with the hours of this day; 
 there is neither "sound nor foam," but perfect 
 peace in that chamber which, for one who has 
 long suffered, will soon be indeed a chamber 
 of peace, and luminous with heaven. What 
 
222 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 will it be to one long shut-in, to enter the land 
 where the inhabitants shall never say, "I am 
 sick"? 
 
 There are always those who, by reason of 
 age or infirmity, are housed in the winter, who 
 must avoid its rigors by remaining in a bland 
 and pleasantly heated atmosphere, and who 
 wait for spring with the wistful longing of 
 prisoners anticipating release from their 
 bonds. They are temporarily shut-in, and 
 have the advantage of knowing that when the 
 time of the singing of birds returns, they too 
 will preen their feathers, and sit in the sun- 
 shine and walk forth into a blossom-fragrant 
 world. The shut-in friends who are perma- 
 nently disabled, chained to a couch or a chair, 
 held there by iron clutches of pain, or 
 weighted by increasing weakness, are objects 
 of deeper sympathy from us than the others. 
 
 Even at the worst, the shut-in sufferer may 
 dare to hope for alleviation or improvement, 
 if not for cure. Pain wears itself out, and is 
 succeeded by ease, or a remedy is discovered, 
 or one grows so accustomed to its daily grind 
 that the torture is lessened. Among the most 
 cheerful, the most heroic, the most blithe- 
 
SHUT-IN FRIENDS. 223 
 
 hearted women I have ever known, I think of 
 two, whose portion for years was never-ceas- 
 ing pain, and confinement to their homes. 
 
 In Elizabeth's room, the gayety of the 
 house centered, and neither husband nor child 
 crossed her door-sill without receiving a radi- 
 ant smile. She grew so thin that the rare face 
 was but a transparency for the rare soul; her 
 dark eyes glowed in her wasted countenance 
 like great stars; her whole being became 
 ethereal before her fetters were broken, but 
 there was no lowering of her flag, no diminu- 
 tion of her courage. She was able through 
 God's grace to "drink her cup of woe, tri- 
 umphant over pain," and that shut-in life was 
 a benediction. 
 
 Agnes was younger, a mere girl, blue-eyed, 
 fair-haired, exquisite. She gave you the image 
 of "a lily among thorns." A mysterious 
 malady sapped her vitality, laid her low, kept 
 her long in anguish. At last snapped the sil- 
 ver chord. About her, too, there was a win- 
 some sweetness, there was an utter absence of 
 fretful complaint and repining. There was 
 an exquisite self-abnegation. 
 
 Such examples prove that there is ameliora- 
 
224 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 tion in the most distressing affliction that 
 comes through physical feebleness or disease. 
 When the three children walked in Nebuchad- 
 nezzar's fiery furnace, seven times heated, one 
 was seen to walk through the flames with 
 them, and his form was like the Son of God. 
 
 Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, once wrote 
 of a beloved shut-in sufferer in these words : 
 
 "I must conclude with a more delightful 
 subject, my most dear and blessed sister. I 
 never saw a more perfect instance of the spirit 
 of power and of love and of a sound mind; in- 
 tense love, almost to the annihilation of sel- 
 fishness, — a daily martyrdom for twenty 
 years, during which she adhered to her early 
 formed resolution of never talking about her- 
 self; thoughtful about the very pins and rib- 
 bons of my wife's dress, about the making of a 
 doll's cap for a child; but of herself save only 
 as regarded her ripening in all goodness, 
 wholly thoughtless; enjoying everything love- 
 ly, graceful, beautiful, high-minded, whether 
 in God's works or man's, with the keenest 
 relish; inheriting the earth to the very fulness 
 of the promise, though never leaving her crib 
 nor changing her posture; and preserved 
 
SHUT-IN FRIENDS. 225 
 
 through the very valley of the shadow of 
 death from all fear or impatience, or from 
 every cloud of impaired reason, which might 
 mar the beauty of Christ's glorious work." 
 
 "The folded hands seem idle. 
 
 If folded at his word, 
 'Tis a holy service, trust me, 
 In obedience to the Lord." 
 
 The rule made for herself by this sister, 
 who left with her famous brother so deep and 
 enduring an impression of sanctity and pa- 
 tience, is a good one for every invalid. As- 
 sailed by the temptation to describe one's ail- 
 ments, unless the auditor be a physician or a 
 nurse, and therefore obliged to listen, because 
 privileged to help, one should firmly close 
 one's lips. Because we are interesting to our- 
 selves, because we half-unconsciously feel that 
 our pangs are a sort of patent of distinction, 
 we are apt to discourse too freely about our 
 headaches, our neuralgia, our nervous ex- 
 haustion. Nothing is less wholesome for 
 those who are ill, and nothing more weari- 
 some to those who are well, than recitals of 
 special varieties of illness, and enumerations 
 
226 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 of the treatments that have been evoked for 
 relief. 
 
 Among my readers there may be somebody 
 who notices that people do not speak so clearly 
 as they used to, that tones are muffled, that she 
 does not catch every delicate shade in a con- 
 versation. In short, deafness is creeping on 
 stealthily, it may be certainly. Well, what of 
 it? Proper treatment may cure or relieve it; 
 there are audiphones which help; in peculiar 
 conditions of the air, the deafest person hears 
 more than in other atmospheric environment. 
 If one is really growing irreparably deaf, she 
 may as well reflect that she will be saved from 
 hearing a good many trivial and some disa- 
 greeable things; and, thank God! memory 
 never loses the sweetness of the music it has 
 heard, the entrancing joy of the harmonies 
 that have filled it in the past. 
 
