Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers

by Unknown

L

LABELS, MISLEADING

Not long ago this country woke up to the fact that with a good deal of our canned food we were not getting just what the colored label on the outside of the can led us to suppose. It was a shocking disillusionment to find that the label showed luscious peach jelly, when the inside of the can contained only some nicely prepared and flavored gelatine, quite innocent of any relation to peaches. The country at once had indigestion, and passed laws to keep the peaches and the labels in the neighborhood of the same can.

The labels on persons are also misleading, because one can see the label but not always the real person. The titles and degrees are supposed to be descriptive of the owner’s brains, and sometimes they are; but they are not always accurate, and they never make brains. A university might confer a B.A. or an LL.D. on a lineal descendant of Balaam’s beast of burden, and yet it would not make him wise.—James M. Stifler, “The Fighting Saint.”

(1744)

See [Envy Gratified]; [New, The].

LABOR

This song of labor is by Caroline A. Lord:

They are working, beneath the sun,

In its red-hot, blinding glare,

In the dust from the toiling teams,

In the noise of the thoroughfare

See them swing and bend, far down to the end

With the rhythm of the strokes they bear.

The cords of the sinewy arms

Stand out like the cable’s twist;

No blow shall miss and no stroke shall fail

From the grasp of the brawny fist,

As the shoulder swings when the pickax rings

And the hand springs firm from the wrist.

Let the feet of the dainty shod

Pass by on the other side,

Where the youth of the slender back and limb

Stands watching—the listless-eyed;

While with sweat and with pain and the long day’s strain

These toil—and are satisfied.

(1745)

Labor, A Hero of—See [Energy Indomitable].

LABOR, AVOIDING

“I like to sew where there is no thread in the machine, it runs so easily,” said a little girl.

A good many people, I think, are pretty fond of running their machines without thread.

When I hear a boy talking very largely of the grand things he would do if he only could and if things and circumstances were only different, and then neglecting every daily duty and avoiding work and lessons, I think he is running his machine without any thread.

When I see a girl very sweet and pleasant abroad, ready to do anything for a stranger, and cross and disagreeable in her home, she, too, is running her machine without any thread.

Ah, this sewing without thread is very easy indeed, and the life machine will make a great buzzing! But labor, time, and force will in the end be far worse than lost.—The Friend.

(1746)

LABOR BY PATIENTS

Patient labor at the Elgin State Hospital (Illinois) has become one of the most striking features in any of the seventeen charitable institutions of Illinois.

Fiscal Supervisor Whipp, of the State Board of Administration, has just returned from Elgin, where he has been investigating the construction of buildings of cement blocks veneered with granite.

Patients have already built a cold storage room and bath-house, and now are at work on a cottage for the acute insane. They make the veneered blocks in the basement of the institution in winter. The process itself is comparatively new. It has been employed no more than a year at Elgin, but has worked out with remarkable success—Boston Journal.

(1747)

LABOR FOR THE COMMUNITY

The worker bee is never found loafing while the sun is shining. Their work is wholly for the hive; for the community that is, and they not infrequently work themselves to death gathering and carrying pollen, with which they load themselves down heavily.

The work of the truly unselfish life is a willingness to work, and even if need be, to die for the good of mankind.

(1748)

LABOR IN VAIN

The Pyramids of Egypt are among the seven wonders of the world. Cheops, said to be the largest of them all, covers an area of over thirteen acres, is larger than Madison Square, New York, and twice the height of Trinity Church spire. It contains enough material to build a city as large as Washington, including all its public buildings. Four hundred thousand men were employed twenty years to build it. The purpose of its erection was that it might be the tomb of kings.

How much better would have been the result if all this labor had been spent to serve those who were alive and the then future generations.

(1749)

LABOR, OPPORTUNITY FOR

The verses below carrying a helpful lesson, are by Ellen M. H. Gates:

If you can not on the ocean

Sail among the swiftest fleet,

Rocking on the highest billows,

Laughing at the storms you meet

You can stand among the sailors,

Anchored yet within the bay;

You can lend a hand to help them,

As they launch their boats away.

If you are too weak to journey

Up the mountain, steep and high,

You can stand within the valley,

While the multitudes go by;

You can chant in happy measure,

As they slowly pass along;

Tho they may forget the singer,

They will not forget the song.

*****

Do not, then, stand idly waiting

For some greater work to do;

Fortune is a lazy goddess—

She will never come to you.

Go and toil in any vineyard,

Do not fear to do or dare;

If you want a field of labor,

You can find it anywhere. (Text.)

(1750)

LABOR-SAVING DEVICES

I have heard old men say that the mere easy use of friction-matches saves every day for each active man and woman ten minutes of life. I think that is true. You are not old enough to remember the adventures of the boy called out of his bed in the morning to go and fetch a pan of coals from the next neighbor’s. The lad tumbles into his clothes, plows through the snow, finds that Mrs. Smith’s luck has been better than his mother’s, and the careful ashes of her hearth have preserved the vestal fire. A glowing brand is given him in his warming-pan, and he returns in triumph home. The alternative would have been to strike flint against steel, not to say against knuckles, till a reluctant spark fell on tinder equally reluctant, till this was fanned by careful breath till it would light a match which would light a candle. The journey to Mrs. Smith’s was, on the whole, light in comparison. Does one trivial invention save twenty minutes a day in each household, ten minutes to a man, ten minutes to a woman? That is a saving for this nation of more than twice the amount of work which Cheops put upon his pyramid, and so much addition to the real resources of the world is made by that one invention.—Edward Everett Hale.

(1751)

See [Precaution].

Lad with Ready Answer—See [Early Religion].

Lamb, The, Slain—See [Christ the Lamb].

LANGUAGE, FORMATION OF

For three centuries after the battle of Hastings French was the language of the upper classes, of courts and schools and literature; yet so tenaciously did the common people cling to their own strong speech that in the end English absorbed almost the whole body of French words and became the language of the land. It was the welding of Saxon and French into one speech that produced the wealth of our modern English.—William J. Long, “English Literature.”

(1752)

Large-heartedness—See [Friend, The Orphan’s].

Larger, The, Extinguishing the Smaller—See [Sunlight and Starlight].

LAST RESORT OF A WOMAN

“I am not Mrs. Nation; I have no hatchet; I am not crazy.”

These words came from the lips of a Lewis woman, as she met her husband face to face in a hotel barroom the other evening, says the Lewis Pilot. They were directed to the bartender and the loungers, as the former handed the woman’s husband a glass of whisky.

She continued: “That man has not done a day’s work this winter, and I am worn out trying to support him and the rest of the family. I want to know if something can not be done to keep him from destroying his own life and starving his family?”

The woman was thin and pale. Her lips quivered as she spoke. Her frail body could hardly stand the strain of the unfamiliar environment. As she finished the little girl by her side burst into tears, the bartender took back the whisky, the abashed husband stood with bowed head, one by one the loungers left the room. Presently the bartender, gazing at the poor woman, solemnly vowed that the man should not drink at his bar again.

It was a pathetic scene; it was the last resort of a desperate woman. As she left the hotel with her husband and the little girl there was a lesson too painful for any pen to picture.

(1753)

Last Words—See [Death Compelling Sincerity].

LATENT POSSIBILITIES

Beauty of character may be evolved out of the most unpromising material which only seems fit to be flung forth and burned. If a child cries we should try to make it laugh; if we meet melancholy folk, we should seek to cheer them; if they have to live in contact with evil tempers, we must endeavor to sweeten them.

At certain seasons of the year some great conservatories are full of ugly plants, with terrible spines sticking out of great, fat, succulent, selfish-looking leaves. These plants are cacti. They wear only a frightful and repellent aspect. Yet they are favorites of the horticulturist. He waters them and nurtures them. And suddenly the whole place is ablaze with their unspeakable loveliness. They have burst into glorious efflorescence, and spectators come to look on them with joy and wonder. Many of them bloom, especially in the night.

(1754)

See [Possibilities, Latent].

LATIN AMERICA AND THE GOSPEL

There are inhabitants of three hundred towns in the Philippine Islands to-day who are stretching out their hands to America for Christian missionaries, and there is not a single person to go. Do they need us? I reply by telling you an incident. I sent a man named Nicholas Zamora, one of our preachers, out about four or five miles from the city. The man has a good voice; it is like a bell, and you can hear it four or five blocks. They were singing for about ten minutes, when a policeman came along and rushed the whole company off to jail. We have a saying in the Philippines that our converts do not have any backbone until they have been in jail about three times. They did not have any regular jail, using instead the lower floor in the policeman’s house. When they arrived there, Nicholas said: “Well, we are here; I guess we might as well do something”; and they began to sing the first verse of “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” The policeman came down-stairs and said that singing must cease, and went back up-stairs. Nicholas said, “I guess we might as well have the second verse,” and they began to sing it. The policeman came down again in high dudgeon and berated them most vigorously; and having cooled off, he went up-stairs again. Nicholas said, “We will now have the third verse.” The policeman came down again as they were starting in strongly on the third verse. This was too much for the policeman, who said in anger: “Get out of here, and go right back to America. I don’t propose to have any psalm-singing Methodists in my jail.”—J. L. McLaughlin, “Student Volunteer Movement,” 1906.

(1755)

LAUGHING PLANT, A

Palgrave, in his work on Central and Eastern Arabia, mentions a plant whose seeds produce effects analogous to those of laughing-gas. The plant is a native of Arabia. A dwarf variety is found at Kasum, and another variety at Oman, which attains a height of from three to four feet, with woody stems, wide-spreading branches, and light green foliage. The flowers are produced in clusters and are yellow in color. The seed-pods contain two or three black seeds of the size and shape of a French bean. Their flavor is a little like that of opium, the taste is sweet, and the odor from them produces a sickening sensation and is slightly offensive. These seeds, when pulverized and taken in small doses, operate on a person in a very peculiar manner. He begins to laugh loudly and boisterously, and then sings, dances, and cuts up all kinds of fantastic capers. The effect continues about an hour, and the patient is extremely comical. When the excitement ceases, the exhausted individual falls into a deep sleep, which continues for an hour or more, and when he awakens, he is utterly unconscious that any such demonstrations have been made by him.—Scientific American.

(1756)

LAUGHTER

Albert J. Beveridge, United States Senator from Indiana, believes that the direction of his career was completely changed by a careless laugh. A writer in Success quotes him as saying:

When I was a youth in Illinois I heard that the Congressman from our district intended to hold an examination to determine what young man he should appoint to West Point. I pitched in and studied hard for that examination, and found it easy when I came to take it. Most of the other fellows seemed to be still struggling with it when I had finished, and I was so confident that I had made few mistakes that I was in a pretty cheerful frame of mind. This is why I laughed when one of the strugglers asked a rather foolish question of the professor in charge. The latter evidently felt that the dignity of the occasion had been trifled with, for he scored one per cent against me. When the papers came to be corrected this loss caused me to fall one-fifth of one per cent below the boy who stood highest on the list. He is a captain in the army now, where I suppose I should be had it not been for that laugh. I believe in the power of cheerfulness. Looking back, I am rather glad that I laughed. (Text.)

(1757)

LAUGHTER AS A VENT

It might be said of Lamb, as of Abraham Lincoln, “laughter was his vent”; if he had not laughed, he would have died of a frenzied brain or of a broken heart. With Lamb the maddest mood of frolic was a rebound from the blackest mood of melancholia; a fact which Carlyle, who did know Lamb’s history, might have remembered before he used the phrase “diluted insanity,” which, in view of that sad history, is nothing less than brutal.—W. J. Dawson, “The Makers of English Prose.”

(1758)

LAUGHTER, PERILS OF

There is certainly no harm in a good laugh, and truly it is not forbidden to a jester to speak the truth. Yet the laugh must have the right ring to it. Socrates laughed, and Voltaire laughed, as Thomas Erskine remarked; yet, as he said, what a difference in the laugh of the two! And the man who laughs all the time will not know what to do when the hour of weeping comes. The laughing philosopher is a very shallow philosopher or else a very shallow laugher. An awful gravity which comes from a man taking himself too seriously is a thing which irresistibly invites a tweaking of the nose; but a ridicule which beats and splashes on all sides and at all times, fixing its pasquinades nightly on the statues of our national heroes, smirking in the presence of names and thoughts that ought to be shrouded in sacred reverence, is one of the things that no right soul can abide.—Christian Union.

(1759)

LAUGHTER, PROVOKING

The doctor who could not laugh and make me laugh I should put down for a half-educated man. It is one of the duties of the profession to hunt for the material of a joke on every corner. Most of them have so esteemed it. Garth, Rabelais, Abernethy, and a hundred or so more too near to be named, what genial, liver-shaking, heart-quickening, wit-waking worthies they were and are! To the son who loves her best, nature reveals most her tricks of workmanship. He knows there is a prize in every package of commonplace and sadness, and he can find it—not only the bit of fun shining to the eye of a connoisseur like an unset jewel, but the eccentricity, the resemblance, the revelation, countless signs and tokens of the evanescent, amusing, pathetic creature we call the human.—A. B. Ward, Scribner’s.

(1760)

LAUGHTER, VALUE OF

To what a dreary, dismal complexion should we all come at last, were all fun and cachinnation expunged from our solemn and scientific planet! Care would soon overwhelm us; the heart would corrode; the river of life would be like the lake of the dismal swamp; we should begin our career with a sigh, and end it with a groan; while cadaverous faces and words to the tune of “The Dead March in Saul,” would make up the whole interlude of our existence. Hume, the historian, in examining a French manuscript containing accounts of some private disbursements of King Edward II of England, found, among others, one item of a crown paid to somebody for making the king laugh. Could one conceive of a wiser investment? Perhaps by paying one crown Edward saved another. “The most utterly lost of all days,” says Chamfort, “is that on which you have not once laughed.” Even that grimmest and most saturnine of men, who, tho he made others roar with merriment, was never known to smile, and who died “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole”—Dean Swift—has called laughter “the most innocent of all diuretics.” (Text.)—William Matthews, Home Magazine.

(1761)

LAW AND GRACE

One of the notable figures in the history of the American Navy is that of Admiral Porter. Wise in counsel and daring in execution, he has left his impression very deep upon its development and traditions. At one time he was in command of the Naval Academy at Annapolis when the following incident occurred:

General Grant was on a visit to the Academy. As he stood watching the evolutions of the midshipmen, the general had his ever-present cigar in his mouth. The marine on duty walked up to the general and said, “General, I beg pardon, but it is against the rules to smoke in the academy.” “All right,” replied the general, and, with soldierly promptness, he proceeded to take the cigar from his mouth. At that instant Admiral Porter stept forward and said, “I abrogate that rule.” (Text.)

(1762)

LAW AND LOVE

A boisterous New-year’s eve reveler, by the name of Downey, was arrested on a Third Avenue elevated train in New York City:

After listening to the testimony Magistrate Cornell decided that Downey’s New-year’s enthusiasm had been excessive, and that he must pay ten dollars to the city treasury. Downey had used all his available cash in celebrating, and he was about to be led to the court prison, when his wife, who had been tearfully listening to the evidence, fell in a faint. She was lifted up by Callahan, the policeman who arrested her husband, and who revived her and then inquired if she had any money with which to pay the fine.

“Not a penny,” she replied, “and poor Jack will have to go to jail. He’s such a good husband, too,” and the little woman wept.

“I won’t let him go to jail,” said Callahan, and he drew a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to the clerk. Thereupon the Downeys fell on his neck and wept for joy.

(1763)

---

Love is, in the spiritual world, what the powers of attraction, resulting in beautiful harmonies of combination and interrelation are seen to be in the physical. But the subject of the law which claims love from moral beings must freely accept its beneficent rule; while the crystal can not choose another finish for its angles, or the star select for itself a rule which will square it instead of rounding it.—Richard S. Storrs.

(1764)

LAW ENFORCED

Violating a petty township ordinance on a hunting expedition on Long Island, his friends were indignant when Garibaldi was hauled before a local magistrate, as described in a recent number of the Century. To the protests and condolences, the patriot replied: “No, friends, these officers of the law have done nothing more than their duty and I deserve the correction. The Americans make and enforce the laws proper to the regulating of their own communities, just as we hope some day to do with ours in Italy.”

(1765)

LAW FOR THE TRANSGRESSOR

In certain places we see regulations like these placarded: “No smoking allowed,” “No betting allowed,” “No swearing allowed”; and we perceive at once the kind of place we are in, and the kind of people who usually frequent them—that is sufficiently clear from the prohibitory legislation. We never think of putting up such regulations in a temple. So the commandments of Moses assume this to be a sinful world; they are addrest to sinners; there is in them the idiom of impeachment and condemnation.—W. L. Watkinson, “The Transfigured Sackcloth.”

(1766)

Law, Help—See [Prohibition as a Benefactor].

Law, Impartial Enforcement of—See [Impartiality].

Law in Earlier Times—See [Punishment, Former Severity of].

Law, Invariable—See [Gravitation, Law of].

LAW, MORAL

We teach children that two and two are four, but not that it is wrong to tell lies as a bookkeeper. We teach them that fire burns, in science, but in morals we do not tell them that the boy who tries to satisfy his hunger for pleasure with sin, is one who eats red-hot coals when he is hungry. We tell the girl that hot water scalds, but we do not tell her that there are passions and pleasures through selfishness that blight the soul, and do not satisfy, just as scalding water and boiling oil, and carbolic acid will not satisfy thirst.—N. D. Hillis.

(1767)

Law More Than the Individual—See [Impartiality].

