M
MACHINE, AN ACCURATE
A fine clock, reminding a community of the lapse of time and of the value of the fleeting minutes and hours, is an object of much public interest. Some clocks have a particular historic interest due to their long and accurate service in behalf of a hurrying and often heedless humanity. A number of invited guests were recently privileged to be present one night in Strasburg Cathedral to observe the mechanism of the famous clock. For the first time since its construction in 1842, the machinery was called upon to indicate the first leap-year of a century, after an eight-year interval. At astronomical midnight the levers and trains of wheels began to move, the movable feasts of the year took their respective places and the admirable mechanism, calculated to indicate in perpetuity all the changes of the calendar, continued its regular movement. The man who can construct a great clock like that is indeed a mechanical genius.
(1942)
Machine-shop Equipment—See [Modernity].
MACHINE TESTIMONY
In an article in the Evening Post on “Manners Over the Wire,” the writer says:
Some little thing may reform an age, the adage runs, and so perhaps the phonograph recording device, which was installed recently in the Copenhagen telephone exchange to check the ill-natured remarks of subscribers to central, by convicting offenders out of their own mouths, may bring about a revolution in the Danish city’s manners.
Probably one of the first thoughts of the man who invented the telephone, and knew that he could project sound over distance, was that now he could tell his stronger neighbor his candid opinion without risking the dog and a possible thrashing; one of his second thoughts was to put his new-found power into practise. And who, after all, should be the object of most of the exasperated remarks, shading from complaint to embroidered profanity, but central herself?
This Copenhagen found out, and set herself to remedy. University professors there who discover another flaw in Dr. Cook’s records and ring up the rector right away, only to find that the wire is busy because half a dozen colleagues have similar messages, must not abuse central; the connection will be switched at once to the phonograph, which has no feelings and is an unprejudiced witness in court. Testimony of as a will recorded thus was recently held valid in Russia; and the notaries will invent another form: “Appeared before me this day Phonograph No. 123, said phonograph being turned on, deposed, etc. ... Polonius, notary; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, witnesses.” Polonius’ advice, “Give thy thoughts no tongue,” holds good, and better for the Danes than in the times when, in language of to-day, the party at Elsinore had no ’phone.
(1943)
Machine versus Purpose—See [Purpose Discerned].
Machine Work—See [Monotony].
Machinery, Excess of—See [Master Hand Lacking].
MAGNANIMITY
The exercise of magnanimity and charity was as natural to General Grant as breathing; and he demonstrated on this occasion that the hand that wielded the sword was moved by kindness as well as by patriotism. The prisoners of war, who so long lived in hunger, now received abundant rations. So much kindness was shown them that when the Union troops entered the city, both sides “fraternized as if they had been fighting for the same cause.” And when the Confederates passed out of town between two lines of Federal soldiers, the scene was solemn and pathetic. Under instructions from General Grant, not a cheer or a word came from the conquerors that would humiliate the fallen foe or give them pain.—Nicholas Smith, “Grant, the Man of Mystery.”
(1944)
Gen. Fitzhugh Lee witnessed the memorable meeting between his uncle, Gen. Robert E. Lee, and Grant, and he frequently exprest his appreciation of the magnanimity displayed by the victorious commander on that occasion. The fact that General Grant refrained from asking for Gen. Robert E. Lee’s sword made a lasting impression on Fitzhugh Lee, who subsequently said: “General Grant not only refrained from demanding my uncle’s sword, as is customary, but he actually apologized to General Lee for not having his own sword on at the time.” (Text.)
(1945)
See [Good for Evil].
Magnanimity, A Boy’s—See [Vicarious Sacrifice].
Magnanimity, A Nation’s—See [America’s Attitude].
MAGNANIMITY, UNDISCIPLINED
Precipitancy of judgment and heat of temper are responsible for all the errors of Walter Savage Landor’s life. To recount these errors is neither wise, necessary, nor generous. One thing, however, is noticeable, that in every case the difficulties which he created for himself arose from a sort of undisciplined magnanimity of nature, a belief in impracticable ideals, a radical inability to adapt himself to the common convictions of life. He sinned against himself in a hundred instances, but against others never. His generosity was extreme and incessant. In his enormous agricultural experiments at Llanthony he squandered seventy thousand pounds in five years—J. W. Dawson, “Makers of English Prose.”
(1946)
MAGNETISM
The use of powerful electromagnets for lifting pieces of iron in foundries is increasing. In The American Machinist, E. F. Lake gives some particulars of recent applications of electromagnetism to lifting, and discusses the economies effected thereby. He says:
“At the West Allis works of the Allis-Chalmers Company, lifting magnets are prest into service for saving the small pieces and even minute particles of iron and steel which have heretofore been allowed to go to waste without thought of the possibility of recovery.
“This is done periodically by hitching the magnets to traveling-cranes and allowing them to sweep over every inch of ground area, both in and around the works. It is a never-failing source of wonder to the shops’ management how much lost metal the magnets can find.” (Text.)
(1947)
Magnificence—See [Ice Beauty].
MAGNIFYING A SACRED OFFICE
Increase Mather, in a sermon entitled “Be Very Courageous,” tells the story: “It has been reported that a minister, preaching to the Earl of Stratford, then lord deputy of Ireland, faithfully reproved some corruptions which that governor was known to be guilty of, but at which he was displeased; and the next day, in a great passion, he sent for the minister, and began his discourse thus: ‘Yesterday, when you were before me, you said such and such things.’ The minister replied to him: ‘You are mistaken, sir; I was not before you yesterday. I confess I am before your excellency to-day, but you were before me yesterday. You represent the kingdom; but yesterday I was made representative of the Almighty God, who is infinitely above the greatest kings on earth.’ Upon that, the earl was so affected as to dismiss the minister without saying anything more to him.” Here was a man who magnified his office, who spoke with authority, and not as the scribes.—Christian Register.
(1948)
Magnifying Objects—See [Science, Improvements by].
Mail, Handling—See [Care in Performing Duties].
Main Objects versus Incidentals—See [Tasks, The Real].
Majority Not Always Right—See [Conviction, Unyielding].
Majority-rule—See [Justice by Majority]; [Tact].
MAKE-BELIEVE
If all difference could be atoned as easily as that described in this extract from the Popular Magazine, much bloodshed would be saved:
Not long ago a Paris journalist, who had by some criticism offended a politician, received from him the following letter:
“Sir—One does not send a challenge to a bandit of your species: one simply administers a cuff on the ears. Therefore, I hereby cuff both your ears. Be grateful to me for not having recourse to weapons.
“Yours truly, ——”
The journalist answered:
“My Dear Sir and Adversary—I thank you, according to your wish, for having sent me cuffs by post, instead of slaughtering me with weapons. Cuffed by post, I respond by dispatching you by post six bullets in the head. I kill you by letter. Please consider yourself dead from the first line of this epistle.
“With a respectful salutation to your corpse, I am,
“Very truly yours, ——.”
The intent to kill is present. Is not that reckoned in morals as bad as the overt act? (Text.)
(1949)
Malaria, Stamping Out—See [Immunity from Disease].
Malice—See [Modesty].
Malingery—See [Sham].
MAMMON WORSHIP
At Nashville, Tenn., there recently died an eccentric old lady, known in the neighborhood as a miser of the most pronounced type, tho possessing multiplied thousands. After her death the premises were searched for the money, known to be hidden in various places about the house. She had no confidence in banks, and therefore employed this method of concealing her treasures. For seventeen years she never left her home, lest some one get her money. Was ever a life more completely misspent? The joy she might have had by helping others, she missed because of her miserly disposition. She preferred to be poor—really poor—in the midst of her gold. She starved her soul that she might worship at the shrine of Mammon.—The Gospel Messenger.
(1950)
MAN A CREATOR
The fork, the knife, the graver, the spade, they are merely steel fingers, iron hands, accumulating and prolonging the energy of those members. The rudder which the hand holds, it is in effect that hand itself, enlarged, and shielded from the wash of the waves. The telescope, with its wondrous space-penetrating power, the microscope, with its clear and searching lens, in which seems almost an image of Omniscience, are yet only adjutants and servitors to the eye, that more marvelous instrument which no hand can fashion. The soul of man, invisible itself, controls the eye. It creates the telescope, to be its assistant. The locomotive steam-engine, with its connected trains of cars, whose tread is like an earthquake traversing the surface, whose rush outruns in noise and power the plunge of the cataract—the soul has created that as a servant to the body, to move this on its errands, and to carry its burdens. The steamship flashing through night and storm, trampling the riotous waves beneath it, and drowning the strife and uproar of the winds, by its more measured and peremptory stroke, is a similar instrument sent forth on the seas. Each began in a thought. Each was born of the soul. And that which produced them has the power to work with them, for any effects.—Richard S. Storrs.