 Equally, should the stealthy advance of the 
 foe be a threat to the precious sight of one's 
 eyes, the gift of all others inestimable, why 
 yield to despair, why involve those you love 
 in the tendency to morbid depression which 
 overclouds the soul as the thought of darkened 
 years appalls it? You may never, my friend, 
 
SHUT-IN FRIENDS. 227 
 
 know those darkened years. None of us has a 
 lease of this mortal life signed and delivered 
 in her hand. The thing you fear may be ar- 
 rested, averted; you may have sight enough 
 for your needs to the latest hour you stay on 
 earth. If not, there are strong and ready 
 hands everywhere to aid you, bright eyes to 
 look for you, and read to you, and good times 
 waiting all round your path. Do not bemoan 
 yourself over any present disturbance, or over 
 any future ill wind of destiny. You are not 
 among the shadows yet. Never dwell among 
 them. Insist, with every power of your mind, 
 in staying in the open, so far as thought and 
 feeling are concerned. You may do this, 
 though your body be pent up within the con- 
 fines of four narrow walls. 
 
 Perhaps the peril that most constantly men- 
 aces the invalid is self-absorption. The well 
 have a thousand outside interests. A man 
 goes to business, works hard all day, comes 
 home at night, tired, but not dull. He has 
 seen people, has rubbed against them. The 
 friction of human intercourse has kept his 
 mental weapons smooth and bright. To the 
 person, man or woman, who spends, day in 
 
228 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 and day out, his or her life in a darkened 
 room, there are few affairs that lift the mind 
 from its own mournful contemplations. A 
 girl or a woman in a normal state of health 
 cares how she looks, and her dress is properly 
 a matter of importance in her thought. Why 
 should one care what she wears, when she lies 
 in bed, when her only change of raiment is 
 from night-robe to dressing-sacque ? 
 
 So far as practicable, I counsel each shut-in 
 woman to strive against carelessness about her 
 toilette. The invalid should be dainty, and, 
 if she can manage it, fastidious. On spotless 
 neatness about her bed and room she should 
 insist. She should teach herself to care about 
 the life of the household, yes, and about the 
 whirling, rushing life of the great world, the 
 roar of which comes so faintly to her, as she 
 tarries in her chamber, in sanctuary. 
 
 If you who are well and strong wish to 
 help your invalid friends, do so by the exer- 
 cise of stout common sense. Should you send 
 them books, they need not be exclusively devo- 
 tional or directly religious in character. Good 
 books we all require, but our reading is varied 
 in health, and it ought to be in illness. The 
 
SHUT-IN FRIENDS. 229 
 
 person who can bear to hear reading may be 
 much more helped by a bright entertaining 
 story than by a classic like Baxter's "Saint's 
 Rest," or Owen's "Four-fold State." Do not 
 assume that illness must be limited to an intel- 
 lectual strain pitched wholly in a minor key. 
 Bring some one to the house who can play the 
 violin, or sing, and bring, too, the stimulant of 
 your own faith and courage and gladness. 
 Pray for and with the sick, but do not forget 
 that their want and pain are prayers that are 
 never unheard at the throne of divine pity. 
 
 Blessings on those neighborly souls who 
 have leisure in the midst of full lives to think 
 of those who are laid aside. A letter carries 
 more comfort than you dream to the invalid 
 who was not expecting it. When poverty 
 complicates the case, and the shut-in friend is 
 forced to do without the little luxuries that 
 make easier a hard lot, love may tactfully sup- 
 ply some of the lack. A gentle word of com- 
 passion goes far, if it be sincere. I have 
 known invalids crushed by the well-meant but 
 brusque assurances of visitors that they were 
 surprised to see them looking so fine and 
 strong, absolutely as if there were nothing at 
 
230 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 all wrong. In gifts, in attentions, in speech, 
 the guest in the sick-room must contrive not to 
 be burdensome, nor inopportune, nor untrue. 
 Nowhere is discretion at a greater premium 
 than here. Nowhere is there more need of 
 that charity which is long-suffering, which has 
 caught its secret from Christ's own heart of 
 love. 
 
 After all, the softest pillow on which the 
 weary head can rest is acceptance of the 
 Father's will, as personal, as individual, as 
 kind and gracious, and sure to be for the best. 
 Rest, dear sufferer, on the "sweet will of 
 God." It never yet made one mistake. 
 
At Christmas Time 
 
 " Somehow, the holly says ' Merry Christmas ' 
 in accents more tuneful than speech. It is itself 
 a song without words." 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 AT CHRISTMAS TIME. 
 
 y/LL the year round the dear Christmas 
 - /^j[ holly is biding its time in the lone- 
 some wood. When the snowdrops 
 come and the jonquils blow, when the roses 
 bloom and the lilies shine, when the salvia 
 strings its jewels and the asters cloud the hills 
 with purple and amethyst, we have no need 
 of holly. But the winter winds blow, the 
 great rivers are ice-locked, the fields are deep 
 in snowy silence, and over the vast white 
 world the golden bells of the Christmas tide 
 are ringing loud and clear. How lofty is their 
 message; how sweet their choral, as they re- 
 mind us of that old night in Bethlehem when 
 the angels brought heaven's greeting to earth. 
 "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
 peace, good-will toward men," for lo! in a 
 
234 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 mother's arms lies a little child, and Jesus the 
 Saviour is born. 
 