LAW, NATURAL

The laws of matter are simply the mode in which matter in virtue of its constitution acts. Oxygen unites chemically with hydrogen, in certain proportions, under certain conditions, simply because of the qualities or attributes wherewith these two gases are invested. It is not the law which determines the combination, but the qualities which determine the law. These elements act as they act, simply because they are what they are.

(1768)

LAW, OBEDIENCE TO

The world has no place in it for a lawless man. What we call liberty is really a form of obedience to law, and whatever you may achieve later in life will represent the discovery of law and the instant acceptance thereof. The Indian obeys one law—and can therefore swim the river. Obeying the law of fire, he achieves a canoe, hollowed out with the flame. Obeying the law of the wind, nature fills his sail, and releases him from bondage to the oar; obeying the law of steam, nature gives the man a ship. Obeying the law of electricity, his car doubles its speed. Obeying the law of the air, the man spreads his wings like a bird.—N. D. Hillis.

(1769)

Law Prohibiting Evil—See [Cocaine Restrictions].

LAW, SEVERITY OF ANCIENT

On February 9, 1810, Romilly, the great reformer, obtained leave to bring in three bills to repeal the acts which punish with death the crimes of stealing privately in a shop goods of the value of five shillings, and of stealing to the amount of forty shillings in dwelling-houses or on board vessels of navigable rivers. In May that relating to shops was passed, the two others were opposed by the Government. But on May 30 the former bill was rejected by the House of Lords by a majority of 31 to 11. There were no less than seven bishops who voted for the old cruel law. These learned Christian gentlemen devoutly believed that transportation for life was not a sufficiently severe punishment for the offense of pilfering what is of five shillings’ value (dollar and a quarter).—Edward Gilliat, “Heroes of Modern Crusades.”

(1770)

Lawless Business Men—See [Misery an Educator].

LAWLESSNESS

We see in the following incident how men who break law forfeit the right to secure the protection of the law:

A man in the preventive service on the south coast told this history to Mrs. Norton, the authoress. He said he had once been a smuggler. Desiring to reform he went to his smuggling companions and demanded his share (one-third) of the boat, as he wanted to leave the partnership. They refused, and laughed at his demand; tho he offered to refer the claim to an arbitrator, they only laughed the more. This exasperated him; so he went out one night and sawed off a third of the boat. This did him no good, but the expense to his companions would be more than his share if they had peaceably given it to him. Mrs. Norton made some comments on this method of redress, to which the man rejoined: “Yes, marm, but you see they darn’t nor I darn’t complain at law, ’cos it was a smuggling craft; and that’s how it would always be, if there was no law, a man wud try and right hisself, and if he couldn’t, he’d revenge hisself. That just it.” (Text.)—Croake James, “Curiosities of Law and Lawyers.”

(1771)

LAWLESSNESS, SPRINGS OF

It was recently my good fortune to be invited to talk to a club of Jewish boys. Among other matters I talked to them about law and lawlessness, and tried to show that the spirit of lawlessness, now so rife in this country, manifests itself at first in little ways. I reminded them of the wanton lawlessness of automobile drivers in exceeding speed limits, and then I sought to bring the illustration close home to them by asking if they ever saw a fellow at a ball-game, where scores of men were standing in line waiting for their turn to get a ticket, pass up to the head of the line and surreptitiously induce some friend there, or even a stranger, to buy a ticket for him, and thus take advantage of all those who had come before him. They all recognized the illustration. It is a very common incident in American life. Then I pointed out that such a proceeding is a rank violation of the law of courtesy and fair play, and that any one who would do that thing ruthlessly is sowing the seeds of lawlessness, and may some day expect to reap the consequences.—George W. Coleman, “Searchlights.”

(1772)

Laymen, Opportunities of—See [Pew, If I Were in the].

LAZINESS, EXCUSE FOR

In the book of Proverbs is this verse: “The sluggard saith, ‘There is a lion without; I shall be slain in the street.’” This means that a lazy man did not wish to go to work, and so pretended that there was a lion in the street, and offered as an excuse for not going to work that the lion in the street would kill him if he went out.

It is a fact that every lazy boy and every indolent girl has a lion; that is, some excuse for not doing what is asked. A daughter is told to do her piano practising and exclaims: “Oh, I can’t! It is so cold in the parlor” (lazy man’s lion). A son is asked to run to the store on an errand and answers that his shoe hurts his foot when he walks (lazy man’s lion). On Sunday morning he can not go to church because it is rainy (lazy man’s lion). He can not study his lessons because his eyes hurt him (lazy man’s lion). She can not eat the crusts of her bread because her gums are sore (lazy man’s lion). She can not get up in time for breakfast because her throat pains her (lazy man’s lion).

Look out for the lazy man’s lion, that foolish excuse for not doing what we should do!—E. H. Byington, Congregationalist.

(1773)

LEADERSHIP, FAITHFUL

Sir Garnet Wolseley, in his Egyptian campaign against Arabi Pasha at Tel-el-Kebir, selected a Scotch Highlander to lead his force over the desert sands by the light of the stars, so timing the silent march as to reach the point of assault at daybreak. March and assault were successful, but the poor Highlander fell mortally wounded. Sir Garnet, learning of this, went over to the brave man, who, seeing his commander, said: “Didn’t I lead them straight?”

Happy the Christian guide who in death can make a similar claim. (Text.)

(1774)

Leaf, The Form of a—See [Creation, A Witness of].

Leaners and Lifters—See [Lifters and Leaners].

LEARNING BY EXAMPLE

Prof. Lloyd Morgan made some interesting experiments in the instincts of birds, by rearing chickens and wild fowl from an incubator, so that they never could have learned anything from their parents. He found that they needed to be taught almost everything necessary to the proper conduct of their lives—not only to distinguish what was good to eat, but even the very acts of eating and drinking. They showed no fear of the human race, and plainly did not understand the language of their own mother when he placed them near her. The mothercluck of the hen had no meaning for the incubator chick, who nevertheless came promptly when he called. These experiments proved conclusively that young birds are taught—or learn by imitation, which is the same thing—to eat and drink, to understand their native tongue, to recognize and procure their food, and to fear mankind.—Olive Thorne Miller, “The Bird Our Brother.”

(1775)

LEARNING PROCESS, THE

A young boy learns to play golf largely by taking the sticks as he has seen some one hold them and whacking at the ball in a haphazard fashion. Sometimes he hits it squarely, and then he gets a satisfaction that tends to impress on him the memory of the movement resulting in this satisfaction. He tries the next time to reproduce this feeling and to locate the point of difference, tho he is or may be conscious of none of these efforts on his part. He keeps trying and trying until he succeeds, noting meanwhile the ways other people stand, hold their clubs, and swing, and comparing them with his way. An old man, on the other hand, tries this method but makes no such progress. He is not free to establish a dozen new ways of getting a swing as the boy is. He has one or two already established ways of turning on his feet and of swinging his arms, but these unfortunately are not such as to help him in his golf. He must, therefore, not merely recognize and strive for the details of the right way, but he must more or less consciously break up the old ways. His chances are poor of success unless he is wisely directed; i.e., taught.—Stuart H. Rowe, “Proceedings of the Religious Education Association,” 1907.

(1776)

Learning Transformed Into Life—See [Principles, Mastering].

Leisure—See [Time, Improving].

Lessons, Class—See [Encouragement].

LETHARGY

In some parts of Africa the natives are attacked with “sleeping-sickness.” The first symptom is drowsiness, and the following days and weeks drift past in sleep. The sleep grows deeper and heavier until the sufferer has passed out into the unknown, to the sleep that knows no waking.

Sleeping-sickness, in a moral sense, is a common disease in the world. It is often as fatal to activity and character as the dread plague of Africa is to the body. The temperature of the heart falls, the soul sleep deepens, God is forgotten, Christ forsaken. (Text.)

(1777)

LETTER OF GOD

An incident is related of William Duncan, the “Apostle of Alaska”:

One day soon after Mr. Duncan had arrived among the Indians there, a fine-looking old Indian chief, Neyashtodoh, one of the chiefs of the Kitlahns, who had three sons, called upon him. “I have heard that you have come here with the letter of God. Is that so? Have you the letter of God with you?” asked the chief. “I have,” said Mr. Duncan. “Would you mind showing it to me?” “Certainly.” Mr. Duncan placed a large Bible on the table. “This is God’s Book.” The Indian caressed it reverently. “Is God’s letter for the Tsimsheans?” “Certainly. God sent this Book to your people, as well as to mine.” “Does that Book give God’s ‘heart’ to us?” “It does.” “And are you going to tell the Indians that?” “I am.” “It is good—it is good, chief,” was the answer of Neyashtodoh.

(1778)

LEVELING

“‘Washing a hill away’ is a process employed by a land-improvement company near Baltimore,” says Indoors and Out. “The summit of a hill was to be lowered about nine feet. The operations covered an area fifteen hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide. From a stream near by water was forced at eighty pounds pressure through eight-inch pipes to a five-inch reducing nozzle and then against the wall of earth. This fell in cartloads every few minutes, and so thin was it, with the water added, as to be easily conveyed through pipes to an abandoned pond which the company wished to fill as a part of the improvement plans.” (Text.)

The streams of Christian influence are leveling society by washing away human pride and building up the humble.

(1779)

Levity—See [Gravity].

LIAR EXPOSED

In a large factory in which were employed several hundred persons, one of the workmen, in wielding his hammer, carelessly allowed it to slip from his hand. It flew half way across the room, and struck a fellow workman in the left eye. The man averred that his eye was blinded by the blow, altho a careful examination failed to reveal any injury, there being not a scratch visible. He brought a suit in the courts for compensation for the loss of half of his eyesight, and refused all offers of compromise. Under the law, the owner of the factory was responsible for an injury resulting from an accident of this kind, and altho he believed that the man was shamming, and that the whole case was an attempt at swindling, he had about made up his mind that he would be compelled to pay the claim. The day of the trial arrived, and in open court an eminent occulist retained by the defense examined the alleged injured member, and gave it as his opinion that it was as good as the right eye. Upon the plaintiff’s loud protest of his inability to see with his left eye, the occulist proved him a perjurer, and satisfied the court and jury of the falsity of his claim. And how do you suppose he did it? Why, simply by knowing that the colors green and red combined made black. He prepared a black card on which a few words were written with green ink. Then the plaintiff was ordered to put on a pair of spectacles with two different glasses, the one for the right eye being red and the one for the left eye consisting of ordinary glass. Then the card was handed him and he was ordered to read the writing on it. This he did without hesitation, and the cheat was at once exposed. The sound right eye, fitted with the red glass, was unable to distinguish the green writing on the black surface of the card, while the left eye, which he pretended was sightless, was the one with which the reading had to be done.—Pottery Gazette.

(1780)

Liberality—See [Generosity].

LIBERALITY IN RELIGION

Father Mathew was going among a large number of his temperance converts, signing the cross on their foreheads, when a man on his knees looked up and said, “Father, here am I, an Orangeman, kneeling to you, and you blessing me.” “God bless you, my dear, I didn’t care if you were a lemon-man,” said Father Mathew.

(1781)

Liberty—See [Freedom Chosen].

Liberty, A Spider’s Struggle for—See [Ingenuity].

LIBERTY, INDIVIDUAL

Throughout his life Milton, tho profoundly religious, held aloof from the strife of sects. In belief, he belonged to the extreme Puritans, called Separatists, Independents, Congregationalists, of which our Pilgrim Fathers are the great examples; but he refused to be bound by any creed or Church discipline:

“As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.”

In this last line of one of his sonnets is found Milton’s rejection of every form of outward religious authority in face of the supreme Puritan principle, the liberty of the individual soul before God.—William J. Long, “English Literature.”

(1782)

Liberty, Promoting—See [Emancipation].

LIBERTY, SPIRITUAL

Madam Guyon, in the Bastile, speaks to us still of patience in suffering. The walls of her prison were nine feet thick and a narrow slit through the massive masonry admitted all the light that ever reached her. The cell was narrow and dirty with the mold of ages. Dreary and cold in winter and suffocating in summer. No privileges, no books, no recreations or employments. But here was born that blithe bird-song of her captivity:

“My cage confines me round:

Abroad I can not fly;

But tho my wings are closely bound,

My heart’s at liberty.

My prison walls can not control

The flight, the freedom of the soul.

And in God’s mighty will I find

The joy, the freedom of the mind.” (Text.)

(1783)

LIBERTY SYMBOLIZED

The other day I came down the East River on the steamer. I saw the Bartholdi statue, and my only comment on it, in voice or in thought, was upon its dingy appearance. I wondered that it had not been cleaned. When I sat in my house reading afterward, I came to an account of the ecstasy of an immigrant when first he saw the statue. It was to him the incarnation of all that he had hoped for. Its torch seemed to light his feet to the ways of peace and prosperity. It seemed to be calling a welcome from this land that is free. It seemed even to his devoted heart to be like the figure of the Christ beckoning him and promising him the liberty of a child of God. I wish it might be that we could never see it without similar emotion.—C. B. McAfee.

(1784)

Liberty, Workers for—See [Emancipation].

LIES IN BUSINESS

You, merchants, must not twine lies and sagacity with your threads in weaving, for every lie that is told in business is a rotten thread in the fabric, and tho it may look well when it first comes out of the loom, there will always be a hole there, first or last, when you come to wear it.—Henry Ward Beecher.

(1785)

LIFE

A lady occupied a whole year in searching for and fitting the following lines from English and American poets. The whole reads almost as if written at one time and by one author:

Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?

—Young

Life’s a short summer—man is but a flower;

—Dr. Johnson

By turns we catch the fatal breath and die

—Pope

The cradle and the tomb, alas! so nigh!

—Prior

To be is better far than not to be,

—Sewell

Tho all man’s life may seem a tragedy;

—Spencer

But light cares speak when mighty griefs are dumb—

—Daniel

The bottom is but shallow whence they come.

—Raleigh

Your fate is but the common fate of all,

—Longfellow

Unmingled joys here to no man befall;

—Southwell

Nature to each allots his proper sphere.

—Congreve

Fortune makes folly her peculiar care.

—Churchill

Custom does often reason overrule

—Rochester

And throw a cruel sunshine on a fool;

—Armstrong

Live well—how long or short permit to heaven,

—Milton

They who forgive most shall be most forgiven.

—Bailey

Sin may be clasped so close we can not see its face;

—French

Vile intercourse where virtue has no place.

—Somerville

Then keep each passion down, however dear,

—Thompson

Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear:

—Byron

Her sensual snares let faithless pleasures lay,

—Smollett

With craft and skill to ruin and betray.

—Crabbe

Soar not too high to fall, but stoop to rise;

—Massinger

We masters grow of all that we despise.

—Crowley

Oh, then, renounce that impious self-esteem.

—Beattie

Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream.

—Cowper

Think not ambition wise because ’tis brave—

—Davenant

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

—Gray

What is ambition? ’Tis a glorious cheat.

—Willis

Only destructive to the brave and great.

—Addison

What’s all the gaudy glitter of a crown?

—Dryden

The way to bliss lies not on beds of down.

—Quarles

How long we live, not years but actions tell.

—Watkins

That man lives twice, who lives the first life well.

—Herrick

Make, then, while yet ye may, your God your friend.

—Mason

Whom Christians worship, yet not comprehend.

—Hill

The trust that’s given guard, and to yourself be just.

—Dana

For live howe’er we may, yet die we must.

—Shakespeare

—Good Housekeeping.

(1786)

---

As I passed down through India I saw two little rice-fields side by side. One was green and growing; the other was dead and dry. I looked for the cause. The great lake was full of water. There was no lack there. Into the one the living water was flowing, for the channel was open. The other was choked. Brother, is your life green and growing, fruitful and joyful, or barren and dry because the channel is choked?—G. S. Eddy, “Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions,” 1910.

(1787)

LIFE A CYCLE

An old man who was just one hundred and three years of age, recently died in Chester, England. Not long before his death he tried to get out of bed, and they said to him: “Father, where do you want to go? What do you want to do?” He answered, “Father is calling me to breakfast.” He repeated it two or three times—“Father is calling me to breakfast.” The old man had become a child again. He was in his little trundle-bed again hearing his father’s voice up the stairway calling him to come to breakfast.

So when we have traveled around the circle of life, we get into the childhood of our old age, and hear the voices of the friends of our youth, which is one of the evidences of the belief that we shall hear those voices again. We would not thus recall them nor remember them if we were not to hear them again.

(1788)

LIFE, A DEVOTED

Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean War Nursing Service, as a child at Lea Hurst, was accustomed to minister to the sick poor, and it so happened that the clergyman of the parish was a man of considerable medical skill. Curiously enough, it was an animal that first turned her thoughts to nursing—the dog of her father’s shepherd. Poor Cap’s leg was thought to have been broken and he was about to be destroyed, when the girl, under the clergyman’s direction, prepared a simple hot compress and soon had the delight of seeing her patient convalescent. The fame of this exploit spread abroad, and many an animal was brought to her to be healed; perhaps that was why she always advocated that sick people should have dumb pets about them if possible. As she grew older, the little girl who had instinctively bandaged her broken dolls in the most professional manner was allowed to attend to the wounds and ailments of real people, and this at a time when ambulance classes were unheard of, and when the only sick nurses available were ignorant and untrained women. Miss Florence did not find the ordinary life of a girl in society appealed to her. With characteristic decision she gave it up and spent the next few years in visiting hospitals in England, Ireland and Scotland. It is easy to see now that the great want of those days was trained women nurses, but it required exceptional intelligence—indeed, we might almost say, a touch of genius, to see it then in the late forties. The question was how to supply the need; characteristically again, Miss Nightingale began with herself. In 1851 she entered the Society of Sisters of Mercy, a Protestant institution at Kaiserverth on the Rhine, for training deaconesses or nursing sisters. Here she thoroughly qualified herself as a nurse, and on her return to London she devoted much time and money to the Governesses’ Sanatorium in Harley Street.