(1951)
MAN A TIMEKEEPER
There are many ways in which a man is like a watch, as this curious epitaph shows, which can be seen in the churchyard at Lydford, Devonshire, England:
Here lies in a horizontal position
The outside case of
George Routledge, watchmaker.
Integrity was the main-spring and prudence
the regulator of all the actions of his life;
Humane, generous and liberal,
His hand never stopt till he had relieved
distress;
So nicely regulated were his movements that
he never went wrong,
Except when set a-going by people who did
not know his key;
Even then he was easily set right again.
He had the art of disposing of his time so
well
That his hours glided away in one continued
round of pleasure.
Till, in an unlucky moment, his pulse
stopt beating.
He ran down Nov. 14, 1801, aged 57,
In hopes of being taken in hand by his
Maker,
Thoroughly cleaned, repaired, wound up and
set a-going,
In the world to come, when time shall be
no more.
(1952)
MAN AS A TEMPLE
My God, I heard this day
That none doth build a stately habitation
But he that means to dwell therein.
What house more stately hath there been
Or can be, than is man? To whose creation
All things are in decay.
Since then, my God, Thou hast
So brave a palace built, O dwell in it,
That it may dwell with Thee at last!
Till Thou afford us so much wit
That, as the world serve us, we may serve Thee,
And both Thy servants be. (Text.)
—George Herbert.
(1953)
MAN GODLIKE
An unidentified writer here points out the greatness of man even tho often overthrown:
Swarming across the earthly crust,
Delving deep in the yellow dust,
Raising his ant-hills here and there,
Scoring the soil for his humble fare,
Braving the sea in his tiny boat—
Tireless he struggles, this human mote.
Tempests scatter his ant-hills wide,
Vainly he braves the boiling tide,
Fire will ruin his busy mart,
Famine stilleth his throbbing heart,
Trembles the earth and prone he falls,
Crusht and tombed by his pigmy walls.
Heir of the kingdom ’neath the skies,
Often he falls, yet falls to rise.
Stumbling, bleeding, beaten back,
Holding still to the upward track;
Playing his part in creation’s plan,
Godlike in image—this is man!
(1954)
Man Imitating Nature—See [Imitation of Nature].
MAN INDESTRUCTIBLE
Some time ago a Philadelphia anatomist announced to the world that the brain of Walt Whitman, through the carelessness of a hospital employee, had been lost to science. The jar that held the poet’s brain fell to the floor and was broken, so that not even the fragments of the organ were saved. Well, let the poet’s brain be shattered, if you will; the poet himself can not be touched. The flaming star-wheels can not crush him, the maddened oceans can not engulf him, the black caves of night can not hide him, the scorching flames of hell can not destroy him. Man is a spark of divinity the image of deity, an “emotion of God flashed into time.”—F. F. Shannon.
(1955)
MAN MADE FOR ETERNITY
You can tell the difference between sea and land birds by the length and strength of their wings. The wings of the former are intended for long and sustained action in their sweep along the surface of the great ocean.
Man’s soul, in a similar manner, is not intended for this material world, but has long and strong wings of hope and affection wherewith to span the ocean of eternity.—Vyrnwy Morgan, “The Cambro-American Pulpit.”
(1956)
Man Not a Puppet—See [Mastery of Circumstances].
Man, Original—See [Originality of Man].
MAN POSSESSING NATURE
Thomas Traherne, a poet, whose worth was discovered only after he was dead, is the author of the following:
The orb of light in its wide circuit moves,
Corn for our food springs out of very mire.
Our fuel grows in woods and groves;
Choice herbs and flowers aspire
To kiss our feet; beasts court our loves.
How glorious is man’s fate!
The laws of God, the works He did create,
His ancient ways, are His and my estate.
(1957)
MAN, SLOW DEVELOPMENT OF
Robert Loveman takes a wide view of man in this verse:
A thousand years doth nature plan
Upon the making of a man;
She sweeps the generations through,
To find the patient, strong, and true;
She rends the surge of seven seas,
Rearing an humble Socrates;
She burns a hundred years of sun,
Sealing the soul of Solomon.
A thousand years doth nature plan
Upon the making of a Man;
She sees the ages dawn apace,
Ere Moses rouse his shackled race,
Or Homer or sweet Shakespeare sing,
Beside his deep eternal spring;
The centuries rise in reverence when
Buddha doth come unto his men.
A thousand years doth nature plan
Upon the making of a man;
She fills his heart with fire and faith,
She leaves him loyal unto death;
She lights his lustrous, loving eye
With flashes of immortality;
She adds one more undying name
Upon the heated scroll of fame.
—“Songs from a Georgia Garden.”
(1958)
Man, Superiority of—See [Speech].
Man, The Manly—See [Manliness].
Man the Product of Many Elements—See [Diverse Influences].
MAN, VALUE OF A
Years ago a Mr. Campbell, a British subject, was held a prisoner by Theodore, King of Abyssinia. England demanded his release, sending an army of ten thousand men who marched seven hundred miles, to Coomassie, and all at a cost of twenty-five million dollars—just to rescue a single man. (Text.)
(1959)
Maneuvering by Birds—See [Stratagem by Birds].
MANHOOD
We need not more machinery or institutions. What the world needs is men, as Rudyard Kipling shows in this verse:
The peace of shocked foundations flew
Before his ribald questionings,
He broke the oracles in two
And bared the paltry wires and strings;
He headed desert wanderings;
He led his soul, his cause, his clan,
A little from the ruck of things.
Once on a time there was a man.
Thrones, powers, dominions block the view
With episodes and underlings;
The meek historian deems them true,
Nor heeds the song that Clio sings,
The simple central truth that stings
The mob to boo, the priest to ban,
Things never yet created things.
Once on a time there was a man. (Text.)
—Collier’s Weekly.
(1960)
MANHOOD RECOGNIZED
Jesus saw in the meanest man the possibilities of character. This is what Charles Wagner urges us to do in the following extract:
Maintain toward the poor man and the infirm a courtesy, an attentiveness; find in your heart and in your love a sign that makes him recollect that he is a man. His misery is like a tomb in which his self-respect sleeps buried. It is something to respect this tomb, to approach it with piety, to care for it and to keep a flower growing there; but each of these attentions is addrest to one that is dead, shows that you accept his death, and that you confirm it. Do more and do better. Remember that it is a living man that lies under the dust, slowly amassed, of days of suffering. Breathe upon this dust, disengage the human form; speak to Lazarus and make him come forth from the shrouds that surround him, from the night that covers him. (Text.)—“The Gospel of Life.”
(1961)
MANIFESTATION
Just as creation is the revelation of God—His avowal, as a poet has said—so in the same way the external life of man, when it follows its normal development, is the translation, in signs and symbols, of what he bears at the bottom of his being. It would be easier to keep the sap from mounting, the flowers from opening, the leaves from tearing apart their coverings, than human nature from manifesting itself. It is this need that gives man his distinction as a social and communicative being.—Charles Wagner, “The Gospel of Life.”
(1962)
MANLINESS
The world has room for the manly man, with the spirit of manly cheer; The world delights in the man who smiles when his eyes keep back the tear; It loves the man who, when things go wrong, can take his place and stand With his face to the fight and his eyes to the light, and toil with a willing hand; The manly man is the country’s need, and the moment’s need, forsooth, With a heart that beats to the pulsing tread of the lilied leagues of truth; The world is his and it waits for him, and it leaps to hear the ring Of the blow he strikes and the wheels he turns and the hammers he dares to swing; It likes the forward look in his face, the poise of his noble head, And the onward lunge of his tireless will and the sweeps of his dauntless tread! Hurrah for the manly man who comes with sunlight on his face, And the strength to do and the will to dare and the courage to find his place! The world delights in the manly man, and the weak and evil flee When the manly man goes forth to hold his own on land or sea! (Text.) —American Israelite.
(1963)
Manner, The Orator’s—See [Earnestness].
Manners—See [Circumstances, Taking Advantage of]; [Dual Character]; [Machine Testimony].
Manners, Teaching Bad—See [Politeness].
MAN’S AGE ON EARTH
Some scientists reason that the Falls of Niagara must have been formed soon after the Glacial Epoch, and the time occupied in wearing the rock back to the present position therefore furnishes a basis for calculating the age of man on the earth, as he must have begun his career since that epoch:
In an address in Washington before the United States Geological Survey, Professor Gilbert gave the following interesting information regarding the recession of the ground under Niagara Falls: The estimate is that for the past forty-four years the falls have receded at the rate of twenty-four feet in a year. The Horseshoe Falls are at the head of the gorge and the American Falls at the eastern side, but the time was when both were together, before the little point called Goat Island was reached. The recession is more rapid at the center than on the sides. As the crest of the Horseshoe Falls retreats the water tends to concentrate there, and the time will probably come when the sides of the present falls will have become dry shores. The gorge is known to be 35,500 feet long. A calculation has shown that, on this basis, the falls began to wear away the rock of the escarpment near Lewiston about 7,900 years ago.—Public Opinion.
