is in the moral world, deceiving the very elect. (Text.)—W. L. Watkinson, "The Transfigured Sackcloth."
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BEAUTY FROM FRAGMENTS
May not God find ways to gather up the fragments of wasted lives and reconstitute them in His own image, as this great artist reconstructed the window:
In a certain old town was a great cathedral
in which was a wondrous stained-glass window.
Its fame had gone abroad over the
land. From miles around people pilgrimaged
to gaze upon the splendor of this master-*piece
of art. One day there came a great
storm. The violence of the tempest forced
in the window, and it crashed to the marble
floor, shattered into a hundred pieces. Great
was the grief of the people at the catastrophe
which had suddenly bereft the town of its
proudest work of art. They gathered up the
fragments, huddled them in a box, and carried
them to the cellar of the church. One
day there came along a stranger, and craved
permission to see the beautiful window.
They told him of its fate. He asked what
they had done with the fragments. And they
took him to the vault and showed him the
broken morsels of glass. "Would you mind
giving these to me?" said the stranger. "Take
them along," was the reply; "they are no
longer of any use to us." And the visitor
carefully lifted the box and carried it away
in his arms. Weeks passed by; then one day
there came an invitation to the custodians of
the cathedral. It was from a famous artist,
noted for his master-skill in glass-craft. It
summoned them to his study to inspect a
stained-glass window, the work of his
genius. Ushering them into his studio, he
stood them before a great veil of canvas.
At the touch of his hand upon a cord the
canvas dropt. And there before their astonished
gaze shone a stained-glass window
surpassing in beauty all their eyes had ever
beheld. As they gazed entranced upon its
rich tints, wondrous pattern, and cunning
workmanship, the artist turned and said:
"This window I have wrought from the
fragments of your shattered one, and it is
now ready to be replaced." Once more a
great window shed its beauteous light into
the dim aisles of the old cathedral. But
the splendor of the new far surpassed the
glory of the old, and the fame of its strange
fashioning filled the land.—Grace and Truth.
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BEAUTY IN COMMON LIFE
I saw in an art gallery a group of well-*drest
people admiring a picture of some
Spanish beggars. The beggars were unkempt,
deformed, ugly, but the artist had seen
beauty in the group, and his imagination made
the scene appeal strongly to the passerby.
How many of those people, think you,
would ever stop to look at a group of beggars,
not in a picture, but in life? Would
they have the imagination, apart from the
artist, to feel the appeal of real men and women
in real need and see beauty and grace
of form beneath rags? And yet it is possible
for all of us to be artists and see common
life transfigured with a beauty and grace
divine.—John H. Melish.
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Beauty, Insensitiveness to—See Insensitiveness to Beauty.
BEAUTY PERVERTED
One of the most beautiful sights around
Ispahan, in Persia, is a field of poppies—those
pure white flowers—stretching away
for miles. But the poppy is often the source
of a curse and misery. Before the poppy is
ripe the "head" is scratched at sunset with
a kind of comb in three places; and from
these gashes the opium oozes out. Next
morning it is collected before sunrise, dried
and rolled into cakes ready for use or market.
Its growers are enriched by the traffic,
but the ground is greatly impoverished. And
the users of opium? Why, it is death to
them.
Too often, as with the poppy, beauty
becomes a curse, and blessing a bane.
(Text.)
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Bed, Taking Up the—See Bible Customs To-day.
BEER, EFFECT OF
I was at a hospital when an ambulance
came tearing to the door, with a man whose
leg was crusht from mid-thigh down. He
was placed upon the operating table, restless
and moaning. "Oh, doctor," he said, "will it
kill me?" and the good, blunt man of science
answered, "No; not the leg, but the beer may
do you up." And it did. The limb was removed
quickly and skilfully, but the clean
aseptic cut had really no chance to heal, because
the general physical degradation of
beer no surgeon's knife can amputate. When
life and death grip one another, beer stabs
life in the back.—John G. Woolley.
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