The autumn of 1854 saw the beginning of the enterprise for which all this time she had been unconsciously preparing herself. The country was being horrified by the tidings which continually came home of the appalling mismanagement of the military hospitals in the Crimea. Our gallant soldiers were dying by hundreds for lack of the simplest and most elementary nursing. It seemed, as religious people say, a clear “call” to this country squire’s daughter, and that very evening she wrote to Mr. Sidney Herbert (afterward Lord Herbert of Lea), the Secretary at War, and sketched her plan. At the very same time Mr. Herbert himself was writing to her to ask if she would organize and take out a company of nurses and the two letters crossed in the post. In October, 1854, Miss Nightingale started for the East with thirty-eight nurses in her command, some of whom were naturally nuns. The day after her arrival came the wounded from Balaklava, quickly followed by six hundred wounded from Inkerman and in a few months she had ten thousand poor fellows under her care. She did much more than organize; she would traverse at night, her little lamp in her hand, the four miles of crowded hospital wards and Longfellow’s famous lines are no poetic fiction, many a dying man turned to kiss her shadow as it fell.

Miss Florence Nightingale was the first woman to receive the Order of Merit, the coveted distinction formerly reserved exclusively for men. She received the freedom of the City of London in 1908 and was a Lady of Grace of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.—Belfast (Ireland) Telegram.

(1789)

LIFE, A NOBLE

I have seen at midnight the gleaming headlight of a giant locomotive, rushing onward through the darkness, heedless of danger and uncertainty, and I have thought the spectacle grand. I have seen the light come over the eastern hills in glory, driving the lazy darkness, like mist before a sea-born gale, till leaf and tree and blade of grass sparkled as myriad diamonds in the morning rays, and I have thought that it was grand. I have seen the lightning leap at midnight athwart the storm-swept sky, shivering over chaotic clouds, ’mid howling winds, till cloud and darkness and the shadow-haunted earth flashed into midday splendor, and I have known that it was grand. But the grandest thing, next to the radiance that flows from the Almighty’s throne, is the light of a noble and beautiful life, shining in benediction upon the destines of men, and finding its home in the bosom of the everlasting God.—John Temple Graves.

(1790)

LIFE A TREE

A Scandinavian allegory represents human life as a tree, the “Igdrasil,” or the tree of existence, whose roots grow deep down in the soil of mystery; the trunk reaches above the clouds; its branches spread out over the globe. At the foot of it sit the Past, the Present and the Future, watering the roots. Its boughs spread out through all lands and all time; every leaf of the tree is a biography, every fiber a word, a thought or a deed; its boughs are the histories of nations; the rustle of it is the noise of human existence onward from of old; it grows amid the howling of the hurricane; it is the great tree of humanity.

(1791)

LIFE A VOYAGE

Into this world we come like ships,

Launched from the docks and stocks and slips,

For fortune fair or fatal.

—Thomas Hood.

O Neptune! You may save me if you will; you may sink me if you will; but whatever happens I shall keep my rudder true.

—Seneca’s “Pilot.”

Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward sail unharmed;

The port, well worth the voyage, is near,

And every wave is charmed.

—R. W. Emerson.

Thou hast embarked; thou hast made the voyage; thou art come to shore; now land! (Text.)

—Marcus Aurelius.

(1792)

Life and Faith United—See [Religion Allaying Fear].

LIFE, APPRECIATION OF

Many who carelessly declare this life to be of no desirable value discover how strongly they hold to it if by chance they seem in danger of losing it. Thus Rev. Asa Bullard writes:

My father had a blacksmith-shop; and sometimes when not called away on professional duties, he would do little jobs in his shop in the evening. One evening, when I was a little boy, I asked him to let me go with him and see him make nails.

He said I would get sleepy and cry to come back. I thought I shouldn’t; and so was permitted to go with him. He fixt me a nice seat on the forge, where I could see him blow the bellows, heat the nail-rod red hot, and then hammer out the nails. It was real fun to watch him for some time.

By and by I began to grow tired and sleepy; and then I wished I was back at the house and in bed; but I did not dare to say anything about it. At length father looked up, and seeing that I was very sleepy and ready to cry, he asked:

“What is the matter, Asa?”

I said: “I wish I was never made!”

Father drew the hot nail-rod out of the fire and raised it as tho he was going to strike me, when I exclaimed:

“I don’t want to be killed, now I am made!” Then, with a hearty laugh, he took me home to mother.—“Incidents in a Busy Life.”

(1793)

Life as Testimony—See [Native Converts].

Life, Brevity of—See [Brevity of Life].

LIFE CHEAP

Mard Bird, in “Persian Women and Their Creed,” tells the following:

A Persian Haji’s baby had convulsions and the parents brought it to the Mohammedan village teacher, who said the child was possest, and the only remedy for her disease was for them to buy a prayer of the exact length of the child, and strap it on her back. The child was so long that the cost of the prayer was five dollars, and the parents decided that a girl baby was not worth that much and took her home to die.

(1794)

LIFE, CLINGING TO

They used to tell during the Civil War of a colonel who was ordered to assault a position which his regiment, when they had advanced far enough to get a good look at it, saw to be so impossible that they fell back and became immovable. Whereupon (so the story ran) the colonel, who took the same sense of the situation that his command did, yet must do his duty, called out in an ostensibly pleading and fervid voice: “Oh, don’t give it up so! Forward again! Forward! Charge! Great heavens, men, do you want to live forever?”—Joseph H. Twichell.

(1795)

LIFE, CONTINUED

A few years ago I was walking along the shore of the Susquehanna River, in Harrisburg, Pa., accompanied by the little boy of my friend, Dr. Hill. Night was fast closing down over the earth, when the little fellow looked up and said: “Brother Shannon, where does the river go to, when the night comes on?” I saw at once that the question was big with the wonder and mystery of a child’s mind. He had just come from his own home; he saw men and women going home; he saw the birds flying to their homes in the trees, and he wondered if the river had a home, too. Of course, I could have answered that the river has its home in the sea, but I said: “My child, the river flows on just the same through the night as through the day.” And men say: “Where does the soul go to when the night of death comes on?” The Master says: “It goes on just the same, thrilled with my joy, united with my destiny, and deathless in my life!”—F. F. Shannon.

(1796)

LIFE, DESIRE FOR LONG

The enchanters of China promised the emperors of that country to find an elixir of long life that should efface the irreparable inroad of years. The astrologers and necromancers of the Middle Ages flattered themselves to have discovered the fountain of youth, in which a person had merely to bathe in order to recover his youth. All such dreams were long ago dispelled by the progress of science. Yet, in the heart of most men, there is such a desire to prolong their stay upon the earth that the art of living for a long time has not ceased to impassion a large number of persons who would be willing to endure all the evils of an indefinitely prolonged old age. We have several times had proof of this mania, which Dean Swift has so wittily stigmatized in his second voyage of Gulliver by showing in what a state of abjection the mortals of Laputa lived—those unfortunates who were condemned to survive their own selves through the loss of memory of what they had been. One of the perpetual secretaries of the Academy of Sciences has written a volume to prove that man should consider himself young up to eighty years of age. A noble Venetian named Cornaro spent twenty years in a scale-pan in order to ascertain what alimentary regimen was best adapted to him. We have known old men who, having learned that Mr. Chevreul had never drank anything but water, took the resolution to abstain wholly from wine, hoping in this way to exceed a hundred years. Fortunately, a rag-gatherer, who had reached the same age as the celebrated academician, spared them this sacrifice, by informing his confrére in longevity that he had never drank anything but wine.—La Science Illustrée.

(1797)

Life, Fecundity of—See [Propagation, Prolific].

LIFE, FEEDING THE

The Mississippi River, which empties its wealth of waters into the Gulf of Mexico, is fed by the Missouri, the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Red River, and indirectly the Allegheny and Monongahela, and the Yellowstone and the Platte. The Amazon River drains an area of two and a half million square miles, or the waters of more than a third of all the South American continent. The River Nile is almost equally enriched by tributaries.

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 life-line 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].

LIFE, NEW, FROM GOD

In London there dwells a man interested in rare and exotic plants. A friend who had been in the Amazon brought him home a rare tree. In the winter he keeps it in the hothouse, but when summer comes, he carries it into his garden. So beautiful is the bloom that he gave garden-parties that men might behold the wondrous flower. One summer’s day he noticed a strange thing that set his pulses throbbing—a singular fruit had begun to set. Sending for an expert, they took counsel together. They knew that this was the only tree of the kind in Paris, and they could not understand from whence had come the pollen that had fertilized the plant. At length they published the story in the papers, and that story brought the explanation. A merchant wrote that years before he had brought to Marseilles a young plant from the Amazon. The pollen of that tree nearly four hundred miles away had been carried on the wings of the wind over hill and vale, and found out the blossom that awaited its coming.

And not otherwise is it with the soul. Because it is in His likeness, it shares with Him in those attributes named reason, wisdom, goodness, holiness and love. The soul waits. Without God it can do nothing. Its life is from afar. Expectant and full of longing, it hungers and thirsts, and desires His coming. That repentant youth, lying in the desert, with a stone for his pillow, waits, and then the light comes from God.—N. D. Hillis.

(1802)

LIFE, ORIGIN OF

The old philosophers who held that all things originated in the sea were not far out of the way, if we are to believe some of the latest biological theories or speculations. That organic evolution began with marine creatures, Haeckel told us long ago. That sea-water is a particularly sympathetic medium for vital processes, has more lately been shown by Loeb in his experiments on the fertilization of the eggs of certain marine creatures. M. René Quinton, of the Laboratory of Pathologic Physiology of the College de France, has published a book, entitled “Sea-water as an Organic Medium,” in which he asserts that as the cell itself has persisted in living organisms, being practically the same in the human body as in our earliest marine predecessors, so the conditions of its life closely reproduce those of primordial times. The cell in our own bodies is bathed in a fluid that closely resembles sea-water in chemical composition and that approximates in temperature to that of the ocean when life first appeared in it. (Text.)

(1803)

LIFE, PASSION FOR

Ponce de Leon searched Florida for the spring of the elixir of life; thousands of alchemists have attempted to concoct it; innumerable patent medicines in every drugstore testify to the universal effort to prolong earthly existence; a miser will fling away his last piece of gold to save his life; lawyers will battle to the last device of law to save a client from execution if only to prolong his existence in a prison; and tho Bacon says “there is no passion so mean as that it can not mate and master the fear of death,” he was speaking only of sudden and occasional passions. The rule is that passion to live outmasters all other passions.

What a word then is this of Jesus when He says, “I came that they might have life.”

(1804)

LIFE, PERSISTENCE OF

A spring of air never loses its elasticity; but it never gains an energy which it had not at first. Tho prest a thousand years under incumbent weights, the instant they are removed it reassumes its original volume; but it gathers no more from the long repose. But the life in the seed tends constantly toward development, into the stalk, the blossom and the fruit. As long as the seed remains perfect and vital, this tendency remains, inhering in it; so that three thousand years after it was shaken from the wheat-ear on the Nile, if planted it develops and brings forth fruit in English gardens.—Richard S. Storrs.

(1805)

Life Pictures—See [Realism].

LIFE PROLONGED

“In the city of New York alone there are 150,000 people living to-day who would be dead if the mortality of fifty years ago still prevailed,” says a writer in The Booklover’s Magazine. “Popular opinion has scarcely yet come to realize what medical science has been doing in late years. People sicken and die, think the laity, and the efforts of the physician are just as futile as before the recent discoveries about which so much is said. This idea is, however, erroneous. I will venture to say there is scarcely an adult living to-day who has not experienced or will not experience an actual prolongation of life due to discoveries of the last fifty years.”

(1806)

LIFE PURPOSE

A story is told of Rubens that during his sojourn as ambassador to the Court of Philip in Spain, he was detected at work upon a painting by a courtier, who, not knowing much about his true fame, exclaimed in surprize, “What! does an ambassador to his Catholic Majesty amuse himself with painting pictures?” “No,” replied Rubens, “the painter sometimes amuses himself with diplomacy.”

The serious business of life is the producing of a good character; all else is pastime. (Text.)

(1807)

---

These noble ambitions for a true life are put in verse by H. H. Barston:

To face each day of life

Nor flinch from any task;

To front the moment’s strife

And only courage ask.

To be a man unawed

By aught but heaven’s command;

Tho men revile or plaud,

To take a stand—and stand.

To fill my life with toil,

With God’s free air and light;

To shun the things that spoil,

That hasten age and night;

To sweat beneath my hod,

Nor ask a better gift

From self or man or God

Than will and strength to lift.

To keep my spirit sweet

Tho head and hand be tired;

Each brother man to greet,

Nor leave him uninspired;

To keep my spirit fed

On God unceasingly,

That none may lack his bread

Who walk this way with me. (Text.)

(1808)

LIFE RECRUDESCENT

Edith M. Thomas is the author of the lines below, found in the Canadian Presbyterian:

The apple-tree said,

“You think I’m dead,”

“Because I have never a leaf to show,

Because I stoop,

And my branches droop,

And the dull, gray mosses over me grow;

But I’m alive in trunk and shoot,

The buds of next May

I fold away,

But I pity the withered grass at my root.”

“You think I’m dead,”

The quick grass said,

“Because I have parted with stem and blade,

But under the ground

I’m safe and sound,

With the snow’s thick blanket over me laid.

I’m all alive and ready to shoot

Should the spring of the year

Come dancing here,

But I pity the flower without branch or root.”

“You think I’m dead,”

A soft voice said,

“Because not a branch or root I own.

I never have died

But close I hide

In a plump seed that the wind has sown,

Patient I wait through the long winter hours.

You will see me again,

I shall laugh at you then

Out of the eyes of a hundred flowers.”

(1809)

LIFE, RESPONSE OF

The touch of God upon men is not answered unless the soul be spiritually alive:

The sun shines down upon the dead twig that has fallen from the tree. All his rich and marvelous powers are exerted. He wraps it about with his mighty arms. He kisses it and bathes it in tides of summer warmth, and smiles upon it and beckons it to come—but it lies there a dead twig to the last. But a vine has peeped through the soil. The sun discovers it and whispers the secrets of the sky to its tiny quivering leaves, and out go the filmy tendrils, and up and up goes the loving plant, climbing the golden trellis of the sunbeam toward its lover, the sun.—John K. Willey.

(1810)

LIFE-SAVING

Every man should try to be as alert and well prepared for helping and saving men as the steamers here described:

All Pacific mail-steamers are carefully protected by a rigid practise in fire and life-saving drills. At the tap of the bell, the crew spring to their places by boat and raft; each officer, with a pistol hung by his side, takes his station; and the precision and quickness with which it is all accompanied inspire the beholder with very comfortable feelings.

The life-drill is practised in case some one should fall overboard. Certain members of the crew are assigned to this duty, ready at any moment to throw out life-lines, buoys that strike a light when they hit the water, or man the emergency lifeboat that is kept in position to be lowered instantly.—Marshall P. Wilder, “Smiling ’Round the World.”

(1811)

See [Knowledge Applied].

Life-saving Attachment—See [Economy of Energy].

LIFE-SAVING BY WIRELESS

The former sound liner Kentucky is at the bottom of the Atlantic at lat. 32.10, long. 76.30, which is more than a hundred miles off the South Carolina coast, south of Cape Hatteras. Her captain and crew of forty-six men are on their way to Key West on board the Mallory liner Alamo. It was the fourth rescue by wireless since that method of communication at sea has been in use. Called by the international distress signal, the Alamo reached the sinking vessel just as the electricity died and but an hour before she sank.

In the meantime her distress calls, heard throughout Atlantic coast waters and sent by W. G. Maginnis, wireless operator, had started speeding toward her the United States Government battleship Louisiana, on a speed trial in the vicinity, the cruiser Birmingham and the revenue cutters Yamacraw and Seminole.

When 150 miles off Sandy Hook, at the very outset of her long journey, she sprang a leak. By working hard at the pumps Captain Moore managed to get her into Newport News with sixteen inches of water in her hold. She was repaired and certified safe and sound by the United States inspector there and Lloyds. Luckily, this little wooden ship, packed tight with coal, had been installed with wireless before she left. The international distress call, S. O. S., set the sound waves jumping all over the coast and the Atlantic. The United States Government received the message at the same time that every sea-captain on the ocean got it. The Alamo, bound for Key West, got it at 11:30 and headed dead for the source at once. Later this came through the air:

“We are sinking. Our lat. is 32 deg. 10 min.; long., 76 deg. 30 min.

“Kentucky.”

The Alamo was sixty-five miles off. She had made the run by 3:50 o’clock, when the Kentucky appeared in sight.

The boat was sinking rapidly and in half a gale the work of transferring the crew of the Kentucky by lifeboat was accomplished. As the last man was taken off only the superstructure was visible above the water.

(1812)

LIFE, SELF-PROPAGATING

The yeast-plant is so small that it can be seen only under the microscope. Each yeast-plant consists of a closed sack or cell, containing a jelly-like liquid named “protoplasm.” Under the microscope the yeast-plant is seen to change in form. Sometimes little swellings grow out, like knobs on a potato, and these will by and by separate themselves from the parent and become other yeast-plants. It is alive and growing.

“What we need,” said McLeod, “is not life, (from galvanism), but the life of life”—Jesus himself. (Text.)