(1964)
MAN’S CONQUEST OF ANIMALS
Man-eating tigers have for so long been regarded by the natives of most parts of India as invincible, or else protected by the native religions, that they have had things pretty much their own way. One determined hunter for every fifty frightened, unarmed men would scarcely serve to intimidate any animal. Many tribes of North American Indians looked upon the bear with veneration; but for all that, any bear so courageous as to let himself be seen by them got an arrow between his ribs right away, and in time the whole tribe of American bears learned that the chances were against them, just as the wolves and cougars arrived at a similar conclusion. Those that turned man-eaters might for a few seasons hunt their prey successfully, and if gifted with unusual cunning get away unscratched for a while, but the vengeance of the tribe would be certain to overtake them before very long, and only the more cowardly ones of their species would survive to perpetuate the race.—Witmer Stone and William Everett Cram, “American Animals.”
(1965)
Man’s Greatness—See [Size not Power].
MAN’S IMPORTANCE
The world is one thing to a bird, or a fish, but quite another thing to Cuvier or Agassiz. Then man entered the scene. Stretching out his hand he waved a wonder-working wand. He touched the wood, and it became a wagon; he touched the ore and it became an engine; he touched the boughs and they became the reeds of an organ; he touched the wild animal, and it became a burden-bearer for his weary feet; while his intellect turned the stone into geology, and the stars into astronomy, and the fields into husbandry, and his duties into ethics. When the flint and steel meet, something beyond either appears—a tongue of flame. And when man and nature met, something new emerged—art, industry, ethics, cities and civilization. There is nothing great in nature but man. Take man out of this wondrous city with its cathedrals, galleries, and homes, and Broadway would become a streak of iron-rust. The earth wears man upon her bosom as the circling ring wears a sparkling gem. The bog puts forth a white lily; genius is a flower rooted in earth, but borrowing its bloom and beauty from heaven.—N. D. Hillis.
(1966)
Man’s Part—See [Evangelization].
Man’s Part in Religion—See [Faith].
MAN’S PREEMINENCE
When you approach a great city at night and see only its tens of thousands of lights, you do not for a moment attach importance to those mechanical contrivances, the lights. The unseen inhabitants in the tens of thousands of lighted homes are the real objects of interest and worth. So the worlds, and not the suns, are the objects of true worth and interest in the universe; the worlds, the lighted and glowing houses of God’s children, not the mechanical contrivances for making them comfortable. Upon these must center our thought and interest. What is the fire which warms the man and cooks his dinner, compared with the man himself? What is the light and fire, compared with the home? What is the sun, compared with the world? Just here we begin to get some breath of assurance. While the worlds in our system differ very greatly in size and glory, while some of the great suns doubtless have correspondingly great worlds circling about them, yet we may reasonably suppose that among the worlds of the universe our earth is somewhere near the middle of the scale. And we earth-dwellers, intelligent children of the Father, are no mean citizens in the kingdom of our God. If He has built such a mansion of light for us, and kindled such a hearth-fire as our sun, and made us lords and masters of such a world as this, why may we not lift up our heads in love and triumph? (Text.)—James H. Ecob.
(1967)
See [Speech].
MAN’S SIZE
How big is a man, anyway? Well, he is smaller than an elephant, and an elephant is smaller than a mountain, and a mountain is smaller than the world, and the world is a mustard-seed compared with the sun, and the sun itself is a mere mote in the dust cloud of spheres that stretches out through the universe beyond the reach of thought.
Coleridge said bigness is not greatness. So while mountains and worlds are bigger than men, man can remove mountains if not worlds. It is not mere size that counts, but power and worth. (Text.)
(1968)
MAN’S WORKS
Mabel Earle writes of a bridge flung across from a cliff to an opposite shore as a symbol of man’s service, improving natural formations:
The cliff stood waiting, silent and alone,
After the rending shock which gave it birth;
Age upon age the waters wore the stone,
And the long shadows wheeled across the earth,
Swinging from west to east. Through sun and snow
It kept God’s secret whispered long ago.
Once from its topmost crag a cable swung,
And a face laughed against its frowning strength,
The life of man in splendid risk outflung
Fulfilling the slow centuries at length;
On the bare rock to stamp his signet clear,
God’s warrant witnessed by the engineer.
Then, with a flash of fire and blinding smoke,
A peal that shook the mountain, base to crest,
The silence of the waiting eons broke
Into the thunder of that high behest,
And on the steep where never foot had trod
Men wrought a pathway for the will of God.
God of the cliff, from whom the whisper fell
Of hope and hope’s fulfilment yet to be,
Make good Thy promise unto us as well;
Yoke Thou our pride in love’s captivity;
And, tho it come through fire and scar and throe,
Give us the crown of service, Lord, to know.
(1969)
The last ten summers have witnessed greater changes than the previous 10,000, for man has learned to work with nature and God. The old manuscripts and the grains and fruits depicted in old frescoes, tell us that the ancient world had all our grains and fruits. Centuries passed, but the same sheaves and boughs were ripened. It could not be otherwise. The wheat had no feet, the flowers had no hands. The tulip needed man. One day man decided to work together with the fruit. He took the most brilliant colors and carried the plants into a glass house and sealed the room tight. Then he went one hundred miles and brought another tulip, being feet thereto, and pollenized the one flower with the seed of the other. When ten years had passed, lo, there were 5,000 new flowers, never seen before, brilliant in hue, and of an unwonted perfume, growing in the fields of Holland. In Minnesota, using similar methods, the scientists have produced 2,000 new kinds of wheat, and three of these wheats have added enormous wealth to Minnesota and Dakota. Out in Illinois a professor selected corn with reference to the increase of the oil that heats, makes muscle and builds tissue. He carried the percentage of oil in a grain of corn from four hundredths to six hundredths, and this added some five hundred millions to the wealth of the great corn States in a single year. And he did it by tying tissue-paper over the tops of his selected cornstalks, after which he journeyed several hundred miles, to bring pollen with which to fertilize the stalks.—N. D. Hillis.
(1970)
Manual-training and Culture—See [Comprehensiveness in Education].
Many Strings Required—See [String, The Need of More than One].
Margin, The, and Character—See [Character, Test of].
MARGINS OF LIFE
It is the little greater care of the extra hour, the additional effort that constitutes the margin of advantage of one man over another. President Garfield said:
When I was in college, a certain young man was leading the class in Latin. I couldn’t see how he got the start of us all so. To us he seemed to have an infinite knowledge. He knew more than we did. Finally, one day, I asked him when he learned his Latin lesson. “At night,” he replied. I learned mine at the same time. His window was not far from mine, and I could see him from my own. I had finished my lesson the next night as well as usual, and, feeling sleepy, was about to go to bed. I happened to saunter to my window, and there I saw my classmate still bending diligently over his book. “There’s where he gets his margin on me,” I thought. “But he shall not have it for once,” I resolved. “I will study just a little longer than he does to night.” So I took down my books again, and, opening to the lesson, went to work with renewed vigor. I watched for the light to go out in my classmate’s room. In fifteen minutes it was all dark. “There is his margin,” I thought. It was fifteen minutes more time. It was hunting out fifteen minutes more of rules and root derivatives. How often, when a lesson is well prepared, just five minutes spent in perfecting it will make one the best in the class. The margin in such a case as that is very small, but it is all-important. The world is made up of little things. (Text.)
(1971)
MARKING TIME
Too much of human effort consists of merely going through motions without ever getting forward:
Bicycle races without leaving the starting-place, which are said to be the latest craze in places of amusement in Paris, are described in Popular Mechanics. Says this paper: “The wheel is fixt in a frame fastened to the floor. When the rider begins to pedal, a belt from the rear wheel drives a small electrical generator. The current thus produced is conducted to a motor on wheels and carrying a flag. The track on which the motor travels is marked in distances, and each foot of track requires as much work by the rider as would have carried the bicycle one mile had it been free to run as under ordinary conditions of use.” (Text.)
(1972)
MARKS, COVERING
When the physician prescribed blisters to Marie Bashkirtseff to check her consumptive tendency, the vain, cynical girl wrote: “I will put on as many blisters as thee like. I shall be able to hide the mark by bodices trimmed with flowers and lace and tulle, and a thousand other delightful things that are worn, without being required; it may even look pretty. Ah! I am comforted.” (Text.)