 When we keep the Christmas feast we want 
 the Christmas holly. Now is the time for 
 home festivals, for church reunions, for good 
 times in the newsboys' lodging house, in the 
 orphan asylum, among the very, very poor, 
 and in the king's palace, too. For there is this 
 about the holly, with the bright green prickly 
 leaf and the bright red gleaming berry, that 
 while it grew in the lonesome wood, it became 
 strong and sturdy, and steadfast and generous, 
 so that it might suit all classes and conditions 
 of men. A spray of it is prettier than dia- 
 monds in the bodice of the princess, and it is a 
 beautiful decoration on the frieze coat of the 
 day laborer. Stuck in a broken pitcher on the 
 shelf in a mountain cabin, it is as much at 
 home as in a crystal vase in a city mansion. 
 The Christmas holly is a great commoner, so 
 great that its aristocracy is never challenged. 
 Bind it with the evergreen garland and hang 
 it over the organ pipes ; it will tremble in har- 
 mony with the music. Carry it to the sick 
 room and set it on the little stand where 
 fevered fingers may caress it. To the invalid 
 
AT CHRISTMAS TIME. 235 
 
 it will speak of health and cheer and fragrance 
 undying. Send it to the counting-house. A 
 branch of it on the merchant's desk shall dis- 
 prove his boastful assertion that sentiment 
 and business are invariably divorced. Tie it 
 on the Christmas basket that carries its sur- 
 prise of food and raiment to the destitute, 
 where they crowd about a naked hearth. Slip 
 it into the Christmas box that adds one more 
 joy to the joys uncounted that bless the path- 
 way of the happy bride. 
 
 Somehow, the holly says "Merry Christ- 
 mas" in accents more tuneful than speech. It 
 is itself a song without words. We loved it 
 when we were children, and if we have lived 
 until gray hairs, we love it still. 
 
 In the beautiful twilight of the curtained 
 parlor, with the rose-red embers and the sil- 
 ver-white ash symbolizing the waning of the 
 year, we are apt to think of Christmas-past 
 as well as of Christmas-present. Do you re- 
 member how interminable the space used to 
 be between one Christmas and another? 
 Twelve months to the girl or the boy who once 
 stood for you and answered to your name 
 seemed a wide section of eternity. The mind 
 
236 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 refused to grasp the distance. And, oh ! what 
 ecstasy in the weeks, busy, eager, zestful, 
 crammed with strange mysteries, that led up 
 through December's bleakness to the day of 
 days. So much to do, so much to wait for; so 
 much to give; so much to feel! And then — 
 
 "The night before Christmas, when all through the 
 house 
 Not a creature was stirring, a rat or a mouse." 
 
 Then the stockings were hung in the chim- 
 ney corner, and you went to bed wide-awake 
 and intended to stay so, and sleep stole on you 
 like an army out of an ambuscade. You have 
 no such nights now, but your children have. 
 The charm of the Christmas-tide is perennial. 
 You are blithe with the children, because in 
 every Christmas-present a Christmas-past sur- 
 vives. Be as sober-footed as care itself the 
 rest of the year, at Christmas you are a child 
 again. God pity you if this possibility has 
 been lost ! if you have not the faith in him, the 
 love for your fellows which makes you child- 
 like in acceptance of his blessedness at the 
 Christmas season. Not to know something of 
 the child's simplicity, of the child's abandon, 
 of the child's humility and gratitude, for 
 
A T CHRIS TMAS TIME. 237 
 
 favors received is to be out of the procession, 
 to sit beggared and bankrupt by the wayside, 
 while the ranks pass by with drums beating 
 and colors flying. 
 
 We cannot but miss some loved faces in the 
 Christmas groups, for there are in most 
 homes vacant chairs. As Dr. Chadwick has 
 said: 
 
 "It singeth low in every heart, 
 
 We hear it each and all — 
 A song of those who answer not, 
 
 However we may call. 
 They throng the silence of the breast; 
 
 We see them as of yore — 
 The kind, the true, the brave, the sweet, 
 
 Who walk with us no more." 
 
 But there is no jar in our Christmas jubila- 
 tion because of the absent who have gone 
 home. They are with God, with that God 
 who so loved the world that he sent his only 
 Son to redeem it. God is with us. His Child 
 of Heaven tabernacled in our clay. God is 
 with them, and they behold the face of the 
 risen Saviour in the land where all is love. I 
 wonder if there be not a richer note in the 
 chorals there on Christmas morning, caught 
 
238 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 from our chorals here, which rise from thou- 
 sands and tens of thousands to praise the One 
 whose hands and feet bear the marks of the 
 nails. Nay, our absent do not darken our 
 Christmas joy. They make it only the more 
 radiant. 
 
 When we abide in the past, we show by that 
 token that we have grown old. To look back 
 upon it with tender yearning is not to stay in 
 it, not to rest there. Being all young together, 
 we may find it a delight to dwell in Christmas- 
 present. 
 
 The woods where the holly grew tough and 
 staunch and thrifty are quiet, but out of their 
 peace they are sending something most 
 precious to the crowded streets and the busy 
 towns and the rushing, laughing, wistful, ve- 
 hement, overflowing life of the people in ham- 
 let and city at Christmas-tide. Ebb days are 
 over. Love and pleasure are now at flood. 
 The shops glitter with the spoils of commerce 
 — laces like hoar-frost for delicacy and like 
 cobwebs for fineness ; pictures that hold nature 
 enchanted in their spells, gems that mirror 
 wave and sky in their rainbow depths, silks 
 which shimmer in a luster that rivals sunshine 
 
 
AT CHRISTMAS TIME. 239 
 
 on the sea, books of ruch beauty and variety 
 as are beyond words to describe are among the 
 treasures that tempt the plethoric purse. The 
 pocketbook that bulges with wealth may easily 
 collapse in the effort to choose among so many 
 splendors. The lean purse, if judgment and 
 painstaking control it, may also buy braveries 
 for its loved ones in this modern Vanity Fair 
 which, less unfriendly than Bunyan's and 
 equally of surpassing pomp, attracts us all. 
 