(1813)

LIFE, SOURCE OF MAN’S

The goddess of the Greek mythology springs from the crest of the curling sea. The spirit of poetic and legendary lore is born of moonbeams playing upon fountains. The glittering elf of the household story leaps up on the shaft of the quivering flame. The meteor is invoked, or the morning-star, to give birth to new spirits; the sunset-sheen on distant hills is imagined to become incorporate in them; or the west wind, toying over banks of flowers, to drop their delicate life from its wings. But when God forms the life, in each conscious soul, and fills this with its strange and unsearchable powers, he creates it by a ministry diverse from all these, and as distantly removed as it is possible to conceive from its own unique nature, and its height of prerogative. He creates it by the ministry of these fleshly forms, which are authors, under Him, of a life that transcends them; a life not limited as they are by space, not subject as they are to material assaults, and not dependent as they are on shelter or on food.—Richard S. Storrs.

(1814)

LIFE, SPENDING

A good life is never lost. It yields cumulative results. This rime expresses the truth:

A life spent with a purpose grand

Has simply not been “spent”;

It’s really an investment, and

Will yield a large per cent. (Text.)

(1815)

LIFE, THE SIMPLE

Washington loved the simple life of home and countryside, of friend and neighbor, of master and servant. “To make and sell a little flour annually,” he wrote, “to repair houses going fast to ruin, to build one for the security of my papers of a public nature, will constitute employment for the few years I have to remain on this terrestrial globe.” But he was still ready for the summons of duty, whether it was to put his shoulder to the wheel of a stranger’s broken-down carriage on the roadside, to serve on the petty jury of his country, or to accept command of the army preparing to meet the French. Washington would never have identified effective citizenship with prominence. The citizen who was never mentioned in the news-letters might be quite as great as the general and President. At Ipswich, Mass., on one occasion, Mr. Cleaveland, the minister of the town, was presented to him. As he approached, hat in hand, Washington said, “Put on your hat, parson, and I will shake hands with you.” “I can not wear my hat in your presence, general,” said the minister, “when I think of what you have done for this country.” “You did as much as I,” said Washington. “No, no,” protested the parson. “Yes,” said Washington, “you did what you could, and I have done no more.”—A. MacColl, Northwestern Christian Advocate.

(1816)

Life, The Whole, the Test of Character—See [Character, Unseen Places in].

LIFE, THE WINGED

The story is told of how the birds received their wings. Created originally without wings, they hopped about, until one day God said to them: “You are beautiful and hop finely and sing sweetly, but I want you to fly. Let me give you wings.” At first they refused, saying that wings would be weights. Besides, they liked to hop. But at length they consented to receive wings and flew.

(1817)

LIFE, USES OF

In this world we have but brief glimpses of the best and brightest things. Sunset splendors linger but a little while; spring blossoms are scattered by the winds while we watch their unfolding; and autumn leaves soon fade and fall and dissolve into forest mold; the dull landscape glows for a time with supernal splendor, giving us a foretaste of the glory that shall be revealed; the wind passes over it and it is gone. For the leaves there are other and higher uses than to enrobe the branches with autumnal tints. They live and die to serve God in the mysterious economy of life. It is so with human destiny; our noblest achievements seem to perish in a day, but no life of faithful service can be lost in the consummation of God’s plan.—The Living Church.

(1818)

LIFE AS AN ART

These verses are from a poem by John Kendrick Bangs in The Century:

He’d never heard of Phidias,

He’d never heard of Byron;

His tastes were not fastidious,

His soul was not aspirin’:

But he could tell you what the birds were whisp’ring in the trees,

And he could find sweet music in the sounding of the seas,

And he could joy in wintry snows,

And summer’s sunny weather,

And tell you all the names of those

Who frolic in the heather.

He nothing knew of sciences,

Of art, or eke of letters;

Nor of those strange appliances

That fill the world with debtors:

But happiness he knew right well; he knew from A to Z

The art of filling life with song, and others’ souls with glee;

And he could joy in day and night,

Heart full of pure thanksgiving—

I am not sure he was not right

In using life for living.

(1819)

LIFE, VALUE OF

There is a suggestive and saddening passage in Miss Ellen Terry’s recent “Reminiscences.” The great actress was talking to Sir Henry Irving, her old comrade on the stage, as he lay ill. “Do you ever think, as I do sometimes, what have you got out of life?” asked Miss Terry. “What have I got out of it?” said Irving, stroking his chin and smiling slightly, “Let me see—well, a good cigar, a good glass of wine, good friends.”

And that summary satisfies many another. The pathetic futility of it all! Material things vanish, and then what remains? Life should be more rewarding than this. (Text.)

(1820)

LIFE, VENERATION FOR

Powhatan Bouldin’s “Home Reminiscences” has a story which shows John Randolph’s peculiar veneration for growing things. The incident is related by a friend of Randolph’s nephew:

When I was a boy I visited at Roanoke. The house was completely environed by trees and underwood, and seemed to be in a dense virgin forest. Mr. Randolph would not permit even a switch to be cut near the house.

Without being aware of this, one day I committed a serious trespass. My friend Tudor and I were roving about, when I, perceiving a straight young hickory about an inch thick, felled it. Tudor said that his uncle would be very angry, so I immediately went and informed him what I had ignorantly done, and exprest my regret. Mr. Randolph took the stick and looked pensively at it as if commiserating its fate. Then, gazing at me, he said:

“I would not have done this for fifty Spanish-milled dollars!”

I had seventy-five cents and had entertained some idea of offering it, but when I heard about the fifty dollars I was afraid of insulting him by such meager compensation.

“Did you want this for a cane?” asked Mr. Randolph. “No, sir.” “No, you are not old enough to need a cane. Did you want it for any particular purpose?” “No, sir. I only saw that it was a pretty stick and thought I’d cut it.” “We can be justified in taking animal life to furnish food or to remove a hurtful object. We can not be justified in taking even vegetable life without some useful object in view. Now, God Almighty planted this thing, and you have killed it without any adequate object. It would have grown into a large nut-tree and furnished food for many squirrels. I hope and believe you will never do so again.” “Never, sir, never!” I cried.

He put the stick into a corner, and I escaped to Tudor. It was some time before I could cut a switch or fishing-rod without feeling I was doing some sort of violence to the vegetable kingdom.

(1821)

Life versus Business—See [Religion versus Business].

LIFE VERSUS CHURCH

The manner in which Wesley by his zeal was pushed outside of the Church of England limits is told thus by the Rev. W. H. Fitchett:

But these two features of that work—open-air preaching and the itinerant nature of his ministry—determined many things. They determined, for example, the general question of Wesley’s relation to ecclesiastical order. For that order he had been, and still was, a zealot; but he was slowly learning that there were things more precious, as well as more urgent, than mere ecclesiastical use and wont. England was mapped out, for example, into parishes; and were these faint lines of ecclesiastical boundaries, drawn by human hands and guarding fancied human rights, to arrest such a work as Wesley was beginning? They were like films of cobweb drawn across a track of an earthquake! And many an ecclesiastical cobweb of the same kind had to be brushed aside to make room for the new religious life beginning to stir in Great Britain.—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”

(1822)

LIFE, WASTING

Henley’s brilliant epitaph on George Moreland sums up not only that artist’s life, but no less the life of too many before and since:

He coined himself into guineas, and so, like the reckless and passionate spendthrift he was, he flung away his genius and his life in handfuls, till nothing else was left him but the silence and the decency of death.

(1823)

LIFE, WATER OF

The Scavatori from Naples, some years ago, dug up from among the ruins of Pompeii an urn of bronze filled with pure water, sweet to the taste and unaltered in quality. It had lost none of its pristine excellence after centuries of time.

Jesus described Himself as living water, and after two thousand years this has lost none of its purity or strength.

(1824)

LIFE WHAT WE MAKE IT

Life is what we make it. It varies in its prospect with the sort of eyes that see it. A writer remarks on this, as he takes his walk over the fields:

The laborer is coming along the road with his lumbering wagon; or the shepherd is standing by the gate of the field; or the gamekeeper is out to see to his snares; and you say to the countryman, whichever you meet, how beautiful the country is when the red berries so thickly stud the hedge.

“Beautiful enough,” he replies, “but it’s no pleasant sight for us poor folk; it means we shall have a hard winter.”

Because of this relation of the individual to the coloring of life, it behooves each one to make his own world beautiful and he will do so when his own life is in accord with truth. (Text.)

(1825)

LIFE WORK, CHOOSING A

In a current book a college president tells this story:

A traveler in Japan says that one day as he stood on the quay in Tokyo waiting for a steamer, he excited the attention of a coolie doing the work of a stevedore, who knew he was an American. As the coolie went by with his load, in his pigeon English he said, “Come buy cargo?” By which he meant, “Are you in Japan on business?” The man shook his head. The second time the coolie passed, he again asked, “Come look and see?” By which he meant to ask if the American were a tourist seeing the country. Receiving a negative reply, the next time he passed he tried one more question. “Spec’ die soon?” By which he meant to ask if the man was there for his health.

This the writer used to describe three different classes of people in the world. There is the young man who seems to be in the world for his health. They want to be coddled. There is the young man who seems to be in the world as a traveler. He wants to be amused. There are the young men who are in the world for business. They mean to do something and be somebody.—N. McGee Waters.

(1826)

Life Yet to Be—See [Future, The].

Life’s Furrow—See [Symbol of Life].

LIFE’S MELODY

A great pipe-organ has one or two thousand pipes. Some are twenty feet long, and large enough for a man to stand in, others are no bigger or longer than a common lead-pencil; some are made of wood, some of zinc, some of lead; and every one is set to make its own peculiar note. No pipe ever makes any other note than its own. But the organist is not limited to one tune. He can play any tune he may wish simply by changing the order of the notes which he sounds.

The laws of God’s world are fixt; but on that great organ He is master, and it obeys His will; and rest assured that He it is that is playing the melody of your life.—James M. Stifler, “The Fighting Saint.”

(1827)

LIFE’S TURNING TIDE

Does the tide ever turn in the land of the dead?

Shall we stir at the kiss of the wave rolling back,

And lift, like the sea-weed, the death-draggled head,

And toss with life’s flood, like the tangles of wrack?

We trust it is so; for the sea that God turns,

And sends flooding back into river and bay—

Is the sea more divine than the spirit that yearns?

And we will not believe that life’s tide ebbs for aye.

—James Buckham, Frank Leslie’s.

(1828)

LIFTERS AND LEANERS

A prosperous member of a church in Scotland had been besought often by his pastor to give to the work of evangelizing the poor in Glasgow, but would always reply: “Na, I need it for mysel’.” One night he dreamed that he was at the gate of heaven, which was only a few inches ajar. He tried to get in, but could not, and was in agony at his poor prospect. Just then the face of his minister appeared, who said: “Sandy, why stand ye glowering there? Why don’t ye gae in?” “I can’t; I am too large, and my pocketbook sticks out whichever way I turn.” “Sandy,” replied the minister, “think how mean ye have been to the Lord’s poor, and ye will be small enough to go through the eye of a needle.” Sandy awoke, and began to reduce both his pocketbook and his meanness by generously lifting forward the cause of his Lord.

We may depend upon it that it is the lifters and not the leaners who have the joy, and the peace, and the triumph of the Christian life.—Louis Albert Banks.

(1829)

LIGHT

The traveler to the heavenly country will often set in contrast to the conditions described below, the time and scene in which “they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light” and “the Lamb is the light thereof.”

In any large city the small hours of the night, while most people are asleep, is the time when the bread is made and baked, the great newspapers printed, the food products, such as milk and vegetables, prepared and brought into the city. If we were obliged to dispense with our modern systems of illumination the world would be set back in its civilization beyond our power to imagine.

(1830)

---

Jesus stated long ago the philosophy of the paragraph below when He said “Neither cometh to the light lest their evil deeds should be reproved” and “men love darkness ... because their deeds are evil.”

The municipality had better take the cue, less light, more crime, more light, less crime. There are still dark spots to be found at night within the city limits where a few powerful arcs would wield an immediate influence. It is easy to see that arc-lights are cheaper than police officers and a brightly lit city the greatest imaginable offset to criminality in any stage or form. (Text.)—Electricity.

(1831)

---

An English writer has this to say about the phosphorescent light cast by the sea-fish called the smelt:

Anybody desirous of seeing the sort of light which it emits may do so very easily by purchasing an unwashed smelt from the fishmonger, and allowing it to dry with its natural slime upon it, then looking at it in the dark. A sole or almost any other fish will answer the purpose, but I name the smelt from having found it the most reliable in the course of my own experiments. It emits a dull, ghostly light, with very little penetrating power, which shows the shape of the fish, but casts no perceptible light on objects around.

Here the light is so dim that it gives no illumination beyond outlining the fish. Many men are like that. They have a little light, but it never shines beyond themselves. It merely outlines their own lives and sometimes scarcely that. (Text.)

(1832)

---

It has been a long stride forward from producing light and heat by means of flint to producing it by matches. What would civilization do without matches? Few realize the immense labor, capital and material used to produce this tiny article of commerce. As a matter of fact, thousands of men are employed, millions of dollars invested and vast forests cut down to meet the demand in America of 700,000,000,000 a year. One plant alone on the Pacific coast covers 240 acres and uses 200,000 feet of sugar-pine and yellow-pine logs in a day. The odds and ends will not do. A constant search is in progress for large forests of perfect trees to meet the future need.

If such labor and pains are necessary to keep at hand the means of lighting that which at best is only a temporary flame, what should measure our diligence to keep our spiritual light burning? (Text.)

(1833)

See [Shining as Lamps].

LIGHT AFTER NIGHT

Mary Elliot interprets the moral cheer of recurring dawn in these musical lines:

Dawn of the red, red sun in a bleak, abandoned sky

That the moon has lately left and the stars are fast forsaking—

The day is drawing the cloudy lids from his bloodshot eye,

And the world impatient stirs—a tired old sleeper, waking.

O most unwearying prophet, ever-returning morn!

Thou giv’st new life to a world grown old, and marred in making;

With ever an old faith lost, and ever a pang new-born,

But ever a new, new hope to hearts that were well-nigh breaking. (Text.)

—The Metropolitan.

(1834)

LIGHT AND ACTIVITY

Those who would glow with the brightness of a blest life can not so shine unless they are luminous with activity.

We are passing along a country road on a dark evening and are arrested by seeing luminous points in the herbage at the foot of a hedgerow or side of a lane. We find on investigation that the beautiful little lights are emitted by glowworms. At first sight these appear to be stationary, but we find by patient waiting and watching that the little creatures are slowly moving as they shine and that each glowworm ceases to emit its lovely gleam directly it stops moving. And in human life are not the bright lights of society, of the family, of the Church, those persons who are incessantly in action? The sluggard is too dull to shine; the energetic souls go sparkling on their way and charm as well as help. (Text.)

(1835)

Light and Darkness—See [Blind Guides].

LIGHT AS A CURE

Dr. Hasselbach, of Copenhagen, has become convinced that the light treatment is effective in heart disease and affections of the nervous system. Dr. Hasselbach, after experimenting on his own perfectly normal organs, next experimented on two doctors. Both of these were complete invalids, one suffering from angina pectoris and the other from a nervous affection of the heart. This treatment, which lasted in one case for a month and in the others for six weeks, resulted in enabling both doctors to resume their practise. (Text.)

(1836)

Light, Attraction of—See [Suicide Prevented].

LIGHT-BEARERS

Natural science has shown that the transmission of light to our globe is dependent on the luminous atmosphere surrounding the sun; and that light existed originally independent of the sun, and consisted of the undulations of a luminiferous ether. The latest theory maintains that the body of the sun is simply an irritant, having the property of setting the undulations of this ether into motion, but wholly devoid of light in itself.

Such a luminous atmosphere is the environment of one’s life, and capable of being made the means of constituting each man a luminary to the world.

(1837)

---

Annie Winsor Allen is the author of this cheering verse:

Bringers of hope to men,

Bearers of light.

Eager and radiant,

Glad in the right,

’Tis from these souls aglow

Man learns his path to know.

They as they onward go

Bear on the light.

What tho they fight to lose,

Facing the night!

Morning will find them still

Seeking the height.

What tho this stress and strain

Makes all their hopes seem vain!

They through the bitter pain

Bear on the light.

Brothers of all that live,

They aid us all.

May our hearts, touched with fire,

Leap to their call!

Their voices, clear and strong,

Ring like a rallying song,

“Upward against the wrong!

Bear on the light!”

(1838)

LIGHT, BENEFITS OF

If we company with Him who said, “I am the light of the world,” our moral natures will experience something corresponding to the physical benefits of light when it is applied in moderation.

Light acts as a stimulant to the bodies of men as well as of animals. The ability of the blood to carry through the system oxygen that is taken from the atmosphere during breathing is increased by exposure to light. The blood is assisted also, by the action of light on it, in giving off the carbonic-acid gas that the body has accumulated, and thus frees the system from the impurities out of the blood.

(1839)

LIGHT, CHRISTIAN

A lighthouse called the Pharos was built at Alexandria, Egypt. It ascended 550 feet in the air and sent its light over the sea for a distance of 100 miles. Its purpose was as a memorial to King Ptolemy.

An upright character is a lighthouse to this storm-tossed world. (Text.)

(1840)

LIGHT DEVELOPING BEAUTY

The human soul can only develop its full capacities when illumined. Light from without must call out the latent powers of the mind.

The sea-anemone is attractive only when light reaches them. In gloom or shadow they fold themselves up on their peduncles and look withered and repellent. In the sunshine that plays on the waters in their pools these strange creatures open out like blossoms expanding their petals. (Text.)

