wrecked brother in its path and removes him without ceremony and covers him with scorn and contempt. Christ reverses this iron law.
Formerly when a war vessel discovered a derelict, the latter was immediately destroyed by dynamite. The government has now entered upon a new policy. Whenever it is possible, the abandoned vessel is towed into the nearest port. Recently two abandoned schooners were brought in, the value of the vessels and their cargo being estimated at more than sixty thousand dollars.
When Jesus finds a human derelict He does not lestroy him. He cleanses him and rehabilitates him, and makes him valuable in the kingdom. (Text.)
(551)
Christian treatment of the Indian not only has improved his character, but has saved him from threatened extinction.
The idea is prevalent that the red man
is doomed to disappear from the earth at no
distant day. But the census tables give no
such indication. The first official count was
taken about seventy years ago, and gave the
number as 253,461. In 1880 the figures had
risen to 256,127, in 1900 to 272,073, and now
(1909), by actual count, the reservations are
found to contain 284,000.
(552)
A bundle of wood is placed in our kitchen stove to kindle the fire. It is consumed. Its ashes represent what the tree took from the soil. Its carbon goes up the chimney, restoring to the air what some tree took from the air. Nothing was lost. The earth received again what it originally gave. To the air was restored its original contribution of carbonic acid gas, which the leaf manufactured into wood. And so God has made a universe of perennial youth, where nothing is lost nor can be lost.—E. M. McGuffey.
(553)
CONSERVATION OF INFLUENCE
Dr. F. F. Shannon, commenting on the early death of a talented man, says:
"Such a man dead at 40?" you ask. "Why,
to what purpose is this waste?" Well, a
man can make a match, but it takes God
to make a sun. We know the match must go
out, the sun never does, tho his shining face
is often hidden from our eye. And so the
sun of this man's genius—of any man's
genius—can never go out. The flame is
burning yet—in a few hearts still in the flesh,
and in countless glorified spirits before the
throne. There is not enough wind, loosed
or unloosed, in the vast caverns of the universe
to blow out that flame, nor enough
blackness in the untenanted halls of space to
swallow up its light! Do you tell me that
the God who is so strict in the economy of
His universe as to refuse a throb of energy
to be lost, or an atom to be wiped out of
existence, or a few pieces of bread to perish
in the desert, will allow that genius, which
is the breath of His own being, to be wasted
without contributing wealth to the world, to
the universe, to God Himself!
(554)
CONSERVATION OF REMAINDERS
A man was in possession of a great farm.
The abundant crops finally failed, and other
calamities came, and at last the wife of the
great land-owner lost her reason. Nearly all
had been lost, and the farmer was left with
only a few feet of ground as his possession.
I had not the courage to visit this man in
his destitution. After a lapse of time, however,
I went to his humble abode, and was
amazed to see the little garden in the highest
state of cultivation. And I exclaimed:
"Why, how is this? How did you have the
heart to do this, after you had lost all?"
"Why, what would you have had me do?" was the reply. "This is all I had, and I tried to make the best of it."
So it is for us to strengthen that
which is left in the Church and in ourselves
as individuals.—Olin A. Curtis.
(555)
CONSERVATISM, FALSE
There stands the false conservative,
anchored to the past. Whatever is, for him,
is right and good. He is constitutionally opposed
to change. Wagon-wheels make a rut
an inch deep across the prairie, but when
this man is thirty he is in a rut up to his
eyebrows. When he dies, at seventy, you
can truly say, that his image is truth lying
at the bottom of a well. He loves his father's
house because it is old; he loves old tools;
old laws; old creeds. He stands at his gate,
like an angry soldier, waving his hands and
shouting warnings to all who approach. He
has one injunction for every boy starting
out to make his fortune: "Watch your
anchor, my son; don't cast off your moorings";
as if any Columbus, who spent all his
time throwing out anchors, could ever have
crossed the sea! As if any world voyage