 A good book contains in its essence so much 
 that is imperishable that it is a charming 
 Christmas gift to offer one's friend. Selected 
 with a view to the pleasure it may convey and 
 to the endurance of that pleasure, tied in white 
 paper with a ribbon and a rose and a bit of 
 holly, it is an unrivalled Christmas messenger. 
 
 But if one have to deny one's self the dear 
 joy of giving at Christmas-tide because one 
 has little money to spend, one need not 
 despair. Few are so poor that they may not 
 walk through the Christmas markets and pur- 
 chase a bunch of evergreen, few cannot com- 
 pass a sheet of paper and a postage stamp. A 
 postal card may carry a sweet phrase, a per- 
 sonal message, around the globe. With what 
 
2 4 o THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 wealth of kind remembrance a telegram may 
 be freighted, and how comforting it is just to 
 be assured that one is not forgotten, just to 
 know that one is held close to some heart, and 
 prayed for at night and morning. In the 
 brightness of our Christmas-present let us 
 leave out none for whom we ought to pray. 
 
 "God has given me a great love for my 
 own," said a friend lately. If God has com- 
 mitted to you or to me a talent for loving, a 
 genius for making others happy, a rare unsel- 
 fishness, let us ask him to make us still richer, 
 to help us so to broaden out and enlarge the 
 sphere of our affection, that it may include the 
 whole world. 
 
 Then, when Christmas comes, and the bit 
 of holly lies beside the plate, there will be a 
 thought of the missionary far from home, of 
 the little brown and yellow and black children 
 in Africa, China and India whose Christmas 
 trees are laden with gifts; of our soldiers in 
 the Far East; of the miners in the fastnesses 
 of the rock; of our sailors on the stormy 
 ocean. If Christmas-past has brought us its 
 best and most cheery lesson, we have not 
 waited until the dawn of Christmas-present to 
 
 
A T CHRIS TMAS TIME. 241 
 
 turn these thoughts into sweet realities. Camp 
 and tent, and ship and bungalow, and mission 
 school are even now rejoicing because Chris- 
 tian people, adoring Christ, have made their 
 Christmas glad. 
 
 In the hush that falls upon our hearts as 
 Christmas leaves us, we review the year. 
 Whatever it has brought us, of bliss or of 
 dele, of denial or of gift, of pain or of satis- 
 faction, it has been to every one of us a year 
 of the right hand of the Most High. Perhaps 
 we cannot now see why the Father appoints us 
 what seems a severe discipline; doubtless we 
 never shall know here, but by faith we may 
 take what God sends and have neither fear nor 
 protest, not alone at the sweet anniversary sea- 
 sons, but in the common days and the common 
 events and experiences, for there our Father 
 has revealed his great goodness to us the un- 
 worthy, yet beloved children of his care. No 
 incident of our pilgrimage but is haloed with a 
 promise of his blessing, no hour that is not 
 glorified because he is ours and we are his. 
 
 The few days that follow Christmas are 
 very busy. Most of us desire to finish up the 
 year's work and be ready for the new year, 
 

 242 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 with debts paid, plans carried to completion, 
 decks, so to speak, cleared for action. We are 
 not able to realize our ideals fully, but at least 
 we may approximate the best that is in our 
 minds. The spell of merry Christmas linger- 
 ing shall make us gentler, more considerate, 
 more courageous, and more solicitous to make 
 our little world happy. With the big world 
 outside, you and I have little to do, but we 
 may make very serene and sweet the small 
 place where our home stands ; very blessed the 
 group of loved ones who are our nearest of 
 kin, very peaceful the aged who depend on our 
 care, and very mirthful the little children 
 whom we love. 
 
 Thus we muse over our Christmas holly. 
 Musing and dreaming, the air is everywhere 
 full of music. What happiness our dear Lord 
 brought with him to the earth. The false re- 
 ligions are gloomy. There are no rites that 
 sanctify and uplift the home in any heathen 
 creed. Christ glorifies the simplest house- 
 hold. Every little child who kneels and says, 
 "Now I lay me down to sleep," is the richer 
 for the Child who brought salvation to a lost 
 world. 
 
AT CHRISTMAS TIME. 243 
 
 A Merry Christmas to you, dear invisible, 
 unknown reader, whose warm hand-clasp I 
 feel across the December snow. Merry 
 Christmas to grandfathers and grandmothers, 
 to big brothers and elder sisters, to husbands 
 and wives, to the children around the hearth. 
 May you find in your stockings just what you 
 want. May the fun of Christmas overflow. 
 And make this good wish mine as my bit of 
 Christmas holly. 
 
A Narrow Neck of Land 
 
 " Every year adds one to our birthdays, and it 
 adds also to that largess of love, which is our 
 treasure never to be taken away." 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 A NARROW NECK OF 
 LAND. 
 
 T TOW fast the years fly! One never 
 
 jfjf finds them slow-paced after child- 
 hood; they have wings, not feet. 
 Our days depart like dreams; our yesterdays 
 are a long procession, our to-morrows stretch 
 away into the infinite. "Lo ! on a narrow neck 
 of land, 'Twixt two unbounded seas we 
 stand." 
 