(1841)

LIGHT, DIVINE

In the oxy-hydrogen lantern the operator first lights the hydrogen burner, and it burns like any other gas-light. Then he turns slowly upon it a little jet of oxygen, under which at first the flame seems dying down. But presently the lime candle kindles, and its flame, concentrated by the condensers to a small jet, begins to glow with a brilliancy that darkens everything else and can not be endured to look on. So in the movement of the world—in the “coming age”—there is high character and grand heroism, and as one studies it he sees that it is not Stephen’s face that shone like an angel, or Moses’ which had to be veiled, but the ineffable Spirit that shone out in them both. The power of the coming age is not the power of any man, but the power of the God who made all things, and whose glory here glows and burns brighter than the sun, bringing out the littlest worthiness of human character in the concentrated light of love.—Franklin Noble, “Sermons in Illustration.”

(1842)

Light, Excess of—See [Advice Disregarded].

LIGHT FOR RESCUE

The recently improved buoy is a remarkable device now in use in the life-saving service of the United States. By means of the signal lights, its position will always be known to those on shore and on the wreck. The green light moving toward the vessel mutely tells the shipwrecked passengers that help is at hand and encourages them to hold on until the buoy reaches them.

How many imperiled mariners on the sea of life are lost in the darkness because they see not the helping hand stretched out to save them.

(1843)

LIGHT-GIVING

One of the first lessons that Jesus inculcated in the minds of His disciples who were to become His messengers, was that they should be lights in the midst of the moral and spiritual gloom.

A preacher one dark night lost his way in a corner of a strange neighborhood. Meeting a farm laborer and asking his way, he received for answer, “Follow that light and you will not have gone far before you hear the bells of the next village.”

(1844)

LIGHT, IMMORTAL

Richard Watson Gilder, who died in 1909, and whose dream is now reality, wrote this beautiful prayer:

O Thou the Lord and Maker of life and light!

Full heavy are the burdens that do weigh

Our spirits earthward, as through twilight gray

We journey to the end and rest of night;

Tho well we know to the deep inward sight,

Darkness is but Thy shadow, and the day

Where Thou art never dies, but sends its rays

Through the wide universe with restless might.

O Lord of Light, steep Thou our souls in Thee!

That when the daylight trembles into shade,

And falls the silence of mortality,

And all is done, we shall not be afraid,

But pass from light to light; from earth’s dull gleam

Into the very heart and heaven of our dream.

(1845)

Light in Christ—See [Christ the Light].

LIGHT IN HUMILIATION

In the neighborhood of Nice the hills are cut and seamed with remarkable gorges, among which are found deep holes known as “star wells.” They are so called because of the belief that from their bottoms stars can be seen even in daylight. These abysses have been formed by the action of water. It is, often, only when looking up out of the deeps of our own humiliation that we can see the stars of hope shining in the sky.

(1846)

LIGHT, INCREASING

The light to which you come at length in the railway tunnel, and before you reach the end of the tunnel, is the very same light exactly, as far as its nature is concerned, as the light into which you come at the end of the tunnel; and the light which shines from the end into the tunnel increases more and more from its first shining until you reach the full light at the end. So the wise man says that the path of the just is as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. The light of the perfect day is the same as the light that shines in the path all along, and that began to shine even ere the sun was up. The lights are in nowise different except in degree.—Alexander Miller, “Heaven and Hell Here.”

(1847)

LIGHT, INJURY FROM

In a moral sense it is better to face the light than to have it shine on us indirectly.

Do not make the mistake of supposing that brilliant lights are harmless except when looked at directly. As a matter of fact they are even more dangerous when so placed as to shine into the eyes sidewise or from above, since the eye is less accustomed to receive bright light from such directions. In other words, light from such direction falls upon the outer parts of the surface of the retina, which, being less accustomed to receive bright light, are the more quickly injured by it. Cases are on record where persons working in the vicinity of bare lamps so placed have entirely lost the sight of one or both eyes.—The Illuminating Engineer.

(1848)

LIGHT OF THE WORLD

Among the Tsimshean Indians of Alaska the following legend is current: “At first it was entirely dark. There was no light in the world. The people could see nothing, but were groping around in a continual night. Then the son of the heavenly chief came down to earth, and the people complained to him that it was so dark. He said he would help them, and then light came.”

A faint reflection, all this, of the story of Him who is indeed the Light of the world. (Text.)

(1849)

LIGHT PREVENTING CRIME

Many banks, stores, and warehouses turn on their lights at night, and leave their window-shutters wide open so that the entire interior may be seen by the policemen or watchman on the beat. This makes it possible to detect any change inside, or the presence of any one who might be bent on robbing. (Text.)

(1850)

LIGHT, SAFETY IN

“Let your light shine.” Do not go to places where your light will not shine. Sam P. Jones says: “Some years ago my father had two Irishmen digging a well for him. They went off on a drinking spree, after they had gotten the well about three-fourths done. They returned to finish up, but long experience and observation had taught them that what is known as ‘fire-damp’ or poisonous gases, sometimes accumulates in the bottom of a well. They came to the house and asked my mother for a bucket and a candle. They set the candle in the bottom of the bucket and lowered it slowly into the well, and the candle went out. Pat said, ‘Ah, Jamie, there is death in that hole.’ They got some pine brush, tied a rope to them and swished the well out with them. They again lowered the candle and it burned brightly clear to the bottom. And the Irishman said, ‘The candle burns bright; she’s safe now.’”—“Famous Stories of Sam P. Jones.”

(1851)

LIGHT, SOURCE OF

Light can not be seen. At great heights reached by aeronauts the heavens seem black, and the stars come out and twinkle against a background of jet. Yet this unfathomed deep of darkness is light and nothing but light. Whatever object the light falls upon shines; every object that produces it shines; but the light itself is not seen.

God is light. No man hath seen him at any time, but there is no glory that does not come from Him. No light shines on earth that did not come from heaven. Yet a man may sit by his little lamp and forget the sun and stars. (Text.)

(1852)

LIGHT THAT CHEERS

The Rev. C. A. S. Dwight says:

“During a damp, foggy evening along the New England shore, a summer resident who had been skirting the beach in a row-boat, was struggling at the oars, trying to drive his little craft through the waters despite the drag upon it of a heavy object towing on behind. It was a dismal evening, and he was tired and weary of his attempted task. But just when his depression was greatest he heard the voice of his little boy hailing him from the beach. Looking through the gloom he could discern the faint glow on the shore, while his boy called encouragingly, ‘Papa, I’ll cheer you with this lantern!’ The heart of the father was gladdened, and his work after that seemed light, for so great is the power of loving sympathy that it illumines all shadows and lightens all tasks.

“I’ll cheer you with this lantern!” We all of us hold in our hands some instrument of blessing, whether it be a lantern or not, by the use of which, if we are alert to note the changing necessities of those about us, we can every now and then cast a gladdening or directing ray over life’s dark waters, or extend some other “help in time of need” to a troubled brother.” (Text.)

(1853)

LIKENESS OF GOD

King Edward of England was driving along a country road in Scotland one day when he overtook an old market-woman struggling under a load which was more than she could well manage. “You might take part of this in your carriage,” she cried to the King whom she did not recognize. “Alas! my good woman,” replied his Majesty with royal courtesy, “I’m very sorry, but I’m not going the same way. However, let me give you the portrait of my mother.” “A lot of good that will do me,” said the woman testily. “Take it all the same,” said the King, smiling, and he put a sovereign, bearing Queen Victoria’s effigy, in the palm of the astonished old peasant.

That is exactly what every kind deed or generous gift is, a likeness of our Father. It is just like Him.

(1854)

Likeness to Christ—See [Future Life].

LIMITATION OF THE SENSES

Reasoning from the analogy of stretched strings and membranes, and of air vibrating in tubes, etc., we are justified in concluding that the smaller the drum or the tube the higher will be the note it produces when agitated, and the smaller and the more rapid the aerial wave to which it will respond. The drums of insect ears, and the tubes, etc., connected with them, are so minute that their world of sounds probably begins where ours ceases; that the sound which appears to us as continuous is to them a series of separated blows, just as vibrations of ten or twelve per second appear to us. We begin to hear such vibrations as continuous sounds when they amount to about thirty per second. The insect’s continuous sound probably begins beyond three thousand. The bluebottle fly may thus enjoy a whole world of exquisite music of which we know nothing. (Text.)—W. Mattieu Williams, “Science in Short Chapters.”

(1855)

LIMITATIONS GLORIFIED

We are apt to chafe at restrictions of all kinds, but these may be disguised blessings. Oftener the narrower the outward sphere, the more valuable the outcome. The lenses of a telescope are narrow, but through them we read the story of the stars. Darwin in the earthworm saw wonders which he spent several years in investigating. The wise botanist does not gather all the flowers in the garden at once; he confines himself to single specimens. One of Murillo’s finest pictures is in the Louvre at Paris. It shows us the interior of a convent kitchen; but doing the work there are not mortals in old dresses, but angels, white-winged and beautiful. One serenely puts the kettle on the fire to boil, and one is lifting up a pail of water with heavenly grace, and one is at the kitchen dresser reaching up for plates. As the painter puts it, all on the canvas are so busy, and working with such a will, and so refining the work as they do it, that somehow you forget that pans are pans and pots are pots, and only think of the angels, and how very natural and beautiful kitchen work is—just what the angels would do.

(1856)

Lincoln and Children—See [Children, Lincoln’s Regard for].

Lincoln Story—See [Good for Evil].

Lincoln’s First Dollar—See [Money, Earning].

Liquor—See [Money, How We Spend Our].

LIQUOR-TRAFFIC

The following chart shows the cost of intoxicating liquors consumed in the United States for twenty years, and the relative yearly increase. The chart is from the American Prohibition Yearbook:

(1858)

LIQUOR REVENUE REFUSED

What a rebuke to this nation receiving millions of dollars annually from its revenue on liquors, is conveyed by the Queen of Madagascar when she says, “I can not consent, as your queen, to take a single penny of revenue from that which destroys the souls and bodies of my subjects.”—Congregationalist.

(1857)

LISTENING FOR SIGNALS

A news item, referring to the wreck of the Republic, and the hearing of the first wireless news of the disaster by the operator at the station on Nantucket Island, says:

Imagine a lonely island in the middle of winter, thereon a lonely Marconi station, therein a lonely Marconi operator, with his telephones glued to his head watching the break of day, thinking of his past and future, listening for any sign of life in his telephones. Imagine that man suddenly startled with a faint, very faint, call from a ship using the recognized distress signal, giving her position and calling for help. Slowly, all too slowly, came the cry for urgent aid, each call seemingly taking an hour’s valuable time, yet in truth but a fraction of a second. Will he never sign? Who can it be? At last came the recognized code letters of the White Star Republic, and again the call for aid. With this information Operator Irwin, of the Marconi force at the station here, who was on duty at the time, immediately got the wires hot, knowing the revenue cutter Acushnet to be lying at Wood’s Hole, and within one minute the captain was informed that his calls had been heard and aid was being rushed to him.

The soul attent to hear the world’s signals that call for help should be ready to serve and save the lost and needy.

(1859)

LITERALISM

“One of the stories of the ‘road’ that Mr. Joseph Jefferson delighted to tell grew out of an experience in an Indiana town, where he was presenting ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ many years ago.

“In the hotel where he stopt was an Irishman who was employed as a porter, but from the serious interest he took in the house he might have been clerk and proprietor rolled into one.

“At six in the morning Mr. Jefferson was startled by a violent thumping at his door. With slowly returning consciousness, he remembered that he had left no call on the night before, and naturally became indignant. His sleep was spoiled for the morning, so he arose and appeared before the clerk.

“‘See here,’ he demanded, ‘why have I been called at this unearthly hour?’

“‘I don’t know,” replied the clerk. ‘I’ll ask Mike.’

“The porter was summoned. ‘Mike, there was no call for Mr. Jefferson. Why did you disturb him?’ he was asked.

“Taking the clerk by his coat-sleeve, the Irishman led him to one side. ‘He was shnoring loike a horse, sir,’ he explained, ‘and I’d heered by the b’yes how onct he were after slapin’ for twinty years, so, says I to myself, it’s a coomin’ on to him agin, an’ it’s yer juty to git the crayther out o’ the house instantly!’”

(1860)

See [Knowledge by Indirection]; [Judgment, Lack of].

Literary Workman—See [Acquisition].

LITERATURE AND MIND EXPANSION

When Coleridge was a boy of eight, his father on a starry night explained to him the size and number of the heavenly bodies with their vast movements. He looked for surprize and wonder in the boy. But the poet tells us that he felt no special wonder, because his mind, through long, happy days of reading fairy-stories, had grown accustomed to feelings of the vast, and to having criteria for belief other than those of his senses. Literature accustoms the mind to feelings of sublimity, wonder, intricacy, and the constant workings of higher laws. These are noble contributions to the religious consciousness.—William D. MacClintock, “Proceedings of the Religious Education Association,” 1904.

(1861)

LITERATURE AS AN INSPIRATION

Literature is but one of the forms of art through which man’s aspiration, his ideals, are revealed. The soul of man takes the hues of that which environs it. It is literature which inspires; not linguistics, rhetoric, and grammar, valuable as these may be for other purposes. Witness the tributes of Darwin and Mill to the power of imaginative literature; these men mourned the fact that other things deprived them of that great power of culture of the feelings which the love of literature brought. Barrie has said that a young man may be better employed than in going to college; but when there, he is unfortunate if he does not meet some one who sends his life off at a new angle. “One such professor,” says he, “is the most any university may hope for in a single generation.” He says, “When you looked into my mother’s eyes, you knew why it was that God sent her into the world; it was to open the eyes of all who looked to beautiful thoughts, and that is the beginning and end of literature.” After having opened the eyes of people to beautiful thoughts, we must be willing to wait, for moral results do not come immediately.—A. J. George, “Proceedings of the Religious Education Association.”

(1862)

LITERATURE, CURRENT

Current literature is like a garden I once saw. Its proud owner led me through a maze of smooth-trodden paths, and pointed out a vast number of horticultural achievements. There were sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there were more than a hundred kinds of roses, there were untold wonders which at last my weary brain refused to record. Finally I escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a hillside I knew, from which I could look across the billowing green of a great rye-field, and there, given up to the beauty of its manifold simplicity, I invited my soul.

It is even so with our reading. When I go into one of our public reading-rooms, and survey the serried ranks of magazines and the long shelves full of “Recent fiction, not to be taken out for more than five days”—nay, even when I look at the library tables of some of my friends—my brain grows sick and I long for my rye-field.—The Outlook.

(1863)

Literature in Advertising—See [Advertising].

Literature in Prisons—See [Prison Literature].

Literature, Short-lived—See [Evanescent Literature].

Little Deeds of Kindness—See [Cheer, Signals of].

Little Evils—See [Destructiveness].

LITTLE GIFTS

An Australian missionary was addressing a band of children on the needs of the people among whom he was working. A little one slipt a sixpence shyly into his hand with the request that he use it for something special. He bought with it a prayer-book, and gave it to a poor workhouse girl who had been sent from England to go into service on an Australian farm. She promised to read it faithfully. Several weeks later a rough-looking man came and asked him if he were the person who had given his servant a prayer-book. His wife was very ill and wanted to see him. Altho it was twenty miles inland, the clergyman went and ministered to the poor woman. A little while later the man came once more to the minister and said that he and his neighbors had built a little church and paid for it and wanted him to come and conduct services among them. Thus an entirely new work was opened as a result of the little child’s sixpence.

(1864)

See Child’s Gift.

LITTLE SINS

And I am afraid of little sins because they grow so great. No one can tell whereunto sin will lead. The beginnings of sin are like the leakings of water from a mighty reservoir; first an innocent ooze, then a drip, then a tiny stream, then a larger vein, then a flood, and the rampart gives way and the town is swept to ruin. The habits of sin are like the habits of burglars, who sometimes take a little fellow and put him through a window too small for a man to enter, and the child must open the door for the burglar gang to pass. So with little sins; they creep in and open the door for larger to enter. A little sin is the thin edge of the wedge, and when once inserted it can be driven home till it splits and ruins the life.—A. H. C. Morse.

(1865)

---

I remember, when a lad, the so-called army-worms first swept across the fields. They went straight ahead, and moved like a mighty host with captains. They were little things, but when they were gone the fields looked as tho they had been swept by a fire. So a thousand little wrongs in the life can rob it of beauty as really as one great, blazing, public transgression.—A. H. C. Morse.

(1866)

---

I am afraid of little sins because they involve a great principle. You go into a bank with a check for $1,000, and in his hurry the clerk passes out $1,100, and you walk out of the bank with that sum. You agree with me, I suppose, that you do a dishonest thing—that you have stolen $100. Would it not be the same if your check called for $5, and he gave you $6 by mistake? You ride on a train to Boston, and by some oversight your ticket is not collected, and you ride back on that very same ticket. You agree with me that the thing is wrong. Is it not the same when you ride on a trolley car and elude the conductor, or slip past the gateman and enter the train? In either case the man is a thief.—A. H. C. Morse.

(1867)

LITTLE THINGS

We belong to a scheme of nature in which the chief factor is the infinitesimal. The composition of the elements depends on the multitudinous accretions of particles. We are most in danger when we overlook the power of mere atoms to affect us, and when we despise trivial causes of mischief.

A cathedral clock with its musical chimes suddenly stopt intoning its sacred and beautiful melodies. The cause was for a time a perplexity, as nothing could be discovered to have gone wrong with the machinery of the chimes. But at length it was found that a frail brown butterfly had become entangled in the wheelworks, and had brought to a complete standstill the clock and its chimes. (Text.)