(1973)
MARKS OF CHARACTER
Admiration is sometimes exprest about the peaceful faces of nuns, sisters of charity, and similar devotees of the secluded life. But if you polish a piece of stone and keep it in a cabinet it will be smooth. The same stone set into a foundation will soon show marks of the weather. So marks on the face, lines of care, traces of sorrow, usually show that one has been doing something; has been of some use; has been developing character.
(1974)
Marks, Removing—See [Reminders, Unpleasant].
MARRIAGE
Look at marriage as a divine plan for mutual compensation—each making up for the deficiencies of the other, somewhat as the two lenses of crown-glass and flint-glass combine in the achromatic lens. What one has the other has not, and so, by association, each gets the advantage of the other’s capacity, and finds relief from conscious lack and incompetency.—A. T. Pierson.
(1975)
Marriage and Divorce—See [Birth-rate in France]; [Divorce].
MARRIAGE CUSTOM, BRUTAL
The marriage ceremony of the Australian savages consists often in the simple process of stunning a stray female of a neighboring tribe by means of a club, and then dragging her away an unresisting captive, just as the males of the larger species of seal are said to attack and temporarily disable their intended mates.—Felix Oswald, Good Health.
(1976)
MARRIAGE RACING
A writer in the New York Commercial Advertiser, describing certain curious marriage customs, says:
In some cases the ceremony takes the form of what is called bride-racing. The girl is given a certain start and the lover is expected to overtake her. An observer among the Calmucks assures us that no Calmuck girl is ever caught “unless she have a partiality for her pursuer.” Per contra, Mr. Kennan tells us of a bride-race among the Koriacks (northern Asia) which he witnest, where the girl went scampering, pursued by her lover, through a succession of compartments, called pologs, in a large tent. So nimble was the maid that she distanced her pursuer, but—she waited for him in the last polog! All of which goes to prove that the wise men of old knew what they were talking about when they said that the race is not always to the swift.
(1977)
MARRIAGE RELATIONS IN THE EAST
The third relation in Confucius’ teaching is that of “Husband and Wife.” Confucius expressly teaches that husband and wife are very “different” beings, which is in startling contrast to the teachings of Christ, who called the twain “one.” The husband of the East was carefully cautioned not to love his wife very much, as that showed an effeminate man. The kiss between husband and wife was wholly unknown, and when foreigners were first seen to show affection in this way, it was regarded as extremely funny. “Every time I see foreigners kiss, I catch a sick,” said a student who was trying to air his English.—John H. De Forest, “Sunrise in the Sunrise Kingdom.”
(1978)
MARTYR SPIRIT
Bad things are said against the Japanese, with more or less truth. But yet, a nation whose history has so many moral heroes can not be bad at heart. Japan has produced one man who gave his life to save the people of his province from oppression and ruin. He was cruelly crucified, his innocent wife with him, and their children were barbarously executed before the parents’ eyes. Yet this man’s dying words on the cross were: “Had I five hundred lives, I’d gladly give them all for you, my people.” So far as I know, there is no other story in all history so closely resembling that of the crucifixion of Christ as this. The nation that can produce one such hero has the potency and promise of noble morality. This fearlessness of death in the face of duty runs all through the history of the people, which tells of wives who willingly died for their husbands, of children for their parents, of parents for their children, and of subjects for their lords.—John H. De Forest, “Sunrise in the Sunrise Kingdom.”
(1979)
Martyrdom—See [Missionary Martyrdom].
MARTYRS
They never fail who die
In a great cause; the block may soak their gore,
Their heads may sodden in the sun, their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls,
But still their spirits walk abroad, tho years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom;
They but augment the deep and swelling thoughts
That overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to freedom.
—Byron.
(1980)
Masks—See [Evil, Disguised].
MASSES, AMONG THE
Alexander Irvine, author and lecturer, speaking before the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, said in part:
Speaking for the mass of the laborers, the men and women of the underworld, men and women not knowing or appreciating beauty in any form, men who know only the whip and spur, I speak feelingly, for I was one of them. I began work caring for the horses of a rich man and I wondered then why a horse was of more value than a man. I had then the ambition to have as good a life as the horse. I quit and went to a coalpit and worked for a shilling a day in merry England, and I saw there the same disparity. I was a miner’s mucker, and the mules were better and far more considered than the men. There was at the time a labor leader trying to organize the men to work for better wages and better hours. I tried to teach them the way to heaven. He was doing the better work, as those workmen in the mines could not have appreciated heaven.
In a lumber-camp I saw peonage at its worst. I was a peon myself, under the whip and lash and the butt-end of the whip was held in Wall Street, and the lash cut the backs of Anglo-Saxon men. Could I find a magazine to print my story of what I saw? I could not. The stocks of the magazine company were owned by the capitalists.—Brooklyn Standard Union.
(1981)
MASTER HAND, LACKING THE
Some years ago I was chairman of a church committee to purchase a new pipe-organ. We were an ambitious congregation, and nothing but the biggest and the best would suffice. We purchased a magnificent instrument—three manuals, tracker, pneumatic action, 1,944 pipes, and all the necessary swells and stops; cost $5,000. It was a “thing of beauty,” and we expected it to be a “joy forever.” The congregation was pleased; the committee was delighted.
But somehow things did not go well. Sister Jones, the old organist, would not touch the new-fangled thing. “Too much machinery and too much show,” she said. Of course, we were adverse to going outside of the congregation for an organist. So we tried Minnie Wright, the deacon’s daughter; but Minnie could not manipulate the stops and swells. We next tried Josie Grayson, an orphan girl, who really needed the place. Now, Josie could play with her hands, but when it came to playing with her feet also she could not do it. We next tried Seth McGraw, who had been to college and who, in addition to his musical ability, was able-bodied and strong. Seth put all the power on the motor, pulled out all the stops, and kicked and pawed with might and main. The organ shrieked and bellowed and roared. As for noise, the bulls of Bashan were outclassed. But as for music—well, it requires more than a big organ and a big man to produce that. The congregation was disappointed, disgusted, and fast becoming desperate. They said that the organ was too big, too complicated, and that it had at least nineteen hundred pipes too many. There were charges of mismanagement and even fraud against the committee, and hints that “something might be doing.” Now, Indiana lies in the north central portion of the lynching belt of the United States, so the committee felt a trifle uncomfortable.
To my way of thinking, there is a marked similarity between the musical experience of this congregation and the educational experience of many communities in this country. We have built great schoolhouses and prepared elaborate courses of study, with more manuals, stops, and swells than characterized the great organ of Newtown. The old course of study, which was so simple that even Sister Jones could play it by ear, has given place to a new, elaborate, and highly organized course which is difficult—entirely too difficult—for the Minnie Wrights and Josie Graysons, no difference if the one is a relative of some member of the school-board and the other is the daughter of a poor widow. It requires more, too, than an able-bodied man to get proper results from the course of study, even if he has been to college and played fullback on the football team. He may make a great ado about it, but the results will be very similar to Seth McGraw’s music on the pipe-organ—calculated to incite a riot.—J. W. Carr.
(1982)
MASTER MIND, THE
Jesus, as the Master mind of the world, rules in it by controlling many other minds, as the master clock in this account controls many other clocks:
“A German has invented a new clock system which has some original features worthy of mention,” says The American Inventor. “The system is that of a master clock which controls electrically as many individual clock installations as may be required. The clock, which is installed in the house or place of business of the subscriber to the system, is similar to the ordinary one, inasmuch as it has a face and two hands; but the works are replaced by a couple of magnets and a balance-wheel. The master clock is provided with a transmitting apparatus designed to be operated by the movement of the hands. An impulse is sent from the wires when the hands of the master clock advance one minute on the face of the dial. This impulse affects the magnets in the small clocks in such a way that the hands are advanced the same amount as were the hands of the master clock. This operation is kept up indefinitely, and, of course, all of the small clocks keep exactly the same time as the master clock.” (Text.)
(1983)
Master Revealed—See [Captain, The Divine].
Master, Thinking About His—See [Duty].
MASTERY
One of those strong currents, always mysterious, and sometimes impossible to foresee, had set us into shore out of our course, and the ship was blindly beating on a dreary coast of sharp and craggy rocks.