 It is inevitable, if we are inclined to be the 
 least thoughtful, that we should review some 
 things at the beginning of a new year. In a 
 sense we own nothing except the present mo- 
 ment. In another sense, equally true, we own 
 every moment we have ever had. Our school- 
 days, our books, our friends, our joys and sor- 
 rows, our hopes and disappointments, our bat- 
 tles and defeats, our gains and our losses, are 
 
248 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 all part of our property, of our personal pos- 
 sessions which none can take away from us. 
 The manner of man or woman that we are is 
 colored by the influences that have affected 
 and the experiences that have entered into our 
 whole lives. The past is in our blood. Our 
 brains are inscribed with the thoughts, feelings, 
 and intentions, the purposes, fulfilments and 
 endeavors of all our years. In some upflashing 
 of memory, prompted by a sound, a song, a 
 flitting glimpse of color, or by a sudden peril, 
 we sometimes see our whole past, from child- 
 hood on, moving before us like a swiftly roll- 
 ing panorama. Intangible, but real, the past 
 is of us and we are of it, and yet this need not 
 daunt us nor distress us, for it is in the power 
 of the present to vanquish and to remedy the 
 foes and the ills of the past. 
 
 Among the pleasures of a new year is a re- 
 view of the way by which the old year has led 
 us. Always it is to be marked with a white 
 stone, for the unexpected blessings that it 
 brought. Surprises in new opportunities, in 
 new friendships, in books which opened new 
 vistas in thought, in many a help heavenward, 
 these came to us with the days. Far wiser it is 
 
A NARROW NECK OF LAND. 249 
 
 to walk on the bright side of the old year than 
 to depress our hearts by recounting its mis- 
 takes, defeats and sorrows. The disposition 
 to grieve too profoundly over losses is mor- 
 bid, and seriously handicaps one for the race 
 that is before him. I think there should be a 
 very special rejoicing in the new year's morn- 
 ing over the little ones who were born in the 
 course of its predecessor. What possibilities 
 are folded in those tiny rose-leaf hands ! What 
 incentives they are to effort! Each wee dar- 
 ling of the household is a motive for the 
 nobler living of its parents, for the mother's 
 fuller consecration, for the father's greater 
 self-control, for more tenderness and sweet- 
 ness on the part of brothers and sisters. 
 
 Forecasting the months to come, young 
 people make many good resolutions. Older 
 people are slower to resolve, because they have 
 learned that too often dependence is on resolu- 
 tion, and not on God, and therefore resolution 
 proves a crutch of bending straw. A happy 
 way for the new year will be to take each day 
 as a gift from the Lord, and, looking little 
 farther than the sunset, fill its golden mo- 
 ments with loving toil for the Master and for 
 
250 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 his dear ones. The tendency to take long, 
 anxious looks ahead is innate in some of us, 
 but it terminates in waste, and is attended by 
 worry, two most destructive forces. When 
 we consider that the present if well spent is of 
 necessity providing for the future, we under- 
 stand that there is no occasion for undue solici- 
 tude, for that sort of fretting care against 
 which the Master warned us. To-day's duty 
 well performed is the foundation-stone for to- 
 morrow's achievement. 
 
 We may well take the tonic of this thought 
 to our hearts when we are set face to face with 
 certain changing conditions that, in the course 
 of the years, affect family life. When illness 
 invades the home or a lingering malady fas- 
 tens its grasp upon a sufferer, the others, who 
 are well, are conscious of carrying on a dual 
 life. They go forth to the shop or the mill, 
 the school or the office, and engage in business 
 with the absorption it demands, or they do the 
 daily housework, cooking, sweeping, sewing, 
 or whatever it may be, with exactness and 
 nicety. Yet all the while, a part of them is in 
 the invalid's chamber, beside her couch, listen- 
 ing for the footsteps of the doctor, and await- 
 
A NARROW NECK OF LAND. 251 
 
 ing his verdict. That ebbing life is so precious. 
 The thought of a vacant chair is so insup- 
 portable. To fancy the house without the 
 mother, or the sister, or the father, is well- 
 nigh impossible, yet over and over, before- 
 hand, the mind goes on, disturbed and over- 
 whelmed. 
 
 Dear friends, who sit in the shadow cast by 
 the Angel at the door, whose errand is to bring 
 release unto them that are bound, shake off 
 your anxiety. Your sorrow you may not lose, 
 but be not anxious. Nothing can happen to 
 any of our loved ones, unless the Lord send it. 
 Nothing will happen until his day dawns, 
 when the darkness of earth shall be changed 
 for the glory of heaven. 
 
 To some of those who are on the wester- 
 ing slope it is a great trouble that they are 
 manifestly growing old. "I hate it," said a 
 woman, looking keenly in her glass and dis- 
 cerning the lines in her face, the hollowing of 
 her cheeks, the whitening of her hair. "I 
 never will grow old!" said another, with an 
 evident snatching at a gayety of manner, 
 charming when natural, but repellent when 
 assumed. And her emphatic protest merely 
 
252 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 accentuated the fact that youth had waned 
 and age had arrived. 
 
 May there not be a growing old which is 
 most beautiful, because in the order of God's 
 appointment the bud becomes the flower, the 
 green ear the ripe? Age has a grace of its 
 own when it is accepted, not resented. Its 
 dignity, its equanimity, its experience, may not 
 these be as winning as the qualities which be- 
 long to an earlier period? Age has great 
 store of wealth, in sunny memories, in troops 
 of kindred, in a great company of friends. 
 Every year adds one to our birthdays, and it 
 adds also to that largess of love, which is our 
 treasure never to be taken away. 
 