(1868)

---

Dr. S. P. Henson says:

What a multitude of threads make up a fringe; and yet how beautiful and costly when completed! And here is found a beauty of the real Christian life. There are not a few who may be willing upon rare and notable occasions to do or suffer some great thing, but the ten thousand little things of life are entirely beneath their notice, as they also suppose them to be beneath the notice of the Lord. (Text.)

(1869)

See [Faith in God].

Lives Corresponding to the Bible—See [Native Converts].

LIVES THAT SHINE

Don’t waste your time in longing

For bright, impossible things;

Don’t sit supinely yearning

For the swiftness of angel wings;

Don’t spurn to be a rushlight

Because you are not a star;

But brighten some bit of darkness

By shining just where you are.

There is need of the tiniest candle

As well as the garish sun;

The humblest deed is ennobled

When it is worthily done.

You may never be called to brighten

The darkened regions afar;

So fill, for the day, your mission

By shining just where you are.

Just where you are, my brother,

Just where God bids you stand,

Tho down in the deepest shadow,

Instead of the sunlit land;

You may carry a brightness with you

That no gloom or darkness can mar,

For the light of a Christlike spirit

Will be shining wherever you are.(Text.)

(1870)

Living in the Faith of Jesus—See [Christ, Faith in].

LIVING IN THE SHADOW

The second Duke of Wellington inherited a great talent for reticence from his father, and did not succeed to his title until he was forty-five. He had served in the army and in the House of Commons without making his mark in either save by conscientious attention to duty. In the House of Lords, however, shortly after taking his seat, he delivered a speech revealing such an intimate knowledge of public business, and of such luminous good sense, as to occasion surprize. Among those who congratulated him was “the candid friend” always present on such occasions. This “candid friend” explained to the duke that the latter had been generally regarded as a “colorless” man, and congratulated him on disproving the charge. The duke made a reply, applicable to many, saying, “If you had sat in the shade of a great tree for almost fifty years very likely people would have regarded you as colorless, too.”

George V, like the second Duke of Wellington, has for almost half a century lived in the shadow of a great tree. From infancy up to his twenty-seventh year he was in the second rank of public interest. Not a negligible quantity, he yet could not be, while the Duke of Clarence lived, conspicuous. Moreover, he was wise to sink his royal personality in the discharge of his duty as a naval officer. The British have peculiar tastes and standards, and they do not altogether like to see a younger member of the royal family very conspicuous in public affairs. A “pushful” prince would be almost obnoxious to their traditions. A royal general or a royal admiral must not lead too much, or the old jealousy of militarism might crop out in the nation, which licenses the existence of its standing army only from year to year. Consequently George V, when Duke of York and subsequently when Prince of Wales, may have been called upon to dissemble, and he may yet demonstrate that his reputation as a colorless man is due to the public inability to understand what constitutes the spectrum of character.—Boston Transcript.

(1871)

LIVING, STRENGTH FOR

There was a time when low on bended knee,

With outstretched hand and wet uplifted eye

I cried: O Father, teach me how to die,

And give me strength Death’s awful face to see

And not to fear. Henceforth my prayer shall be;

Help me to live. Stern life stalks by

Relentless and inexorable, no cry

For help or pity moveth her as she

Gives to each one the burden of the day.

Therefore, let us pray:

Give us the strength we need to live, O Lord.

—Julia C. R. Dorr.

(1872)

Living, The, as an Asset—See [Motive, Mercenary].

LIVING THE GOSPEL

An American teacher was employed in Japan in a government school, on the understanding that during school hours he should not utter a word on the subject of Christianity. The engagement was faithfully kept, and he lived before his students the Christ life, but never spoke of it to them. Not a word was said to influence the young men committed to his care, but so beautiful was his character, and so blameless his example, that forty of the students without his knowledge, met in a grove and signed a secret covenant to abandon idolatry. Twenty-five of them entered the Kyoto Christian Training School and some of them are now preaching the gospel which their teacher unconsciously commended.

(1873)

Loads—See [Overloading].

LOADS, BALKING UNDER

This morning I saw a pair of horses which had evidently become discouraged by being hitched to loads that were too heavy for them. At the start they did their best to go forward; when the driver struck them with his whip they made an effort to pull; but one could see that their spirit had been broken; the long struggle with unequal burdens had caused them to lose their confidence and their grip, and after a while they ceased to make any effort to move.

I have often seen other horses loaded beyond their strength; but no matter how heavy their load, they would pull again and again with all their might, stretching to the utmost every muscle, nerve, and fiber in them; and, altho they could not start the load, they would never give up trying.

Everywhere in life we find people like those horses. Some have become discouraged by trying to carry too heavy a load, and finally give up the struggle. They spurt a little now and again, but there is no heart, no spirit in their effort. The buoyancy and cheer and enthusiasm have gone out of their lives. They have been tugging away over heavy loads so long that they have become disheartened. There is no more fight in them.

There are others who, no matter how heavy their load, will never cease in their efforts to go forward. They will try a thousand times with all their might and main; they will tug away until completely exhausted; they will gather their strength and try again and again without losing heart or courage. Nothing will daunt them, or induce them to give up the struggle. When everybody else lets go, they stick because they are made of winning material, the mettle which never gives up.—Success.

(1874)

LOCAL PRIDE

Augustine Burrell tells the following incident which goes to prove that things are great or small to men, according to very local points of view:

Bonnor, the Australian cricketer, told us that until that evening he had never heard of Dr. Johnson. Thereupon somebody was thoughtless enough to titter audibly. “Yes,” added Bonnor, in heightened tones, and drawing himself proudly up, “and what is more, I come from a great country, where you might ride a horse sixty miles a day for three months, and never meet anybody who had.”

(1875)

Location—See [Sentiment Mixed].

Location in Animals—See [Direction, Sense of].

LOCUSTS AS FOOD

In the East, as elsewhere, since the Biblical days of John’s “locusts and honey,” locusts have been deemed more or less edible. In Palestine to this day they are considered a luxury. The Jews fry them in sesame oil, sesame being the grain of which mention is made in the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” a favorite tale in the Arabian Nights entertainments.

In Arabia Petrea locusts are dried in the sun and then ground into a sort of flour for baking; and in Central Africa certain tribes employ locusts for making a thick brown soup.

In Madagascar they are baked in huge jars, fried in grease, and then mixed with rice, forming a dainty much affected by the dusky inhabitants of that big island.

The Algerians have a simpler method. They merely boil the locusts in water and salt them to the taste. The Arabians grind and bake the locusts as cakes, roast them in butter, or else crush them in a mixture of camel’s cheese and dates.

Locusts are also eaten, in times of famine, in southern Russia, generally by the poorest of the poor, among whom the insects are smoked like fish. In the preparation of locusts for food the legs and wings are invariably detached.

It is said that, while the flavor of locusts is strangely disagreeable in the raw state, this flavor is readily disguised and even becomes agreeable when the insect is cooked. Some of the locust soups are, we are told, scarcely to be distinguished from beef broth; and when the little insects are fried in their own oil and slightly salted they take on a pleasing nutty flavor. (Text.)—Harper’s Weekly.

(1876)

LONELINESS, PERILS OF

Recently a London pastor preached a sermon on the after-business occupations of young people, in which he said that from 6 to 11 P.M. was the danger zone for young folks who are employed during the day. Speaking of the mesmeric glitter of London, and the fascination of its so-called amusements, he made the assertion that he believed that the theaters and music-halls should be controlled by the churches.

The Sunday-school Chronicle sent an interviewer to ask him why he made this statement. His answer follows:

“First of all,” said the pastor, “I have been so deeply imprest by the sense of awful loneliness which is experienced by young people coming to central London from the provinces. I know for a fact that scores of young men and women go to the bad because of the absolute friendlessness of their lives. Six months ago I spent two days at the Old Bailey Sessions House trying to snatch a girl of nineteen from prison. She came to London motherless and friendless, and was spoken to kindly by a young man in Oxford street. She appreciated the apparent sympathy which this stranger extended to her—well, the rest of the story of her downfall may be imagined. Many of these young people have nowhere to go after business hours but the music-hall or the public-house, and the things they take away from these places and retail in their houses of business are the questionable jokes which they have heard. So for these young people I plead for churches that are homes and amusements that are healthy.”—The Advance.

(1877)

Lonesomeness Abated—See [Reminders].

LONGEVITY ACCOUNTED FOR

Senator Chauncey M. Depew, entertained at a dinner on the occasion of his seventy-sixth birthday, said:

Fifty-four years in public and semipublic life and upon the platform all over this country and in Europe for all sorts of objects in every department of human interest have given me a larger acquaintance than almost anybody living. The sum of observation and experience growing out of this opportunity is that granted normal conditions, no hereditary troubles, and barring accidents and plagues, the man who dies before seventy commits suicide. Mourning the loss of friends has led me to study the causes of their earlier departure. It could invariably be traced to intemperance in the broadest sense of that word; intemperance in eating, in drinking, in the gratification of desires, in work, and in irregularity of hours, crowning it all with unnecessary worry.—New York Times.

(1878)

Longevity and Work—See [Industry and Longevity].

LONGEVITY, EXAMPLE OF

One of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole record of longevity is reported from Pesth, in Hungary, where a beggar, aged eighty-four, tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Danube because he was no longer able to support his father and mother, who are one hundred and fifteen and one hundred and ten years old, respectively. When he told this story, after his rescue, it was laughed at, but a police inquiry showed it to be true. The family are Magyars from the extreme south of Hungary.—Public Opinion.

(1879)

LONGEVITY INCREASING

“It is estimated,” said Dr. Felton, the learned Georgia statesman, divine, and M.D., in an address before the graduating class of Atlanta Medical College, “that human life has increased twenty-five per cent in the past fifty years.” The average human life in Rome under Cæsar was eighteen years; now it is forty. The average in France fifty years ago was twenty-eight; the mean duration in 1887 was forty-five and one-half years. In Geneva during the thirteenth century a generation played its part upon the stage and disappeared in fourteen years; now the drama requires forty years before the curtain falls. During the golden reign of good Queen Bess, in London and all the large cities of merry old England, fifty out of every 1,000 paid the last debt to nature early, which means instead of threescore-and-ten, they averaged but one score. Now, in the city of London, the average is forty-seven years.—Dr. Todd.

(1880)

See [Improved Conditions].

LONGEVITY, RECIPES FOR

A complete list of infallible prescriptions for the prolongation of human life would fill a voluminous book, and would include some decidedly curious specifics. “To what do you ascribe your hale old age?” the Emperor Augustus asked a centenarian whom he found wrestling in the palestra and bandying jokes with the young athletes. “Intus mulso, foris oleo,” said the old fellow. “Oil for the skin and mead (water and honey) for the inner man.” Cardanus suggests that old age might be indefinitely postponed by a semifluid diet warmed (like mother’s milk) to the exact temperature of the human system; and Voltaire accuses his rival Maupertuis of having hoped to attain a similar result by varnishing his hide with a sort of resinous paint (un poix resineux) that would prevent the vital strength from evaporating by exhalation. Robert Burton recommends “oil of unaphar and dormouse fat”; Paracelsus rectified spirits of alcohol; Horace, olives and marshmallows. Dr. Zimmerman, the medical adviser of Frederick the Great, sums up the “Art of Longevity” in the following words: “Temperate habits, outdoor exercise, and steady industry, sweetened by occasional festivals.”(Text.)—Felix Oswald, Bedford’s Magazine.

(1881)

LONGING

The thing we long for, that we are

For one transcendent moment,

Before the present, poor and bare,

Can make its sneering comment.

*****

Longing is God’s fresh heavenward will

With our poor earthward striving;

We quench it that it may be still—

Content with merely living;

But, would we learn that heart’s full scope,

Which we are hourly wronging,

Our lives must climb from hope to hope,

And realize the longing.

—James Russell Lowell.

(1882)

Look, The Kind—See [Face, an Inviting].

LOOKING BOTH UP AND DOWN

“Your way is dark,” the angel said,

“Because you downward gaze,

Look up; the sun is overhead,

Look up and learn to praise.”

I looked; I learned. Who looks above

Will find in heaven both light and love.

“Why upward gaze?” the angel said;

“Have you not learned to know

The light of God shines overhead

That men may work below?”

I learned. Who only looks above

May miss below the work of love,

And thus I learned the lessons twain:

The heart whose treasure is above

Will gladly turn to earth again

Because the heaven is love.

Yea, love that framed the starry height

Came down to earth and gave it light.

—Bishop of Ripon.

(1883)

LOOKING DOWN

It is usually the small-souled and narrow-minded man who can decry faults and failings with an eagle eye, but upon whom all the finer and grander qualities of humanity are lost. To him who ever walks with head bent and eyes on the ground the whole universe appears to be made of dust; but he who goes with head erect and eyes uplifted breathes the pure air and greets the rising sun, and forgets the dust that may be under his feet.—Philadelphia Ledger.

(1884)

LOOKING UP

In the early days of Britain, when the Christian Cuthbert and his companions were driven from the bitter land to sea, and then were cast upon a dreary shore by a terrible storm, they cried, “No path is open for us; let us perish: we are driven from land to sea and from sea to land.” And Cuthbert answered, “Have ye so little faith, my comrades?” and then lifting his eyes to heaven he prayed, “I thank Thee, Lord, that the way to heaven is still open.”

When there is no other way to look for help, we may look up. (Text.)

(1885)

Loquacity—See [Verbiage].

LORD’S PRAYER INTERPRETED

A friend tells us an anecdote of Booth, the tragedian:

Booth and several friends had been invited to dine with an old gentleman in Baltimore, of distinguished kindness, urbanity, and piety. The host, altho disapproving of theaters and theater-going, had heard so much of Booth’s remarkable powers that curiosity to see the man had, in this instance, overcome all scruples and prejudices. After the entertainment was over, lamps lighted, and the company reseated in the drawing-room, some one requested Booth as a particular favor, and one which all present would doubtless appreciate, to read aloud the Lord’s Prayer. Booth exprest his willingness to do this, and all eyes were turned expectantly upon him. Booth rose slowly and reverently from his chair. It was wonderful to watch the play of emotions that convulsed his countenance. He became deathly pale, and his eyes, turned tremblingly upward, were wet with tears. And yet he had not spoken. The silence could be felt. It became absolutely painful, till at last the spell was broken as if by an electric shock, as his rich-toned voice, from white lips syllabled forth, “Our Father who art in heaven,” etc., with a pathos and solemnity that thrilled all hearers. He finished. The silence continued. Not a voice was heard or a muscle moved in his rapt audience, till from a remote corner of the room a subdued sob was heard, and the old gentleman, their host, stept forward, with streaming eyes and tottering frame, and seized Booth by the hand. “Sir,” said he, in broken accents, “you have afforded me a pleasure for which my whole future life will feel grateful. I am an old man, and every day from my boyhood to the present time I thought I had repeated the Lord’s prayer; but I have never heard it—never.” “You are right,” replied Booth; “to read that prayer as it should be read has caused me the severest study and labor for thirty years; and I am far from being satisfied with my rendering of that wonderful production.”—The Millenarian.

(1886)

Losing and Saving—See [Message, A Timely].

Loss and Gain—See [Compensation]; [Deportment]; [Fast Living].

LOSS AND PROFIT

It is said that the bursting of a pin in the driving-wheel of an engine in the Illinois Steel Company will cost the company $369,000, since the accident stopt the operation of the whole plant about six days and a half, and the loss involved by the stop was reckoned at about $40 a minute. This fable teaches that great business operations work both ways: where big profits are made big losses stand ready to overwhelm when something goes wrong.

(1887)

Loss Creating Wealth—See [Discovery, Accidental].

LOSS, GAIN IN

When Mahamoud, the conqueror of India, took the city of Gujarat, he proceeded, as his custom was, to destroy the idols. One of these, standing fifteen feet high, the attendant priests and devotees begged him to spare. But, deaf to their entreaties, he seized a hammer and smote the idol, when to his amazement from the shattered image there rained a shower of gems—pearls and diamonds—treasures of fabulous value hidden within it. (Text.)

(1888)

Loss Through Disuse—See [Talents, Buried].

Lost and Won—See [Success].

LOST CHORDS

How few of us have kept the early joy, and have continued in blest peace? Of course, you know the story of the lost chord? A woman, in the shadows of the twilight, when her heart was sad, gently touched the keys of a glorious organ. She did not know nor care what she was playing; her fingers lingered idly but caressingly upon the keys. Suddenly she struck a chord, and its wondrous melody as it filled the room was uplifting and transforming and heavenly.

It flooded the crimson twilight,

Like the close of an angel’s psalm,

And it lay on her fevered spirit

With the touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,

Like love overcoming strife;

It seemed the harmonious echo

From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings

Into one perfect peace,

And trembled away in silence,

As if it were loath to cease.

Something disturbed this woman and called her from the organ. As soon as possible she hurried back and began to play, but this divine chord was gone, and tho she kept on playing she could not bring it back again. (Text.)—Curtis Lee Laws.

(1889)

LOST, CRY OF THE

A drover in Dakota promised to bring home from his cattle sale a doll for his little girl. He was caught in a blizzard, and night found him still miles from home. In the darkness he heard a cry, possibly of a child lost in the storm. He was thankful for the warm house that sheltered his own child, but he could not leave that cry off in the dark, tho he knew he was risking his life lingering. It was hard tracing the feeble cry, and when at last he found it it was not crying. He gathered it up under his big overcoat and struggled homeward, stumbling, nearly perishing, but at last fell in over his own threshold, with his own child saved in his arms.—Franklin Noble, “Sermons in Illustration.”