Suddenly we heard a voice up in the fog in the direction of the wheel-house, ringing like a clarion above the roar of the waves, and the clashing sounds on shipboard, and it had in it an assuring, not a fearful tone. As the orders came distinctly and deliberately through the captain’s trumpet, to “shift the cargo,” to “back her,” to “keep her steady,” we felt somehow that the commander up there in the thick mist on the wheel-house knew what he was about, and that through his skill and courage, by the blessing of heaven, we should all be rescued. The man who saved us so far as human aid ever saves drowning mortals, was one fully competent to command a ship; and when, after weary days of anxious suspense, the vessel leaking badly, and the fires in danger of being put out, we arrived safely in Halifax, old Mr. Cunard, agent of the line, on hearing from the mail officer that the steamer had struck on the rocks and had been saved only by the captain’s presence of mind and courage, simply replied: “Just what might have been expected in such a disaster; Captain Harrison is always master of the situation.”—James T. Fields.
(1984)
MASTERY BY INTELLIGENCE
The devil can always be beaten if we go about it seriously:
Morphy, the American chess-player, looking at the picture of a youth playing chess with Satan, and, apparently, doomed to inevitable defeat, studied the position, called for chessmen and board in reality, and by one move won the hypothetical game.
(1985)
Mastery Necessary to Progress—See [Conquest by Man].
MASTERY OF CIRCUMSTANCES
One of Mr. Ingersoll’s most eloquent chapters is on “Man as an Automaton,” played upon by the blind forces of nature. A clot in the brain explains Benedict Arnold’s treason. A foul taint in the arteries that is like a fungus luring a merchant ship on the rocks. Penury and vicious environment fill our jails and must fill them. But the argument was born of a great man’s beautiful sympathy for his fellow sufferers. It did not issue from logic or nature or events. Indeed, all life and daily experience stood up and shouted against his affirmation. What! Man a puppet with whom nature plays an endless game of battledore and shuttlecock! Man a victim of heredity and environment! Some years ago I met a successful merchant, living in a beautiful house on one of the best avenues in his great city. His mother was an evil woman, his father a river thief, he was kicked around the river front until he was eight, slept in the loft of a livery stable until he was nine, killed a man when he was ten, taken home by one of the participants in the trial, became the partner of his benefactor and achieved universal recognition and honor.—N. D. Hillis.
(1986)
MASTERY OF NATURE
Until a generation ago our great lakes of the north were closed with the ice, which stopt all navigation until the thaw of the spring came. Now there are ice-boats, made of steel with powerful engines, that not only cut paths for themselves and the heavy freight which they carry, but also make a path for less powerful craft. They pound their way through the ice-fields, and thus make all-the-year-round navigation possible. The ports of northern Europe used to be locked with ice until these great ice-breaking ships were brought into use. There is nothing short of an iceberg which they can not overcome. Our lakes do not have bergs, of course, and hence these great ice-cutting ships have a marvelous mastery over the obstacles.
The mastery of the ice-fields by the hardy men and powerful ships of the north is another illustration of human genius and sovereignty. (Text.)
(1987)
MATERIAL FOR A GREAT LIFE
Do not try to do a great thing; you may waste all your life waiting for the opportunity which may never come. To be content to be a fountain in the midst of a wild valley of stones, nourishing a few lichens and wild flowers or now and again a thirsty sheep; and to do this always and not for the praise of man, but for the sake of God—this makes a great life.—F. B. Meyer.
(1988)
Material, The, and the Spiritual—See [Mystery in Religion].
MATERIALISM INADEQUATE
A machine can tell us something about its maker, but it can not produce another machine. The gospel of materialism is inadequate to explain the world.
“Give me matter,” said Kant, “and I will explain the formation of a world; but give me matter only, and I can not explain the formation of a caterpillar.”
The glory of the Creator has not descended to man and it will not. Matter, in all its inertia and helplessness but adds to the angelic refrain, “Worship God.”
(1989)
MATERNAL, GOD’S LOVE
The pagan Stoic poet, Cleanthes, who flourished B.C. 260, would seem to have caught a glimpse of the maternal quality of God. One of his prayers is:
“Merciful mother! bestow favor upon me, thy poor worshiper, whatever evil I may be guilty of. Thou hast a maternal nature, art gentle and patient, thou supreme one.” (Text.)
(1990)
Maternal Love and Fiction—See [Mothers Not in Fiction].
MATURITY, SINS OF
Remember that the time is short, too short, to recover from mistakes. An old man’s broken limb heals slowly. The butterfly that tears its wing in the morning in August does not heal its wound. The mature goldfish may tear the hook loose, but the hurt can not be cured. The well-grown tree suffers grievously from the gash of an ax. Sin injures youth much, but scars maturity more. Saul pleased God in his youth, and lost his soul in his maturity.—N. D. Hillis.
(1991)
MEALS, SIMPLICITY IN
It is related of Count von Haseler, who for twelve years commanded the Sixteenth German Army Corps at Metz, and enjoyed a high reputation in other countries besides his own, that when on a tour of inspection he arrived at a hotel where a sumptuous meal had been prepared for him. To the proprietor’s infinite disappointment he ordered a glass of milk and some bread and butter to be taken to his room, whence he did not emerge for the rest of the evening. This talented soldier, when nearing his seventieth year, spent whole days in the saddle in all weathers, and his untiring energy is still a favorite theme of conversation in German military circles.—National Review.
(1992)
MEAN, THE GOLDEN
In arctic regions plants, which under more genial conditions would unfold themselves in a delightful perfection, remain stunted and mean, exhausting their vitality in withstanding the severities of the climate. The same is true of animal life. The Newfoundland dogs of Kane, in the Polar seas, became mad through the excruciating severity of the cold. The birds come to a certain strength and glory through the necessity of awareness, but there is often such a fearful blood-thirstiness in the tropical forest, such a profusion of cruel hawks, owls, serpents, and beasts of prey, that a bird’s life is one long terror, and it forgets its music. And this applies equally to man. He is all the better for a regulated conflict with his environment, but all the worse if the conflict attain undue severity. His conflict with nature may exhaust him. (Text.)—W. L. Watkinson, “The Transfigured Sackcloth.”
(1993)
MEANING, LOGICAL
Take the English proverb, “Tenderden steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands.” We said, “How ignorant a population!” But, when we went deeper into the history, we found that the proverb was not meant for logic, but was meant for sarcasm. One of the bishops had £50,000 given to him to build a breakwater to save the Goodwin Sands from the advancing sea; but the good bishop, instead of building the breakwater to keep out the sea, simply built a steeple; and this proverb was sarcastic, and not logical, that “Tenderden steeple was the cause of the Goodwin Sands.” When you contemplate the motive, there was the closest and best-welded logic in the proverb. So I think a large share of our criticism of old legends and old statements will be found in the end to be the ignorance that overleaps its own saddle and falls on the other side.—Wendell Phillips.
(1994)
Means and End—See [Values, Standard of].
MEANS, LIVING WITHIN ONE’S
The man of five hundred dollars income is trying to live as tho he were sure of a thousand. Of course he is in straits and shallows. Instead of sailing on a fair sea, as he might within his own range, he is doomed to struggle perpetually with his head under water. To live generously is desirable when one has the means; but to attempt a scale of expenditure beyond our means is neither wise nor comfortable. How much more sensible to live in a modest way, agreeable to our fortune and suited to our condition! To follow this rule requires more courage than to besiege a city or fight a battle; but it is attainment for which we should aspire as a means of personal comfort and a guard against temptation.—Zion’s Herald.
(1995)
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
“How is it, Mr. Brown,” said a miller to a farmer, “that when I came to measure those ten barrels of apples I bought from you I found them nearly two barrels short?” “Singular, very singular; for I sent them to you in ten of your own flour barrels.” (Text.)
(1996)
MEASUREMENT
Man’s power to solve the problems of the natural world is indicated by the feats of modern photography, of which O. H. Cloudy writes as follows:
Just think for an instant what the twelve-hundredth part of a second really means. A railroad train going sixty miles an hour, or eighty-eight feet per second, would move, in such an interval, less than one inch. A bullet, with a muzzle velocity of twelve hundred feet per second, would get but one short foot from the muzzle before a twelve-hundredth of a second had elapsed. Could two bells be rung, one twelve-hundredth of a second after the other, the sound-waves given out by them both would travel within five feet of each other, too close for any human ear to distinguish that there was more than one sound. Yet in this tiny bit of time the eye of the camera can record on the sensitive plate everything in front of it, with sufficient force to make a good negative. (Text.)—The American Inventor.
(1997)
Measurement of Morals—See [Conscience a Moral Mentor].
MEASUREMENT, SPIRITUAL
I must see your motives, your disposition, your loves and hates, your aspirations and longings and hopes, before I can say I see you. How tall are you? How much do you weigh? Six feet, you say, and weigh a hundred and fifty pounds? Both of us are wrong. You can’t measure the self by a foot-rule, nor weigh it in iron scales. Every time you aspire and hope and love you escape the body and live in the heights and distances. To estimate you aright I must gather up all your hopes and aspirations and faiths and loves; and if you have been wise enough to reach up and lay hold of the eternal I must weigh and measure the eternal in order to estimate you.—Robert MacDonald.