 Instead of bewailing the passing years, the 
 old should be chary of losing any that remain. 
 Age should beware of rusty tools and of 
 empty hands. To ignore the flight of time 
 and keep straight on with our work, is to erect 
 the best barrier against time's attacks. u Do 
 thy work," whether old or young. "Improve 
 the shining hour." Leave all the rest to 
 God. 
 
 In the new year that is now poised on the 
 threshold, one who is thrifty may perceive an 
 
A NARROW NECK OF LAND. 253 
 
 opportunity for carrying out some purpose 
 hitherto unattainable. "My husband and I 
 are going away for a long holiday," said a 
 lady. "It is the first time in forty years that 
 we have been free to leave home. But our 
 last daughter is married and we are at liberty 
 to saunter around lands of which we have 
 read, to poke into tiny out-of-the-way places 
 where few tourists go, and to have an Indian 
 summer pilgrimage all by ourselves." The 
 idea was a good one. Not all are so fortu- 
 nate as to have the means and the leisure to 
 carry out so broad a plan, but there are few 
 who could not manage to get some definite bit 
 of unwonted pleasure or recreation into some 
 month of the coming twelve, if they would 
 only think it worth while to try. 
 
 In this glad new year might we not be more 
 careful about the little things that foot up to 
 so large a total on the balance sheet at last? 
 How often are we weary and irritable, and 
 say less or more than we mean, less of gen- 
 erous whole-hearted praise, more of crabbed 
 and inconsiderate blame. The sharp words 
 that ought never to be spoken, the sharp tem- 
 per behind the knife-like words are among 
 
254 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 those things which we should most regret, and 
 for help against which we should oftenest 
 pray. And our deeds that are wrong, our lit- 
 tle acts of churlishness or stupidity, our blind- 
 ness and dumbness and deafness in the house- 
 hold, in society, our failures to make the at- 
 mosphere about us purer and sweeter, how 
 they rise against us in judgment. We may as 
 well, God granting us grace, endeavor hon- 
 estly and faithfully to be right and do right in 
 little things for another year. 
 
 A good deal of wretchedness is wrought in 
 this world through perversity. Two or three 
 persons may be honorable and straightfor- 
 ward, yet through having a different education 
 or a different point of view, carelessly jar upon 
 and antagonize one another. Otherwise happy 
 domestic circles are often almost hopelessly 
 disintegrated in feeling, because of this. They 
 wholly miss the family blessedness that ought 
 to be the family birthright. Incompatibility 
 of temperament puts a sack-cloth robe on the 
 joy of life. But if it exist and if it be recog- 
 nized, it need not be insurmountable. Chris- 
 tian patience and long suffering can do much 
 toward adjustment, and there is to those who 
 
A NARROW NECK OF LAND. 255 
 
 bear and forbear a very special message from 
 the King, "To him that overcometh, will I 
 give to eat of the hidden manna." 
 
 Has there been family worship in your 
 home in the years past? The practice once 
 universal in Christian homes of having family 
 prayer either morning or evening is falling 
 upon evil days, and is too generally neglected. 
 The causes of this are an open secret. Busi- 
 ness, hurrying men off to the morning train, 
 school, marshalling the children early, a com- 
 plex domestic machinery and many artificial 
 wants account for the lapse of morning prayer 
 in the family. At night-fall every one is tired, 
 and the family separates in various directions 
 at once upon the close of the evening meal. A 
 beautiful and hallowed custom, more than any 
 other service, a bond in the family, allying it 
 to God and heaven, is almost unknown to the 
 children of our period. Why should we 
 not bring it back, beginning with the new 
 year! 
 
 A young wife, marrying a man who was not 
 even a regular attendant at church, and who 
 had not been religiously educated, herself 
 asked the blessing at the first meal in the new 
 
256 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 home. When the evening came on which she 
 had usually gone to prayer-meeting she was 
 ready, as she had been in her father's house, 
 assuming her husband's escort as a matter of 
 course. Every evening before they retired 
 she read aloud a chapter of the Bible and a 
 prayer from a little book of prayers. In less 
 than a year the young husband was at his 
 wife's side at the communion table. 
 
 Shall we not all seek in the new year for 
 greater fidelity in the inner life, and greater 
 fruitfulness in the outer? u Lo! on a narrow 
 neck of land, 'twixt two unbounded seas we 
 stand." Here God has placed us; here Christ 
 has saved us; here the Spirit condescends to 
 make our hearts his home. 
 
 Come, Lord Jesus ! 
 The days are chill, the nights are drear, 
 It is the winter of the year. 
 The bloom is gone from flower and tree, 
 What can we do but watch for thee? 
 
 Come, Lord Jesus ! 
 We'd yield thee of our first and best, 
 Ah, wilt thou stoop to make request? 
 Our offerings shall be full and free, 
 The while we wait and watch for thee. 
 
A NARROW NECK OF LAND. 257 
 
 Come, Lord Jesus ! 
 Ah, voice that sounded in the room, 
 Ah, Face Divine that breaks the gloom ! 
 Oh, tones that thrill with "Come to me," 
 Oh, heart that hastes to lean on thee ! 
 
 Come, Lord Jesus ! 
 Come, as thou wilt in peace or strife, 
 Come, as thou wilt, in death or life, 
 O Star upon the unknown sea, 
 Arise our light of heaven to be. 
 
