- regard of death, that form the sinews of the
nation, personal strength becoming a subordinate factor. Wolves hunt in companies, and together fearlessly attack animals which would easily master them separately. Insects live in communities and tho individually they are weak, by concert of action they make themselves formidable to the strongest of animals. But the central feature of the teaching of Christ was the law of love. It constantly appears in His words—now clothed in one parable now in another. The new command given to man was to love his enemy, to do good to them that hated him, to help the weak, to pardon the erring, to resist evil, and to give to him that asked. Henceforth it was to be the peacemaker who should be blest, and he who wished to be greatest was to be servant of all.—H. W. Conn, Methodist Review.
(2991)
See Unity, Strength in.
SOCIAL TRAITS IN CHILDREN
Pedagogs tell us that the plays of children
under seven or eight are noncompetitive and
noncooperative. Kindergarten children play
side by side or in pairs, rarely spontaneously
in groups. They are gregarious rather than
social. The plays between the ages of seven
and twelve are social, cooperative and competitive
games, but each child usually plays
for himself. After twelve group games with
opposing sides are more popular, and finally
tend to crowd out all others.
(2992)
SOCIAL VANITY
I read in a Paris paper an interesting account
of a reception that some of our distinguished
friends passing the season in
Newport gave to a chimpanzee. Of course,
it was mortifying to an American to have
it known by Europeans that my compatriots
were prepared to confess in that practical
way to their belief in the evolution theory,
and to have it understood in the cultivated
centers of English and Continental life that
over here people of advertised refinement
could drop into such close relations of social
reciprocity without either the Newport gentlemen
and ladies or the chimpanzee feeling
themselves insulted by the contact. But that
first feeling, which of course was one of
loathing, not for the chimpanzee, but for his
companions, soon gave place to one which
I am sure was more just and wholesome, this,
namely, a pathetic realization of the horrid
sense of emptiness which people must be
suffering under to be willing to fill up the
vacuum with material of such an abominably
unhuman type; like a man so agonizingly
hungry that he had rather fill himself with
carrion than go to bed supperless, and not only
that, but reduced to such an extreme point
of inanition as even to acquire an appetite
for carrion.—Charles H. Parkhurst.
(2993)
SOCIETY IS MAN'S PLACE
The man of the city closes his house, forgets
his office and goes away. He has a
suit of store clothes on him and two linen
collars in his handbag, but for the rest he
carries the garb of the vagabond, and getting
into this as quick as he can he buries
his face in the pine-needles and lets the wind
and rain beat down on his uncovered head
and untrimmed beard. And the weeks pass;
and then happens the stranger thing.
Through the music of the forest and the
harmonies of the falling waters, he hears, at
first, far away and hardly audible, then ever
nearer and clearer, the voice of the city he
deserted, and to his manhood's spirit that
voice speaks with a charm which overcomes
the woodland's spell and in another day he
is back again, back in the old street, to the
old work, to the ever dear old city. And
once more keeping step with the vast army
of toilers, he knows that not in solitude, but
in society, is character made, and more, that
not nature, but human nature, is God's best
handiwork.—T. C. McClelland.
(2994)
Soil—See Fruit and Soil.
SOLACE OF THE SEA
The following paragraph is the conclusion of James G. Blaine's eulogy of President Garfield, and forms one of the finest passages of English prose:
Gently, silently, the love of a great people
bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing
of the sea, to live or to die, as God should
will. Within sight of its heaving billows,
within sound of its manifold voices, with
wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling
breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the
ocean's changing wonders, on its far sails
whitening in the morning light, on its restless
waves rolling shoreward to break and
die beneath the noonday sun, on the red
clouds of evening arching low to the horizon,
on the serene and shining pathway of the
stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read
a mystic meaning, which only the rapt and
parting soul may know. Let us believe that,