(1890)

LOST, FINDING THE

Shortly before the death of Eugene Field a friend from one of the Southern States told him a pathetic story of a girl who had wandered away from her home in the country and taken refuge in a large city, with the usual results of that dangerous step:

Her old father mourned for the girl he had lost; but in his simplicity it never occurred to him to try to find her, for the world beyond the limits of his township was vast and forbidding. But word came to him one day that somebody had seen his daughter in the city, one hundred miles away, and with only that to guide him he went in search of her.

Once in the city, he shrank from the noise and confusion of the crowds. He waited until night, and then when the streets were comparatively deserted, he roamed up and down from one street to another, giving the peculiar cry he had always used when looking for a lost lamb—a cry the girl herself had heard and given many times in her better days. A policeman stopt the old man and warned him that he was disturbing the peace, whereupon the father told his story and said:

“She will come to me if she hears that cry.”

The officer was moved by the old man’s simplicity and earnestness, and offered to accompany him in his search. So on they went up and down the thoroughfares and into the most abandoned sections of the city, the farmer giving the plaintive cry and the officer leading the way that seemed the most promising of success.

And success did come. The girl heard the cry, recognized it, and intuitively felt that it was for her. She rushed into the street and straight to her father’s arms. She confest the weariness and misery of her lot, and begged that he would take her back to the farm, where she might begin a new and better life. Together they left the city the next day. (Text.)

(1891)

Lost, Not, but Gone Before—See [Evidence, Providential].

LOST, SEEKING THE

Years ago when Charley Ross was kidnapped, his broken-hearted father declared: “I will search for my lost boy while life lasts. I will go up and down the earth, and look into the face of this child and that to see if it is my lost boy.”

The great Father is engaged in a similar search; nor will He rest until the lost is found. (Text.)

(1892)

---

The Arab Waziers have a tradition as to their origin:

A certain ancestor had two sons, Issa and Missa, which may mean Jesus and Moses. Missa was a shepherd, and one day a lamb wandered away and was not to be found. For three days and nights Missa sought it far and near through the jungle. On the fourth morning he found it in a distant valley, and instead of being angry with the lamb for straying and giving him all his pains and anxiety, he took it in his arms, prest it to his bosom, kissed it tenderly and carried it back to the flock. For this humane act God greatly blest Missa and made him progenitor of the Wazir tribe. (Text.)

(1893)

Lot, Consulting the Bible by—See [Bibliomancy].

LOVE

To cease from egotistic ambition and learn love with a humble mind is the lesson of this verse by John G. Neehardt:

For my faith was the faith of dusk and riot,

The faith of fevered blood and selfish lust;

Until I learned that love is cool and quiet

And not akin to dust.

For once as in Apocalyptic vision,

Above my smoking altars did I see

My god’s face, veilless, ugly with derision—

The shameless, magnified; projected—Me!

And I have left mine ancient fanes to crumble,

And I have hurled my false gods from the sky;

I wish to grasp the joy of being humble,

To build great love an altar ere I die.

(1894)

---

Love is not merely a sentiment. It will have its material expression if it is real. The following from Dr. W. T. Grenfell refers to the fishermen of the North Sea Coast:

The intense cold of winter, and the inadequacy of the warm clothes with which the men, and especially the boys, were unable to provide themselves, claimed attention, and warm hearts of Christian ladies told all over England were moved by the tales of this great need. Hundreds and thousands of warm mittens, helmets, mufflers, and guernseys have been sent out during these past years, and have been true messages of love.

“Look ’ere,” said a grizzled skipper, pulling out three mufflers from his pocket, to three wild friends of his whom he was visiting, “look ’ere, will yer admit there’s love in those mufflers? Yer see them ladies never see’d yer, nor never knowed yer, yet they jest sent me these mufflers for you. Well, then, how much more must Christ Jesus ’ave loved yer, when He give His life blood to save yer.”

I have it from his own lips as well as one of theirs, that this was the beginning of leading those three men to God; and before he left the ship that night, they were trusting in Christ for pardon, and for strength to live as His children.

(1895)

---

Joseph Dana Miller shows how love socializes the solitary soul:

God pity those who know not the touch of hands—

Who dwell from all their fellows far apart,

Who, isolated in unpeopled lands,

Know not a friend’s communion, heart to heart!

But pity these—oh, pity these the more,

Who of the populous town a desert make,

Pent in a solitude upon whose shore

The tides of sweet compassion never break!

These are the dread Saharas we enclose

About our lives when love we put away;

Amid life’s roses, not a scent of rose;

Amid the blossoming, nothing but decay.

But if ’tis love we search for, knowledge comes,

And love that passeth knowledge—God is there!

Who seek the love of hearts find in their homes

Peace at the threshold, angels on the stair. (Text.)

—Munsey’s Magazine.

(1896)

---

The old fable of the bar of iron as an illustration of the superior power of love will never be superseded.

The bar of iron lay across a log to be broken. “I can make it yield,” boasted the hammer, but at the first blow the hammer flew from its handle helpless to the ground. The ax followed proudly, “I can succeed.” But after two or three strokes its edge was dulled without leaving any impression on the iron bar. “I, with my sharp teeth, will soon sever it,” said the saw, with a confident air; only to have all its teeth broken in the task. At length a quiet, warm flame said, “Let me try, it may yield to me.” And the little flame twined itself about the iron in a gentle, loving way, imparting an influence that finally made the strong bar yield and fall apart.

(1897)

---

The power of love to draw out what is best in men is poetically exprest by L. M. Montgomery:

Upon the marsh mud, dank and foul,

A golden sunbeam softly fell,

And from the noisome depths arose

A lily miracle.

Upon a dark, bemired life

A gleam of human love was flung.

And lo, from that ungenial soil

A noble deed upsprung.

(1898)

---

Upon the foundation of love a great work was done in Paris, France:

When Mr. McAll began his work he could utter but two sentences in the tongue of those workingmen. One was “God loves you,” and the other, “I love you”; and upon those two, as pillars, the whole arch rests.—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”

(1899)

See [Prodigal, The].

LOVE A FINALITY

In his poem “Virgillia” Edwin Markham has these stanzas:

If this all is a dream, then perhaps our dreaming

Can touch life’s height to a finer fire;

Who knows but the heavens and all their seeming,

Were made by the heart’s desire?

One thing shines clear in the heart’s own reason,

One lightning over the chasm runs—

That to turn from love is the world’s one treason

That treads down all the suns.

So I go to the long adventure, lifting

My face to the far, mysterious goals,

To the last assize, to the final sifting

Of gods and stars and souls. (Text.)

—The Cosmopolitan.

(1900)

LOVE A HARMONIZER

Life’s harmony must have its discords; but, as in music, pathos is tempered into pleasure by the pervading spirit of beauty, so are all life’s sounds tempered by love.—George Henry Lewes.

(1901)

Love, A Mother’s—See [Mother-love].

LOVE, A PROOF OF

We can not permanently benefit men until we are willing to get near to them. The Christian method of charity is illustrated in this incident in the career of a notable promoter of London city missions:

Love is not fastidious; her hands are as busy as her heart is full. He (Frank Crossley) found five dirty youngsters (their father a sot, their mother in the sick ward), and he burned their old clothes and clad them in clean ones, and then sent them to play with his own boy! Is it any wonder if both their father and mother were won?—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”

(1902)

LOVE AND LAW

As to which was the first and greatest command, the rabbis were in grave doubt. Most agreed that the smallest and least command was the one concerning the bird’s nest, recorded in Deut. 22:6, 7; but when it came to the first and greatest, they were in doubt, whether it was the one respecting the observance of the Sabbath, or the law concerning circumcision, or the one concerning fringes and phylacteries, while still others contended that the omission of ceremonial ablutions was as bad as homicide. With these distinctions and differences and absurd hair-splittings in mind the young lawyer addrest the master with the question, “Which is the first commandment of all?” What a majestic answer was that which he received! Nothing in it about fringes and phylacteries, nothing about ceremonial washings, nothing about attitudes and genuflections; but the grand answer which will abide for all time to come: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, this is the first commandment.” This answer goes to the heart of the matter. Eighteen hundred years have not suggested any improvement or addition to the great answer, nor will eighteen hundred years to come, because it embraces all other answers and is the sum total of morality.—The Golden Rule.

(1903)

LOVE AND TIME

Love that lasts is the power that binds heart to heart with the indissoluble bonds. Such love knows no limit of time. Dr. Van Dyke says:

Time is

Too slow for those who wait,

Too swift for those who fear,

Too long for those who grieve,

Too short for those who rejoice;

But for those who love

Time is not!

—Church Advocate.

(1904)

Love as a Converting Power—See [Persecution and Prayer].

LOVE AS A SIDING

With our differing hereditary traits, educations, experience, and ways of living and thinking, it is quite impossible that there should not be collisions with those with whom we are living or working. We are like a number of trains trying to go in different directions on the same track. Congestions are certain to come, but a congestion need not degenerate into a collision and a wreck if we will remember that there are plenty of sidings. Now a “siding” is a sort of abbreviated second track whereby trains going in opposite directions may pass each other in safety. In material railways they bear various names; on the invisible pathway of life they are all called love. Sometimes they are nicknamed forbearance, tolerance, patience, or common sense; but these are all translations of the same thing. So in case of danger, remember the sidings.—James M. Stifler, “The Fighting Saint.”

(1905)

Love Compared—See [Christ’s Love].

LOVE, CONQUESTS OF

There is a story told

In Eastern tents, when autumn nights grow cold

And round the fire the Mongol shepherds sit

With grave responses listening unto it:

Once, on the errands of his mercy bent,

Buddha, the holy and benevolent,

Met a fell monster, huge and fierce of look,

Whose awful voice the hills and forests shook.

“O son of peace!” the giant cried, “thy fate

Is sealed at last, and love shall yield to hate.”

The unarmed Buddha, looking, with no trace

Of fear or anger, in the monster’s face,

In pity said: “Poor friend, even thee I love.”

Lo! as he spake, the sky-tall terror sank

To hand-breadth size; the huge abhorrence shrank

Into the form and fashion of a dove;

And where the thunder of its rage was heard,

Circling above him, sweetly sang the bird:

“Hate hath no harm for love,” so ran the song.

“And peace unweaponed conquers every wrong!”

—George Dana Boardman.

(1906)

Love Dissolving Doubts—See [Doubts, Dissolving].

LOVE DRIVING OUT FEAR

Mr. Robert E. Speer stopt from a British India steamer at Muscat to visit Rev. Peter Zwemer, who was working there alone. Mr. Zwemer took his visitor up to his house, where, he said, his family were staying. There, sitting on benches about the room, were eighteen little black boys. They had been rescued from a slave-ship that had been coming up the eastern coast of Arabia with those little fellows, to be sold on the date plantations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The British consul had seized them from the traders, and Mr. Zwemer had undertaken to keep them until they were eighteen years old, when they would be given their manumission papers.

“When I got them,” said Mr. Zwemer, “the whole eighteen huddled together in the middle of the floor, like jack-rabbits, and every time I came close, they huddled a little nearer. They mistrusted every one. On each little cheek-bone was the brand of the slave’s iron, and for months and months they had known nothing but hatred and beatings, and had been shut down in the hold of the slave-ship, in order that they might make no noise and betray their presence.”

As Mr. Speer saw them they looked happy and confident, and they sang for him, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” looking as if the realization that all their blessings had come from that divine Source had already sunk deep into their hearts. (Text.)

(1907)

LOVE, FILIAL

A boy of thirteen was often brought to Judge Lindsey’s Juvenile Court in Denver, charged with truancy. Notwithstanding the judge admonished him many times, it did not seem to do him any good. The teacher kept writing, “Tim will stay out of school to work.”

Once, when reproving him, the judge told him that there would be time enough to work when he was a man. “My father was a man,” replied the boy, “and he did not work. He went off and left mother and me. I guess that’s what killed her.”

Finally, Tim appeared in court one day with a happy face, and pulling a soiled and crumpled paper from his pocket, handed it to the judge. “I’m goin’ to remember all the things you told me and I’m goin’ to school regular, now I got that done,” he said, with some pride. Judge Lindsey examined the paper, which proved to be a receipted bill, and found that, little by little, Tim had paid fifty dollars for a headstone at his mother’s grave.

“My boy, is that what you’ve been doing all these months?”

“I wanted her to have a monument, judge.” Tim furtively wiped away the moisture in his eyes. “She done a lot for me; that’s all I could do for her now.”

(1908)

LOVE IN A NAME

James Hargreaves, sitting alone there in his little house in Yorkshire, finding that he could not get enough from the spinners of cotton to supply his wants as a weaver, cast about for a way to spin faster. After many weary days, and weeks, and months, he found out a method by which he could spin eight threads in the same time that one had previously been spun; and being asked for a name for the instrument, he looked lovingly upon his wife, and said: “We’ll call it Jenny”; and the modest Jenny has come down to posterity, and will go to remotest generations with the name of the “Spinning Jenny.”—George Dawson.

(1909)

LOVE IN MAN

That trained horse that I saw in the World’s Fair, in seven years had learned twenty tricks. But that horse loved only one person, the master,/ and rushed with open her cheeks, and she said, “You must love in the animal world is a little tiny stream that trickles. Love in man is an ocean that rolls like the sea. Let us bow the forehead and smite upon the breast, and confess that man’s infinite capacity for love tells us he was made in the image of God.” (Text.)—N. D. Hillis.

(1910)

LOVE INDESTRUCTIBLE

Asbestos is the most extraordinary of all minerals. It is of the nature of alabaster, but it may be drawn out into fine silken threads. It is indissoluble in water and unconsumed in fire. An asbestos handkerchief was presented to the Royal Society of England. It was thrown into an intensely hot fire and lost but two drams of its weight, and when thus heated was laid on white paper and did not burn it. Love is like asbestos. The waves of sorrow will not wash it away. The flames of tribulation will not burn it up. It is eternal and immortal. (Text.)

(1911)

LOVE INESCAPABLE

James Freeman Clarke, on his seventy-eighth birthday, wrote this significant bit of verse:

Be happy now and ever

That from the love divine no power the soul shall sever:

For not our feeble nor our stormy past,

Nor shadows from the future backward cast;

Not all the gulfs of evil far below,

Nor mountain-peaks of good which soar on high

Into the unstained sky,

Nor any power the universe can know;

Not the vast laws to whose control are given

The blades of grass just springing from the sod,

And stars within the unsounded depths of heaven—

Can touch the spirit hid with Christ in God.

For nought that He has made, below, above,

Can part us from His love.

(1912)

LOVE, INTERPRETATION BY

A story is told of an artist who painted the picture of the Crucifixion. When it was completed, he called in a lady friend to see it, and pulling the curtain aside, withdrew into the shade that he might see the effect on her face. He saw the tears running down her cheeks, and she said, “You must love Him to paint Him like that.” Her words touched his heart and he replied, “I hope I do, but as I love Him more I will paint Him better.”

(1913)

LOVE IS GOD’S NATURE

Why does this beautiful girl, that once was the center of attraction, in every reception, now hang over the cradle, refuse honors and give herself by day and by night to this little babe that puts helpless arms around the neck, that once flashed with jewels? We can only say that the mother is built that way. Why do robins sing? Why does the sunbeam warm? Why does summer ripen purple clusters? Why is a rose red? And a rainbow beautiful? When we can answer, we may be able to say why God loves His weak and sinful children. He loves them because it is His nature to love them.—N. D. Hillis.

(1914)

LOVE-LETTER, ANCIENT

We possess many love-songs of the old Egyptians, but a genuine love-letter had not heretofore been found. Some years ago in Chaldea there was a love-letter found, written on clay. Tho the letter has much formality for such a missive, the reader can feel the tenderness that lies between its lines. The document was produced, we should say, in the year 2200 B.C., and was found in Sippara, the Biblical Sepharvani. Apparently the lady lived there, while her beloved was a resident of Babylon. The letter reads:

“To the lady, Kasbuya (little ewe) says Gimil Marduk (the favorite of Merodach) this: May the sun god of Marduk afford you eternal life. I write wishing that I may know how your health is. Oh, send me a message about it. I live in Babylon and have not seen you, and for this reason I am very anxious. Send me a message that will tell me when you will come to me, so that I may be happy. Come in Marchesvan. May you live long for my sake.”

(1915)

LOVE MAKES PATIENT

Ellen sat at the piano practising. The big clock in the corner was slowly ticking away the seconds, and the hands pointed to half-past ten.

“Oh, dear!” sighed Ellen. “A whole half hour more; and the clock seems to move more slowly than usual. How I hate this everlasting practising! I wish there were no such things as pianos in the world!”

“Why, Ellen!” said mama, who had entered the room in time to hear the last sentence. “A year ago you were coaxing father to buy you a piano. Are you growing tired of it so soon?”

The little girl’s face flushed. “I did not know it was such hard work, mama; and I can’t bear to stay in the house a whole hour this bright morning, just drumming at exercises. I would like to play pretty pieces.”

“You must be patient, dear,” answered her mother. “The pretty pieces will come in time. Think how delightful it will be, by and by, to entertain father when he comes home tired from the office! You know how he loves music. So keep up your courage, little daughter, for father’s sake.”

The words lingered in the child’s memory. “For father’s sake,” she would say to herself when the hours seemed long. And love gave her patience.

Love always brings patience. Life’s exercises are often hard and unmusical. But, little by little, they are preparing us for the heavenly harmonies above.