(1998)
MECCA, INFLUENCE OF
The pilgrimage to Mecca is not only one of the pillars of the religion of Islam, but it has proved one of the strongest bonds of union and has always exercised a tremendous influence as a missionary agency. Even to-day the pilgrims who return from Mecca to their native villages in Java, India, and west Africa, are fanatical ambassadors of the greatness and glory of Islam. From an ethical standpoint, the Mecca pilgrimage, with its superstitious and childish ritual, is a blot upon Mohammedan monotheism. But as a great magnet to draw the Moslem world together with an annual and ever-widening esprit de corps, the Mecca pilgrimage is without a rival. The number of pilgrims that come to Mecca varies from year to year. The vast majority arrive by sea from Egypt, India, and the Malay Archipelago. The pilgrim caravan from Syria and Arabia by land is growing smaller every year, for the roads are very unsafe. It will probably increase again on the completion of the Hejaz railway from Damascus to Mecca. All told, the present number is from sixty to ninety thousand pilgrims each year.—Samuel M. Zwemer, “The Moslem World.”
(1999)
MEDIATION
King Edward III, in 1347, besieged Calais and the French king, very unwilling to lose his town, sought to come to the help of his people, but in vain. King Edward refused to grant any conditions of peace. The people were hunger-bitten because of the protracted siege. The unrelenting king said, “You must give up yourselves to be dealt with as I will. Let six of the chief citizens of the town come to me with halters around their necks, their heads and feet bare, and the keys of the town and castle in their hands. With these I will deal as I please.” Accordingly these six, led by the governor, came to the king. Dropping on their knees before him, they implored him to spare their lives. King Edward refused to grant them mercy and ordered their instant death. His chief counselors and governor entreated him to spare these brave and valiant men, but his purpose was fixt. No merit that they might plead could cause him to change his mind, until finally, his consort, Queen Philippa knelt before him and said: “I pray you, sire, for the love that you bear me, to have mercy upon the men.” Then the king relented, saying: “I can not refuse the thing which you ask in this way. I give you, therefore, these men to do with them as you please.” The men were then taken to clean apartments to be well clothed and fed. (Text.)
(2000)
Medical Missionaries—See [God Sends Gifts]; [India, Medical Opportunities in]; [Missionaries, Medical]; [Surgery in Korea].
MEDICAL MISSIONS
Some of the best surgical work in the world is done by medical missionaries, who often have the poorest kind of equipment in the way of building and apparatus. Dr. H. N. Kinnear, at the head of a hospital in Fuchau, used the sitting-room of his own house for an operating-room, but in one year he performed over eight hundred operations, with only his wife and untrained natives for assistants. Of the nearly 18,000 patients treated last year, several came from high-class families, and they were most appreciative of what was done for them. A distinctive feature of this and all mission hospitals is the person, usually a native Christian, who acts as a kind of chaplain. Many of the patients have never heard the gospel story, and while they are being helped physically they listen willingly to what is told them. Religious services are also held every day in the room where people await their turn and receive the bamboo tallies that decide the order in which they are to be seen. Fees are ridiculously small, according to our American standard, five cents being the maximum, except in special cases, when the munificent sum of twenty cents is charged. This allows precedence to men who wear the long gown of the literati and object to waiting while laborers and women receive attention. Dr. Kinnear is a resourceful man, and often uses the Chinese queue to hold in place dressings of wounds about the head or as a sling for the support of injured or diseased hands and arms. He writes that he considers medical missionaries the most favored of all workers. Yet his salary is far below what he could earn as a surgeon in the United States.—Boston Transcript.
(2001)
See [Missions]; [Missionaries, Medical].
Medical Science—See [Life Prolonged].
Meeting of Friends and Foes—See [Amity After War].
MELODY FROM DRUDGERY
When you go into some great cathedral across the sea, to watch the player on the keys, which away up in the tower are sounding forth their wondrous chime, down there you hear only the clatter of the wires, the deafening din of the reverberating bells, and the clanging of the wooden shoes he wears upon his hands with which to strike the keyboard, sending out away up there in the belfry the silvery notes which he himself can scarcely hear.
Ah, but they are heard. Many a tired soul stops on the distant hillside in his day’s toil to listen to those strains, and his heart is filled with a strange gladness and peace. And amid the din and tumult of your daily work, it may sometimes seem as tho you were doing naught which was worth the doing; down there in obscurity, unthought of and unnoticed by the great world, simply beating out the allotted task upon the clattering keyboard which the Master has set for you. But do it well. Do it as the violet smiles, as the bird sings, as Jesus lived, and you shall send out over land and sea music, which shall bless the generations afar off.—George T. Dowling.
(2002)
Membership, Church—See [Badges].
Membership of Churches, Distribution of—See [Church Statistics].
Memorial Day—See [Dead, Influence of]; [Decorating Soldiers’ Graves]; [Honor’s Roll-call].
MEMORIAL OF LINCOLN
In the museum connected with the monument to Abraham Lincoln, at Springfield, Illinois, among other relics suggestive of the spirit and mission of the great emancipator, is treasured a piece of the rich gown worn by Laura Keene, the actress, in Ford’s Theater, Washington, on the tragic night when Lincoln fell. After the fatal shot of the assassin, Miss Keene sprang to the box and caught in her lap the head of the slain President, while the blood from the oozing wound saturated a portion of her garment. After the event, that blood-stained breadth was cut from the gown, sent to Springfield and preserved as the speaking symbol of the great sacrificial life which Lincoln lived even unto death, on behalf of the redemption of the black slaves of the South.—H. C. Mabie, “Methods in Evangelism.”
(2003)
Memorial to Humble Helpers—See [Negro “Mammy” Remembered].
Memorials of Genius—See [Economy, Divine].
MEMORIALS OF PATRIOTISM
When the Paris Commune savagely threw down the Vendome column all the civilized world felt a shock of disgust. Why? Certainly not because all the world equally admired Napoleon, whose triumphs the column recorded. Certainly not alone for the reason that it was a noble work of art. It was because all intelligent and unprejudiced people instinctively recognized that the column had been reared as an emblem of patriotism. That column stood for something higher than the fame of an individual conqueror, and for something broader than any theory of government or reaction of parties. It stood for the glory and dignity of France. It typified the love of the native land—patriotism. Take, as another instance, the great Washington shaft at the capital. Long delayed, frequently jeered at before its completion, it now lifts its finished strength toward heaven in everlasting tribute to the great leader of the Revolution and the founder of our nation.—New York Star.
(2004)
MEMORY
God’s precepts should be as thoroughly stamped on the memory as the landscape mentioned below was on the artist’s mind:
A publisher ordered from Gustave Doré a picture, sending him a photograph of some Alpine scenery to be copied. The artist went away without his model, and the publisher was much provoked; but he was astonished when Doré appeared next day with the desired picture, having made it from memory. A few seconds’ examination of the photograph had sufficed to impress on his memory the slightest details and to enable him to reproduce them with not a rock or a tree lacking. (Text.)—L. Menard, Cosmos.
(2005)
“What did I do with that memorandum?” said a distinguished-looking man, speaking half to himself but with his eyes on the clerk, who stood waiting for his order in a large city grocery. “What I’ve done with that memorandum this time I really can not imagine. But you just wait a minute.”
He began searching his pockets. From each of them came scraps of paper, big and little, old letters with pencil notes on them, envelops similarly decorated, two or three small note-books, a theater program, and a number of pieces evidently torn from the margin of a newspaper and covered with writing. He examined the scraps one after another and restored each bunch to its separate pocket. The clerk waited, and a customer farther along the counter eyed the display with curiosity.
“Gone,” said the gentleman, with an air of finality. “I’ll have to trust to memory.”
The clerk nodded.
“Six eggs?” he said, with an interrogative inflection.
“Right,” said the gentleman.
The clerk wrote it down. “A pound of butter?” he continued.
“A pound of butter,” agreed the gentleman.
“Bread?”
“Three loaves.”
“Coffee?”
The gentleman hesitated. “No,” he said, with decision. “Coffee enough on hand to last the rest of the week.” He smiled contentedly, watched the clerk write a name and address at the top of the order, and then went out of the shop whistling.
“How did you know what he wanted?” asked the other customer of the clerk.
“He lives just around the corner in an apartment, and he and his wife get their own breakfasts. Always the same things—never any change—but he always has to have it written down.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“His name is Bertini, I think. He’s a kind of professor. I believe he has a kind of memory system he teaches to people who can’t remember things.”