 Even so. Come. 
 
The Call of the Future 
 
 " We must find the leaders of the future in the 
 classes that are shaped in the institutions which 
 cultivate body, brain, heart and mind, and fit the 
 young to assume posts of influence and duty." 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE CALL OF THE 
 FUTURE. 
 
 / ^ VERY young man and woman reaches 
 #"L in due time a parting of the ways, 
 when the call of the future becomes 
 peremptory and urgent. Childhood's irre- 
 sponsibility soon passes. Early in life it is 
 borne in upon most that they must prepare for 
 life's tasks, and a little later the conviction 
 deepens that they must make haste to assume 
 them. There is nothing new in this. The 
 successive generations of our race from re- 
 motest antiquity have shared the experience 
 which is common to the boys and girls of our 
 own day. 
 
 It seems to some of us that we were only 
 yesterday where now our children are. With 
 eager eyes and hurrying feet we trod the up- 
 ward path. Our commencement day, our di- 
 
262 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 ploma, our good-by to school and college, 
 were to us as interesting and important as they 
 are to our sons and daughters. We heard the 
 bugle call that summons them to action. 
 
 We are not yet on the retired list, though 
 we have fought in many battles and faced 
 many an obstinate foe. Some of us have been 
 bitterly disappointed; the ideals of others 
 have changed; only a few have reaped that 
 fruit of attainment that hangs temptingly 
 from the bough when one is young, light- 
 hearted and ambitious. Not the music of the 
 future, but the echoes of the past, come to 
 older people, as they tread the evening slopes. 
 But they understand and sympathize, and to 
 some extent share, the enthusiasm of the 
 young, as they join in the plaudits which are 
 given to those who start gallantly on a new 
 campaign. Here and there is a fortunate 
 soul, sanguine to the last, always spontaneous, 
 always courageous, always dominant, and al- 
 ways young. To such, the high call of the 
 future is ever sounding, flung down from 
 angel harps across the last river, and filling the 
 earthly life with the minstrelsies of heavenly 
 cheer. 
 
THE CALL OF THE FUTURE. 263 
 
 From the great universities, splendidly 
 equipped and amply endowed, thousands of 
 graduates are going forth, to engage in the 
 activities of the world. They are going also 
 by thousands more, from smaller educational 
 seats, which, though handicapped by poverty, 
 still develop in their students all that is manly 
 and womanly, still furnish them nobly with 
 the essentials of scholarship. The small, the 
 obscure, the struggling Alma Mater, in New 
 England, in the West, in the South, or in the 
 States on the long Pacific Coast, deserves well 
 of her children. Not all the finely educated 
 men and women are coming from the con- 
 spicuous and crowded universities. They con- 
 tribute their quota to those who shall consti- 
 tute the leadership of the age, but there is a 
 large and fine contingent that is sent out by 
 humbler colleges, where poorly paid and little- 
 known professors do missionary work in true 
 missionary spirit, and are honored by the 
 Lord whom they serve. 
 
 In the several departments of government, 
 finance, war, philanthropy, municipal and na- 
 tional politics, missionary effort, and in that 
 large and unselfish Christian endeavor which 
 
264 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 makes for the unlifting of humanity, the edu- 
 cated young people who each summer issue 
 from the classroom to mingle in world-busi- 
 ness of some sort, will step into the foremost 
 rank. Is there a line of battle, east or west, on 
 sea or land? The captains are the picked 
 men, the men who have known the rigor of 
 study and the moulding of discipline. Is there 
 need of reform in politics? Into the arena, 
 alert for good government, spring the college 
 men, men who have been made ready for the 
 conflict by their serious study. Among the 
 most efficient workers who help the poor, who 
 tackle with brave hearts the problem of immi- 
 gration, who never despair of elevating the 
 masses, are the flower of our university men. 
 If a governor is wanted in the Philippines, or 
 a minister needed for a foreign embassy, he is 
 chosen from the list of graduates whom a col- 
 lege has armed for the delicate and diplomatic 
 and tactful situations that confront a man 
 when he deals with men. We must find the 
 leaders of the future in the classes that are 
 shaped in the institutions which cultivate body, 
 brain, heart and mind, and fit the young -to 
 assume posts of influence and duty. 
 
THE CALL OF THE FUTURE. 265 
 
 The pressure of immediate necessity in 
 many homes and the general desire on the part 
 of the young to escape from tutelage and ac- 
 cept obligations as soon as they may, combine 
 to push the young too early into the thick of 
 the fight. It sometimes seems as if in America 
 we were jealous of the time it takes for chil- 
 dren to grow up. They are hurried from 
 grade to grade in the preparatory schools, has- 
 tened through college, precipitated while yet 
 immature upon society, that finds them crude 
 and unripe, and naturally, they cease to learn 
 and to grow. For evident reasons, where the 
 want of the hour is not insistent, the prepara- 
 tion for life should be extended. Post-gradu- 
 ate work is not a wasteful expense of time or 
 money for the teacher, the physician, the law- 
 yer, or the student of science. Granted, fair 
 ability and conscientious study on the student's 
 part, it is wise, whenever it is possible, to pro- 
 long the years of preparation, and to wait a 
 little while before the conflict with active work 
 begins. In this country and this age, that con- 
 flict is seldom relaxed. The man who finds 
 himself in the whirl of an intensely eager and 
 strongly competitive period has not time to 
 
266 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 take breath, to drop his work, and sit down in 
 quiet. 
 