(1916)

LOVE OF CHRIST

After Lafayette’s devoted service to our country, he was equally devoted to the cause of liberty in France, helping with wise and unselfish service. But he was opposed bitterly by the extremists, and driven by them out of the country, and was imprisoned by the Emperor of Austria for five years in a loathsome dungeon at Olmutz. All Europe was moved to get him released, and his wife pleaded with ruler after ruler, and at length was permitted to share his dungeon, which she did for about two years. His life was despaired of, but Napoleon Bonaparte compelled his release. Our Lord shares the sinner’s dungeon, and spares no pain for his release. (Text.)

(1917)

LOVE OWNS ALL

We can not go so far

That home is out of sight;

The morn, the evening star,

Will say, “Good-day!” “Good-night!”

The heart that loves will never be alone;

All earth, all heaven it reckons as its own.

(1918)

LOVE, PRACTICAL

A dutiful son of his widowed mother once said, “I love my mother with all my strength.” “How is that?” he was asked. Said he, “I’ll tell you. We live in a tenement, on the top floor four flights up, with no elevator; and my mother being busy, I carry up the coal in a scuttle, and I tell you, it takes all my strength to do it.” (Text.)

(1919)

LOVE, PRESERVATIVE

Botanists tell us that strongly scented plants are of longer duration than those destitute of smell.

This is as true in the gardens of soul as in the gardens of nature. Lives fragrant with helpfulness endure. Those wanting in the aroma of love, die. (Text.)—Vyrnwy Morgan, “The Cambro-American Pulpit.”

(1920)

LOVE RATHER THAN KNOWLEDGE

“Papa,” said the son of Bishop Berkeley, “what is the meaning of the words ‘cherubim’ and ‘seraphim’ in the Bible?” “Cherubim,” replied his father, “is a Hebrew word signifying knowledge; seraphim is another word of the same language, and signifies flame; whence it is supposed that the cherubim are angels who excel in knowledge, and that the seraphim are angels who excel in loving God.” “I hope, then,” said the little boy, “when I die I shall be a seraph; for I would rather love God than know all things.”

The child had the right sentiment, if not the right theology.

(1921)

LOVE RECLAIMING

Dr. Felix Adler has brought to light an old legend of two brothers who lived and played together. At last one of them left home and got into evil ways, and finally was, by an evil magician, changed into a wolf. For long the bereaved brother sought the wanderer, and one day returning home through the woods, he was set on by a wolf, and by the might of his love under the spell of that continued gaze the features of the wolf began to disappear, until at length the brother was restored to his senses and to his home.

(1922)

Love, Rewards of—See [Resignation].

LOVE, THE LANGUAGE OF

When William Duncan went among the Alaskan Indians to convert them to Christianity, he won them first by his kindness. He visited them, helped them with simple advice, and administered to their ailments from his medicine-chest. Long before he could make himself understood in words he spoke intelligibly in his works. They understood the language of his love and sympathy and kindness. By relieving their suffering he found a way at length to relieve their sins, in the gospel that he learned to utter in his message to them from the Word of God.

There is a gospel without words, as there is music without words; and he is the real linguist that can talk from the heart to the heart by a vibrant love.

(1923)

LOVE THE WORLD’S NEED

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in the Century Magazine, writes thus of the world’s need:

Oh, love is the need of the world! Down under its pride of power,

Down under its lust of greed, for the joys that last but an hour,

There lies forever its need.

For love is the law and the creed;

And love is the aim and the goal

Of life, from the man to the mole.

The need of the world is love.

(1924)

LOVE UPLIFTING

Jacob Riis, in “The Making of an American,” brings from his Danish homeland a most beautiful and significant phrase. There is scant sunlight over there in the long, cold winters, and it is not easy to make plants grow. Yet the poor have their window-boxes and winter blossoms, nevertheless, and their tender winter lesson. For when they speak of their flowers they do not say that they have been grown; instead, with finest insight, they say that they have been “loved up.”

Almost any man can be “loved up.” So it is with the child, the waif of society.

(1925)

LOVE’S ACCEPTABLE OFFERING

One of the family was a little lad who was weak-minded, and him the father and mother specially loved. Yet there was little response to their affection. But one day, when the other children were gathering flowers and bringing them to their parents, the poor little lad gathered a bundle of dry sticks and brought them to his father. “I valued those sticks,” said the father afterward, “far more than the fairest flowers.” We are not all equally gifted—some can bring lovely flowers to God’s service and honor; others can only gather dry sticks. But even the “cup of cold water” is accepted by Him. (Text.)

(1926)

LOVE’S CAREFULNESS

If I knew that a word of mine,

A word not kind and true,

Might leave its trace

On a loved one’s face,

I’d never speak harshly, would you?

If I knew the light of a smile

Might linger the whole day through

And brighten some heart

With a heavier part,

I wouldn’t withhold it, would you?

—Unidentified.

(1927)

LOVE’S COMPLETENESS

That God’s love is without measure or limit is illustrated in the following incident:

In the home of a friend one day, as he reclined on the lounge opposite, and I in an easy chair, we were having a pleasant chat until dinner was called, when his little boy, named Neil, about three or four years old, came in. He went to his father’s side, and I heard him whisper, “Papa, get up and show Mr. Shields how much you love me.” I knew at once there was a secret between them, as it is fitting there should be between father and child, and that it was a secret in which the child rejoiced.

His father smiled, and said, “Oh, run away, Neil, and play; we are busy talking, and Mr. Shields knows I love you.” “Yes,” said the little fellow, “but I want you to show him how much.”

Again and again the father tried to put him off, but the child persisted in his plea that the visitor be shown “how much” the father loved.

At length the father yielded, and as he stood, the child stood between us, and, holding up his index-finger, with a glance first at his father, and then at me, he said, “Now you watch, till you see how much my papa loves me.”

His father was a tall and splendidly proportioned man. First he partially extended one arm, but the child exclaimed, “No, more than that.” Then the other arm was extended similarly, but the little fellow was not content, and demanded, “More than that.” Then one after the other both arms were outstretched to the full, only the fingers remaining closed. But still the child insisted, “More than that.” Then, in response to his repeated demands, as he playfully stamped his little foot and clapped his hands and cried, “No! No! It’s more than that!” One finger after another on either hand was extended, until his father’s arms were opened to their utmost reach, and to each was added the full hand-breadth. Then the child turned to me, and, gleefully clapping his hands, exclaimed, “See? That’s how much papa loves me.” Than he ran off to his play content.—C. C. Shields.

(1928)

LOVING ENEMIES

Here is one more illustration of a moral power that occasionally came out of Confucianism. Ieyasu, the founder of the Shogunate, is regarded as perhaps the greatest hero Japan has produced. In his wars, his enemy, Mitsunari, was defeated, and fearing the revenge of Ieyasu’s seven generals, he sent to Ieyasu for pardon. The desired forgiveness was immediately granted, but the seven generals were indignant that such an enemy should escape death, and remonstrated with Ieyasu. The proverb he quoted to them shows how near the best hearts in all ages are to Christ’s “Love your enemies.” His reply was: “Even a hunter will have pity on a distrest bird when it seeks refuge in his bosom.”—John H. De Forest, “Sunrise in the Sunrise Kingdom.”

(1929)

LOYALTY

On the deck of the Republic (January, 1909), when the passengers had all departed, when Captain Sealby was left alone with his men, with his ship, he stood before them. His voice shook a little.

“Men of the Republic,” he said, “I am proud of you. You have acquitted yourselves like men. I look upon no coward. The darkness is drawing on”—it was then four o’clock Saturday afternoon—“and the passengers are gone. You have now the right to leave this vessel. She may sink; she may not—I can not say. But you have done your duty; the boats are at your disposal—”

“How about you, captain?” interrupted a voice.

“I shall stand by the ship,” was the reply.

And then, in chorus, came a great shout:

“And we’ll stand by with you, captain.”

So they did, until, later in the evening, the captain compelled all but fifty men to leave the vessel.

(1930)

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The story of a little Boer boy who refused to betray his friends even on the threat of death, is told by Major Seely, M.P., as an illustration of deeply-rooted love of freedom and of country. It happened during the Boer war:

“I was asked,” said Major Seely, “to get some volunteers and try to capture a commandant at a place some twenty miles away. I got the men readily, and we set out. It was a rather desperate enterprise, but we got there all right. The Boer general had got away, but where had he gone? It was even a question of the general catching us, and not we catching the general. We rode down to the farmhouse, and there we saw a good-looking Boer boy and some yeomen. I asked the boy if the commandant had been there, and he said in Dutch, taken by surprize, ‘Yes.’ ‘Where has he gone?’ I said, and the boy became suspicious. He answered, ‘I will not say.’

“I decided to do a thing for which I hope I may be forgiven, because my men’s lives were in danger. I threatened the boy with death if he would not disclose the whereabouts of the general. He still refused, and I put him against a wall, and said I would have him shot. At the same time I whispered to my men, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t shoot.’ The boy still refused, altho I could see he believed I was going to have him shot. I ordered the men to ‘Aim.’ Every rifle was leveled at the boy.

“‘Now,’ I said, ‘before I give the word, which way has the general gone?’ I remember the look in the boy’s face—a look such as I have never seen but once. He was transfigured before me. Something greater almost than anything human shone from his eyes. He threw back his head, and said in Dutch, ‘I will not say.’ There was nothing for it but to shake hands with the boy and go away.”—Singapore Straits Budget.

(1931)

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I remember once taking a walk by the river near where the falls of Niagara are, and I noticed a remarkable figure walking along the river bank. When he came a little closer, I saw he was wearing a kilt; when he came a little nearer still, I saw that he was drest exactly like a Highland soldier. When he came quite near, I said to him, “What are you doing here?” “Why should I not be here?” he said. “Don’t you know this is British soil? When you cross the river you come into Canada.” This soldier was thousands of miles from England, and yet he was in the kingdom of England.

Wherever there is an English heart beating loyal to the ruler of Britain, there is England. Wherever there is a man whose heart is loyal to the King of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God is within him.—Henry Drummond.

(1932)

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A young girl came to headquarters faint and exhausted, her body covered with marks of cruel beatings administered by her father and brother. It was their way of convincing her that she must accept the offer of her former employer to give her more than twice the wages that she had received before the shirt-waist strike in New York, 1909, and to send an automobile to take her to and from work if she would return to her former position. That she could decline an offer of such magnificence was conclusive proof to them that a girl is too stupid to make her own decisions; so they proceeded to decide for her and to communicate their decision in their own vigorous fashion.

“Will you go?” asked the little group surrounding her.

“Never till I die,” was the unfaltering response, “unless the other girls be taken back, and unless we may stay by the union. To that did not we all pledge our word?” “But,” she added wearily, “I think they will kill me. See! Here it is that yesterday they pulled out so much of my hair. To-day, again, they beat me. To-morrow, surely, they will kill me. I can not bear more.”

When offered a place of safety and protection, she hesitated for a little time, then said, “My mother, she is away at work. Not to find me when she comes home at evening—that would trouble her. I must go home to her.”

The will which could not be conquered by force was coupled with loyalty, with love, no less unconquerable. The friend who had offered her protection understood, for she, too, was a woman.

Shall the stone and mortar and machinery of factories or the bank accounts of their owners be ranked as assets of greater value to the nation than the life, the health, the welfare, of such womanhood?—The World To-day.

(1933)

LOYALTY, SPIRIT OF

The spirit that leads to lying for the sake of a member of the clique or gang has been contemptuously called “honor among thieves.” Honor it is rightly styled. Many tests have shown that it is indeed the spirit of loyalty that occasions it. Such a lie is the lie heroic. Many a boy will persist in it and take a punishment cheerfully rather than betray his chum. The lie, of course, is wrong; but the spirit which prompts it is right—indeed, is at the very core of moral character. Instead of asking boy or girl to tell of the misdeeds of another, the one who has glimpsed God’s plan for the shaping of a character will ask the culprit to confess and save his comrades from suspicion. The boy who will lie and take a thrashing to save his friend will confess and take the penalty just as quickly, if the spirit of honor is fostered.

The spirit of hero worship is strong in both sexes at this time. Each one has his concrete ideal. Among the boys it may be the pugilist, the border outlaw, the soldier, or the statesman, but he is surely of the virile and aggressive type. Unconsciously the youth is selecting during these crucial years the models after whom his life is to be shaped.—E. P. St. John, Sunday-school Times.

(1934)

LOYALTY TO CHRIST

In “Gloria Christi” we read this statement concerning some early martyrs of Madagascar:

In 1849 nineteen Christians, four of them from the highest nobility and all of good birth, were condemned to die. Fifteen were ordered to be hurled to death over the cliffs of Ampamarinana, a wall of rock one hundred and fifty feet high, with a rocky ravine below. The queen looked at the sight from her palace windows. Idols were placed before the Christians as they hung suspended by a rope in mid-air over the cliff, and each was asked in turn, “Will you worship this god?” As they refused, the rope was cut, and the victim fell into the abyss.

(1935)

Loyalty to Race—See [Race Loyalty].

LOYALTY TO THE CHURCH

President William McKinley was a member of the Sunday-school from the time that he became old enough to attend. He was converted and joined the Church before he was sixteen, and from that day maintained his Christian character through all the vicissitudes of his vigorous and busy life.

After the war he was admitted to the bar, and removed to Canton, Ohio. One of the first things he attended to was to call on the minister of his chosen church, present his church credentials, and, like the soldier he was, ask for assignment to duty. He was given a class in the Sunday-school, and was later elected its superintendent. It was not beneath his dignity to devote his life to the training of the young.

(1936)

See [Evangelism, Unheralded].

LUBRICATION EFFECTIVE

An old Quaker was once visited by a garrulous neighbor, who complained that he had the worst servants in the world, and everybody seemed to conspire to make him miserable.

“My dear friend,” said the Quaker, “let me advise you to oil yourself a little.”

“What do you mean?” said the irritated old gentleman.

“Well,” said the Quaker, “I had a door in my house some time ago that was always creaking on its hinges, and I found that everybody avoided it, and altho it was the nearest way to most of the rooms, yet they went round some other way. So I just got some oil, and after a few applications it opened and shut without a creak or a jar, and now everybody just goes to that door and uses the old passage.”

Just oil yourself a little with the oil of kindness. Occasionally praise your servants for something they do well. Encourage your children more than you scold them, and you will be surprized to find that a little sunshine will wear out a lot of fog, and a little molasses is better than a great deal of vinegar.

(1937)

Luck—See [Discovery, Fortunate].

Lunacy Undiscovered—See [Heads, Losing].

LUMINOSITY

Our characters ought to be like the luminous paint mentioned below and continue to shine in the night of misfortune and disaster just the same.

You have probably seen luminous paints applied to the surfaces of the match-boxes that are permanently fixt on the walls of a room. During their exposure to the light in the daytime, these paints are so affected that they will continue to shine during the greater part of the night, altho there is no other light in the room. One coming into the room can, therefore, readily see where the match-box is.—Edwin J. Houston, Ph.D., “The Wonder Book of Light.”

(1938)

LYING

Admiral Dewey was a great stickler for truth. He has stated of himself, “There is nothing that I detest so much in a man as lying. I don’t think a man ever gained anything by telling a lie.” A blue-jacket says of him, “We had not been at sea long with him before we got next to how he despised a liar.” One of the men was brought before Dewey, and told of being “sunstruck.” “You are lying, my man,” said Dewey. “You were very drunk last night. I don’t expect to find total abstinence, but I do expect to be told the truth. Had you told me candidly that you had taken a drop too much on your liberty, you would have gone free. For lying, you get ten days in irons.”—James T. White, “Character Lessons.”

(1939)

See [Loyalty, Spirit of].

LYING AROUND

“Yes, he lied about it. I’m sure of that, and can prove it.”

That’s a pretty serious matter, to call a man a liar. Doubly serious if you can prove it on him. It is very, very bad to be lying about anything whatsoever.

But I’m convinced that lying around is almost as bad as lying about. I said, “You were not out at church yesterday. What were you doing?”

“I was just lying around.” An excuse—offered as a reason—that I’ve heard scores of times.

Late to get out of bed Sunday morning. A very late breakfast. Everything starts behind, and never catches up. The men are lying around unshaved, unbathed, undrest. They look bad, and probably feel worse. An unclean skin and dirty clothes are not good to rest in.

Maybe the women are lying around with hair unbrushed, and dresses and aprons showing the stains of week-day work. Rather frowsy. If they don’t feel any better than they look, they are some points below normal.

Just lying around, not at church, not fit to be seen, not feeling much respect for oneself. Pretty low down, not much above the dirt level. Doing no good, getting no good out of the blest day.

Does plain lying about things hurt one more than this lying around on Sunday? It makes one almost trifling.

Don’t do it. On Sunday morning, get up, wash up, dress up, shave up, shine up, go up to church, think up toward God and the highest and best. The day will be worth much more to you. You’ll feel better Monday morning, better rested, better fitted for the work of the new week. Quit lying around, and try it.—Presbyterian Advance.

(1940)

LYING PUNISHED

Some time ago in a case in New York a man gave false evidence under oath and upon that evidence the point at issue was sent to a referee and costs amounting to $1,759 were incurred. A certain judge to whom these facts became known fined the perjured man the full amount of the costs and directed that when the fine was paid it should be turned over to the aggrieved party. This action has recently been affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals.

“This is hailed as a rebuke to a growing evil, that of lying under oath and nothing being thought of it if one can avoid detection or any civil consequences. The home, the school, the Church and the State should unite and compel greater attention to the dishonor of lying, and business concerns should be held strictly to account wherever misrepresentation or lying form a part of the business methods. Decent men should refuse to trade with the man who scolds his clerks for not making a sale and declares the failure was due to not lying hard enough.”

(1941)