The other customer smiled, but the clerk was quite serious. He had no sense of humor.—The Youth’s Companion.
(2006)
See [Absent-mindedness].
MEMORY AND DISEASE
Many strange defects of memory are known to exist, and of these an interesting example may be given.
A business man of keen mind and good general memory, who was not paralyzed in any way, and was perfectly able to comprehend and engage in conversation, suddenly lost a part of his power of reading and of mathematical calculation.
The letters d, g, q, x, and y, tho seen perfectly, were in this case no longer recognized, and conveyed no more idea to him than Chinese characters would to most of us. He had difficulty in reading—was obliged to spell out all words, and could read no words containing three letters.
He could write the letters which he could read, but could not write the five letters mentioned. He could read and write certain numbers, but 6, 7, and 8, had been lost to him; and when asked to write them his only result, after many attempts, was to begin to write the words six, seven, and eight, not being able to finish these, as the first and last contained letters (x and g) which he did not know.
He could not add 7 and 5, or any two numbers whereof 6, 7, or 8 formed a part, for he could not call them to mind. Other numbers he knew well. He could no longer tell time by the watch.
For a week after the beginning of this curious condition he did not recognize his surroundings. On going out for the first time the streets of the city no longer seemed familiar; on coming back he did not know his own house. After a few weeks, however, all his memories had returned excepting those of the letters and figures named; but as the loss of these put a stop to his reading, and to all his business life, the small defect of memory was to him a serious thing.
Experience has shown that such a defect is due to a small area of disease in one part of the brain.—Harper’s Weekly.
(2007)
Memory Elusive—See [Heads, Losing].
MEMORY FACULTY IN FISHES
Experiments recently made at Tortugas show that fishes have the faculty of remembering for at least twenty-four hours.
The fish studied at Tortugas are gray perch, whose favorite food is the little silver sardine. The experimenters painted some of the silver sardines light red; then they offered them to the gray perch mixed with the unpainted sardines. The perch snatched the silver sardines and ate them, then very deliberately and cautiously they nibbled at the painted sardines. Finding that the fish were the same whether red or silver, they devoured the red fish.
Having given proof of their intelligence, they were permitted to rest twenty-four hours. The experimenters offered them silver sardines, sardines painted red, and sardines painted blue. The perch quickly devoured the silver fish, then, without an instant’s hesitation, they devoured the red fish. Finally, gliding cautiously up to the blue fish, they took a bite and darted away. As the taste was favorable they returned to the blue fish, nibbled again, and devoured them.
The experimenters then tied sea-thistles to the blue sardines. The perch nibbled, then, disagreeably surprized, darted away. For twenty-four hours not a fish approached the painted blue fishes. They remembered the sea-thistles. But their memory is short; the day following again they snatched the blue fish.—Harper’s Weekly.
(2008)
MEMORY, MOURNFUL
Renan, in one of his books, recalls an old French legend of a buried city on the coast of Brittany. With its homes, public buildings, churches and thronged streets, it sank instantly into the sea. The legend says that the city’s life goes on as before down beneath the waves. The fishermen, when in calm weather they row over the place, sometimes think they can see the gleaming tips of the church-spires deep in the water, and fancy they can hear the chiming of the bells in the old belfries, and even the murmur of the city’s noises. There are men who in their later years seem to have an experience like this. Their life of youthful hopes, dreams, successes and joys has been sunk out of sight, submerged in misfortunes and adversities and has vanished altogether. All that remains is a memory. In their discouragement they seem to hear the echoes of the old songs of hope and gladness, and to catch visions of the old beauty and splendor, but that is all. They have nothing real left. They have grown hopeless and bitter.
(2009)
MEMORY RENEWED
Instances are on record in which those who had heard passages from a foreign and perfectly unintelligible tongue, which seemed, of course, to have passed at once from out their recollection, as the breath fades off from the polished mirror—have afterward recalled these in delirium or death, or at some moment of extraordinary excitement, with the utmost clearness and fullness of detail. And the instances are frequent, within our observation, in which aged men recall with vivid distinctness the poetry they recited, the problems they studied, the games they played, in the freshness of youth, or the arguments they made in the prime of their manhood; altho a thousand intervening events had taken a prominence before them since that, these never had seemed to have submerged those forever in their thoughts—Richard S. Storrs.
(2010)
MEMORY REVIVED BY SICKNESS
A case cited by Dr. Abercrombie confirms the suggestive theory that the stimulus which fever gives to the circulation (sign of the disease tho it is) may bring dormant mental impression into temporary activity. A boy at the age of four had undergone the operation of trepanning being at the time in a state of stupor from a severe fracture of the skull. After his recovery he retained no recollection either of the accident or of the operation. But at the age of fifteen, during an attack of fever, he gave his mother an account of the operation, describing the persons who were present, and even remembering details of their dress and other minute particulars.—Richard A. Proctor, New York Mail and Express.
(2011)
MEMORY, UNUSUAL
Pepys tells us of an Indian who could repeat a long passage in Greek or Hebrew after it had been recited to him only once, tho he was ignorant of either language. This man would doubtless have been able to repeat, so far as his vocal organs would permit him to imitate the sounds, the song of a nightingale or a lark, through all its ever-varying passages, during ten or twenty minutes, and with as much understanding of its significance as of the meaning of the Greek and Latin words he recited so glibly. We certainly need not envy that particular “poor Indian” his “untutored mind,” tho as certainly the power he possest would be of immense value to a philosopher.—Richard A. Proctor, New York Mail and Express.
(2012)
Memory, Verbal—See [Rote versus Reason].
MEN
It would be difficult to think of a time when the sentiment exprest in this poem by J. G. Holland would not be appropriate. The important thing, however, is that it applies to our time.
God, give us men! A time like this demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office can not buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will,
Men who have honor, men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagog,
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog
In public duty and in private thinking;
For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,
Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps!
(2013)
Men are Gods—See [Children’s Religious Ideas].
MENACES TO CIVILIZATION
In ancient Athens the Cave of the Furies was underneath the rock on whose top sat the court of the Areopagus.
May not modern civilization have an underside that harbors many kinds of moral furies?
(2014)
Menagerie, A Moral—See [Self-conflict].
Mental Device—See [Patience].
Mental Quickness—See [Presence of Mind].
Mental States and Dress—See [Dress Affecting Moods].
MENTALITY, DEVELOPMENT OF
C. C. Abbot writes in the New York Sun:
Beasts and birds long ago became afraid of man, and afraid of him in a way wholly different from their fear of other forms of animal life. This demonstrates that they recognize a difference, as when I can not approach a snipe that will permit a cow almost to tread upon it. Fear being the sum of disastrous experiences, the birds that soonest learned the lesson of prudence left the most descendants. The fearless ones paid the price of their foolhardiness and died out. Such conditions did not call for anatomical changes, but mental ones, and this increased mentality that led to the preservation of the species is so near the border line of what Goldwin Smith calls self-improvement that it can be looked upon only as its forerunner, as birds and all beasts foreran the man who was to prove their arch enemy.
(2015)
Mercenary Spirit, The—See [Gold, Taint of].
MERCY, LIMITATION OF
Says the old hymn:
While the lamp holds out to burn,
The vilest sinner may return.
An old Saxon king had some serious trouble with his subjects: they murmured against him and at last rose up in rebellion. The king set out to subdue them, and soon the well-disciplined troops won a decided victory over the tatterdemalion horde opposing them. Having conquered, the king determined to show mercy. He adopted the novel expedient of placing a candle in the window of his castle and proclaiming that all should be pardoned who returned “while the candle burns.” (Text.)
(2016)
Merit—See [Praise, Unnecessary].
MERIT COUNTS
An instance of a work published not because of its merit, but “from a cold and calculating publisher’s point of view of very doubtful sale,” is McMaster’s “History of the United States.”
The manuscript of the first volume was sent to the house by the author without introduction or comment of any kind. The author was a young tutor in mathematics at Princeton, had published nothing on any historical subject, and as far as any one knew at Princeton, had made no special historical study. It appeared that one very prominent New York house had declined to risk the publication of the work, and the historical expert of the house could not bring himself to recommend it as a reasonable publishing venture. Finally, the senior member of the firm read the manuscript himself, and decided to undertake the venture, believing in its probable success. The author was written to, he presented himself for the first time, being personally unknown in the office, and arrangements for the publication of this most popular and successful work were concluded within ten minutes.—Appleton’s Magazine.
(2017)
Merit Recognized—See [Inconspicuous Workers.]