 Though I speak thus, I do not overlook the 
 fact that there are multitudes of students who 
 are compelled by the stern spur of necessity to 
 finish their college course and get to work as 
 early as practicable. They are brave and 
 buoyant, and when I look into their faces, I 
 see there that sincerity of purpose, that invinci- 
 ble resolution which shows that the future will 
 not call upon them in vain. 
 
 In one college, for example, there is a 
 young girl who has wholly supported herself 
 since she was fifteen. As mother's helper, as 
 waitress in a summer hotel, as general house- 
 servant working in the early morning and the 
 late evening, she has earned and paid her way, 
 assisted by a scholarship in the latter years of 
 her college life. No task has been shirked. 
 She has kept pace with her fellow-students, but 
 she has had and has sought no holidays, and 
 when she commences her life beyond college 
 walls, she will have had an all-round training 
 in service, which few can surpass. I am sorry 
 for the long hours and the hard work, for the 
 good times that have passed her by, but I 
 
THE CALL OF THE FUTURE. 267 
 
 would not show her my sorrow, for such a 
 young woman would scorn pity. She has seen 
 her goal. It has been ever before her, and in 
 attaining it she has achieved much and already 
 reaped a rich reward. She is a representative 
 of a large number of young people of both 
 sexes, children of the farm-house and the tene- 
 ment, children of plain families, who do not 
 ask odds of fortune, but go forth and conquer 
 their way, step by step. 
 
 Emerson says in an essay on "The Method 
 of Nature," "What a debt is ours to that old 
 religion which in the childhood of most of us 
 still dwelt like a Sabbath morning in the coun- 
 try of New England, teaching privation, self- 
 denial and sorrow? A man was born not for 
 prosperity, but to suffer for the good of 
 others, like the noble rock maple which all 
 around our villages bleeds for the service of 
 man. Not praise, not men's acceptance of our 
 doing, but the Spirit's holy errand through us 
 absorbed the thought. How dignified was 
 this ! How all that is called talent and success 
 in our noisy capitals becomes buzz and din be- 
 fore this worthiness!" 
 
 The plain truth is that the tree so rooted 
 
268 THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 that no storm can shake it is the tree that en- 
 dures longest. If adverse circumstances do 
 not embitter the spirit, nor crush the physical 
 strength, they do no harm in the end, and as 
 I think of the many who have forged to the 
 front, notwithstanding hard conditions, I re- 
 peat that they are a brave and buoyant com- 
 pany. 
 
 Success is the net result of innumerable and 
 persevering efforts made with intelligent de- 
 sign. The idler never succeeds. Neither does 
 success come to the person who swings like a 
 pendulum from side to side with no settled 
 purpose. "Unstable as water thou shalt not 
 excel," and "Thou art weighed in the bal- 
 ances and found wanting," are the words writ- 
 ten to-day on the records of those who are lag- 
 gards in the race, or weak, cowardly and vacil- 
 lating. 
 
 We are much too ready to call the person 
 signally successful who makes a fortune. The 
 country is rich, its resources are expanding, 
 and luxury is on the increase. To hear some 
 people talk, you would suppose that the only 
 success worth mentioning was that which is 
 counted in dollars and cents, which gives' a 
 
THE CALL OF THE FUTURE. 269 
 
 man the control of millions. A millionaire is 
 no longer singular. We have men whose 
 wealth foots up to many millions, and our 
 young people are dazzled by the sight of this 
 success, as if there were no other. 
 
 Yet the great surgeon who mitigates human 
 pain, the great scientist who discovers and ap- 
 plies new secrets of nature and brings the ends 
 of the earth nearer together, the great ad- 
 miral, the great commander managing by sea 
 and land those battles that are God's battles, 
 working out God's hidden purposes, the great 
 orator handling vast things by a magic purely 
 spiritual and subtle, the great teacher, im- 
 pressing and shaping childhood and youth, 
 and the great missionary winning alien peoples 
 to the cross, are each and all greater and more 
 truly successful than the one who simply 
 amasses money, and is king in the market- 
 place. 
 
 Our hearts are uplifted in earnest prayer 
 that the young who are to be graduated from 
 our colleges and seminaries may indeed see 
 visions of future power, self-denial and loving 
 labor. 
 
 Nothing is so important as that these edu- 
 
2 7 o THE DAILY PATHWAY. 
 
 cated young people shall be Christians in the 
 vital and real sense, which makes the disciple 
 cling close to and constantly imitate his Lord. 
 If they receive into honest hearts his teaching 
 in their colleges, they will go out immensely 
 influential and immensely blessed. On the 
 other hand, if they leave college without hav- 
 ing given their fealty to Christ, the danger is 
 that they will never become his followers and 
 friends, that they will drift into the ranks of 
 his enemies. Would that all our dear young 
 people might have a vision of the Lord, look- 
 ing down upon them from the sky, and that 
 each might hasten to answer, "Lord, what wilt 
 thou have me to do?" 
 
 Then their heart's cry would be, 
 
 "Open our eyes, good Lord, open our eyes, 
 For thou hast girt thyself in captive guise, 
 And from the heathen gloom, thy voice we hear, 
 
 'I was in prison, and ye left me there !' 
 Open our eyes, good Lord, open our eyes ! 
 
 "Open our minds, good Lord, open our minds ! 
 When sin or selfishness man's conscience blinds, 
 Scatter the mists that cloud thy clear command ; 
 Then with rich blessing on each Christless strand 
 Open thy hand, good Lord, open thy hand!" 
 
SEP 21 190* 
 
mmf^L2L congress