But no river is more fed by confluent currents than is that of a life which draws to itself all resources of knowledge and grace. (Text.)
(1798)
LIFE FROM DEATH
Clinton Scollard, in The Outlook, draws a lesson from the new-fallen snow:
The evanescent wonder of the snow
Is round about us, and as in a cloud—
A vestiture inviolate—we walk.
Earth seems bereft of song and shorn of sun,
A cloistral world. Even the lyric throat
Of the rapt brook is like a pulse-beat faint.
The wood—white architrave on architrave—
Is as a temple where the lips of prayer
Tremble upon the verge of utterance.
Hush! In the heart of this great gulf of sleep,
This void abysmal, may we not divine
The inscrutable Presence clothed about with dreams,
The immaculate Vision that is death yet life,
For out of death comes life: the twain are one! (Text.)
(1799)
Life, Inward—See Character More than Clothing.
LIFE LEARNED FROM DEATH
Prof. G. Currie Martin draws this suggestive picture:
In the gallery at The Hague there hangs
a wonderful picture by Rembrandt. When
the visitor first looks at it the horror that it
inspires seems too great to be borne, for
there, in the very forefront of the canvas,
so that the spectator imagines he could touch
it, is the grim and ghastly form of a corpse
lying livid and rigid upon the dissecting-*table.
To add still further to the sense of
shrinking it evokes, the scalpel of the surgeon
has been thrust into the flesh, and he
is laying bare the muscles of the arm. But
if the visitor has only patience and courage
for a moment to overcome the first sense
of repulsion, he will find that he goes away
from an examination of the picture thinking
no longer of death and its terror, but of life
and its power. For the skill of the artist
is shown in so presenting the great and
eternal contrast between death and life that
the latter triumphs. Above the figure of the
corpse are grouped the faces of the great
scientists and physicians who, as they listen
to the words of the lecturer, are drinking
in the new-found knowledge that is to make
them the conquerors of disease, and those
portraits are so wonderfully painted that the
spectator finds himself ever afterward thinking
of the power of life that they manifest
and of the greatness of human knowledge
that has wrested the secrets from death itself
which make life more powerful and safe.
(Text.)
(1800)
Life-line, A—See Ingenuity.
LIFE-LINE HYMN
A speaker at one of Evan Roberts' remarkable
revival services in Wales, was
telling of a "vision" he had had, and of a
voice which exhorted him to "Throw out
the life-line," when instantly the listeners
sang the whole hymn together.
Mr. Ufford, the author of the lines, once sang them at a watch-service in California, and there he told how the Elsie Smith was lost on Cape Cod in 1902, showing the very life-line that saved sixteen lives from the sea, and by chance one of the number was present at the service.
From a room, in a building hired for religious services in a Pennsylvania city, and where a series of revival meetings was being held, rang out, one night, the hymn, "Throw out the life-line," in the hearing, next door, of a convivial card-party. It was a sweet female voice, followed in the chorus by other and louder voices chiming in. The result was the merriment ceased as one of the members of the card-party remarked: "If what they're saying is right, then we're wrong," and the revelers broke up. An ex-*member of that party is now an editor of a great city daily, and his fellows are all filling positions of responsibility. The lifeline pulled them ashore.
In a Massachusetts city, twenty years ago, this hymn won to Christ a man who is now a prosperous manufacturer.
At a special service held at Gibraltar for the survivors of an emigrant ship that went ashore there during a storm, this hymn was sung with telling effect.
The story of that life-line is long enough and strong enough to tie up a large bundle of results wrought by it.
(1801)
Life-material—See Material for a Great Life.