MERIT WINS
Dr. S. Parkes Cadman tells this story of the late Dudley Buck, the well-known musical composer:
He was offered a thousand dollars by the managers of the Cincinnati Festival for a score which should embody solos, choruses and the accompanying orchestration. He promptly refused the offer, because it was not an open one to all competitors. Thereupon the managers threw it open, and the result was that Mr. Buck sent in “Marmion” and his setting of “The Golden Legend” under a nom de plume, and, of course, its merits won the prize.
(2018)
Merriment Misplaced—See [Drunkenness, The Tragedy of].
MESSAGE, A TIMELY
In the “Life of Lord Tennyson,” by his son, a story is told of a New England clergyman who once wrote to Tennyson telling him how, one Sabbath, he was strangely imprest to drop his sermon, and recite “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The congregation were shocked and later dismissed the pastor. Subsequently, a stranger called upon this clergyman, and told him how on that particular Sunday he had wandered into his church and heard him recite the famous poem; that he was in that charge; had fought at Gettysburg; and felt he had done something, and ought to be a man. Said the New England clergyman to the old England poet: “I lost my pulpit, but I saved a soul.”
(2019)
MESSAGE, A WELCOME
It is related that one day, when the arctic explorer Nansen was battling with the ice-floes in the Polar seas, a carrier-pigeon tapped at the window of Mrs. Nansen’s home at Christiania. Instantly the casement was opened, and the wife of the famous arctic explorer in another moment covered the little messenger with kisses and caresses. The carrier-pigeon had been away from the cottage thirty long months, but it had not forgotten the way home. It brought a note from Nansen stating that all was going well with him and his expedition in the Polar regions. He had fastened the message to the frail courier, and turned it loose into the frigid air. It flew like an arrow over a thousand miles of frozen waste, and then sped forward over another thousand miles of ocean and plain and forests, and one morning entered the window of the waiting mistress, and delivered the message for which she had been waiting so anxiously. (Text.)
(2020)
Messengers, Business—See [Time-savers].
Meteorites—See [Heavenly Visitors].
Meteorological Changes and Crime—See [Crime, Epidemics of].
METHOD IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
Mrs. Wesley carried her principle of method and a time-table into the realm of religion. She began surprizingly early. “The children were early made to distinguish the Sabbath from other days, and were soon taught to be still at family prayers, and to ask a blessing immediately afterward, which they used to do by signs, before they could kneel or speak!” The cells of each infantile brain were diligently stored with passages of Scripture, hymns, collects, etc. Prayer was woven into the fabric of every day’s life. The daily lesson of each child was set in a framework of hymns. Later, certain fixt hours were assigned to each member of the household, during which the mother talked with the particular child for whom that hour was set aside.—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
(2021)
Method in Service—See [Service, Method of].
Methods, Imperfect—See [Gravitation, Law of].
METHODS IN RELIGION
Francis Newman once tried to explain to Dr. Martineau the difference between his own religious attitude and that of his eminent brother, the cardinal. “It is a matter of faith,” he said. “I have faith, and the cardinal has none. The cardinal comes to a river, and believes that he can not possibly cross it unless he takes a particular boat with a particular name painted on it. But I believe that I can swim.” (Text.)—Francis Gribble, The Fortnightly Review.
(2022)
Mettle that Wins—See [Loads, Balking Under].
Microbes—See [Cleansing, Difficulty of].
MILITANT EVANGELISM
Robert Collyer told me the other day of a big-hearted, big-fisted old clergyman in Yorkshire who was so determined to convert the wild, wicked dwellers on the moors that when they refused to come into church on Sunday, he would rush out of his pulpit, spring into a crowd of cock-fighters outside the chapel, knock some of them down with his brawny fist, collar them, drag them in, and then administer gospel truths right and left to the rascals.—James T. Fields.
(2023)
MILITARISM
This is merely what eight years’ increase in army and navy has cost the American people:
Average annual cost of army and navy for the eight years preceding the Spanish War (1890–1898), $51,500,000.
Average annual cost of army and navy for the eight years since the Spanish War (1902–1910), $185,400,000.
Average yearly increase in the latter period as compared with the former, $134,000,000, making a total increase in eight years of $1,072,000,000, or 360 per cent.
This eight-year increase exceeds the national debt by $158,000,000.
It exceeds the entire budget of the United States for 1910.
It is twice as much as the highest estimate of carrying out the deep water-ways projects.
It is nearly three times the estimated cost of replanting the 56,000,000 acres of denuded forest land in the United States.
It is three times the estimated cost of the Panama Canal, including purchase price from the French company.
It is three times the cost of carrying out the whole irrigation program contemplated within a generation.
It is probably enough to banish tuberculosis from the United States within a reasonable time, if efficiently used to arouse and assist the people in their fight against this dread disease. More than 160,000 are dying yearly from this cause.
It is $60 for every family in the United States.
It lays a yearly tax of 1¼ per cent on the total wages paid in the United States, on the supposition that wages average $600 to the family; and we pay it in the higher price of our goods.
Interest on this sum at 4 per cent would give an income of $1,000 a year forever to 42,880 families—a city of 200,000.
The increase for 190–09 is only $13,000,000 less than all the gifts to charities, libraries, educational institutions, and other public causes in 1909, which reached the vast total of $185,000,000.
The cost of a battleship would build a macadam road of approved construction between the cities of Chicago and New York.
The Congressional Library at Washington, the finest library building in the world, was built for little over half the cost of a battleship, and is maintained for three-fourths the cost of keeping her afloat.
Fifty manual training-schools could be built and equipped with necessary tools and appliances for the cost of a battleship, teaching the rudiments of a trade to 75,000 young people each year.
The cost of a few battleships wisely spent in the fight against tuberculosis in New York City, coupled with proper legislation and cooperation of the people, would probably render this disease as rare in a generation or two as is smallpox to-day.—By courtesy of the Peace Society.
(2024)
See Armies of the World, Naval Powers and Armaments; Navies of the World; War and Racial Fertility.
United States S. S. North Dakota
Forty Y. M. C. A. buildings could be built and equipped throughout for the cost of a battleship, each building accommodating the young men in a city of 200,000 people.
One 26,000-ton battleship ($12,000,000) + 20 years’ upkeep at $800,000 a year,—$28,000,000: Then the junk heap.
$28,000,000: 1,400 churches at $20,000 each, 7,000 farms at $4,000 each, a college education for 14,000 men or women at $500 a year for four years.
For past wars and preparation for war, $423,000,000, or 70 per cent.
Left for other purposes, $181,000,000, or 30 per cent.
The Way of Militarism
Which benefits a few trusts and contractors and gives temporary and uneconomical employment, but which is rapidly impoverishing the nations.
Ordinary income of the United States for 1908–09, $604,000,000.
Our generation has not accepted Christ’s ideal of non-resistance, gentleness and humility. We believe in Dreadnaughts and armed regiments. At our conferences in The Hague and Mohonk we plead for peace; at our capitals we vote uncounted millions for cannon and bombshells. Disclaiming hypocrisy, we excuse ourselves by saying that the best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war, when in our hearts we know that a man who carries a concealed revolver in his pocket is a thousand times more likely to slay any chance enemy than if he had left his weapon at home or hurled it into the sea. We admire and love the Quaker—but we want him to stay in Philadelphia; the man we send to Washington must argue for us that a nation needs a war about once in thirty years.—N. D. Hillis.
(2025)
Military Sagacity—See [Retreat Discouraged].
Millennial Possibilities—See [Future Welfare].
Mind—See [Mastery].
MIND-ACTIVITY
Dr. R. S. Storrs points out the activity of the mind and its persistence under great limitations in these words:
A universal spasmodic disease masters the organs of locomotion, so that the arm or the limb will remain in any posture, however unnatural, in which it is placed. The senses are usually entirely sealed, of no more avail than if they were obliterated. And the continued pulsation, with the warmth which this maintains in the system, are the only indications that life remains. Yet there have been authentic instances in which the mind, thus shrouded from sight, instead of being destroyed, impaired, or even limited, in its central force, has been stimulated to a more amazing activity, by being thus crowded, as it were, into a corner of its realm; and has feared and agonized, or has triumphed and exulted, with a vividness of experience altogether unaccustomed.
(2026)
Mind and Will Conquering Circumstances—See [Physical Weakness Overcome].
MIND-HEALING
The story is told of a woman who called on a physician for nervous trouble. She was a woman whose ailments had worried and excited her to such a degree that she was threatened with nervous prostration. Said the doctor: “Madam, what you need is to read your Bible more.” She promptly began to take offense at the strange prescription. He told her he meant it. “Go home and read your Bible an hour a day; then come back to me a month from to-day.” She thought over the matter, recalled the fact that tho she was a professing Christian she had been neglecting to read her Bible, and so she decided to take his advice. At the end of the month she came back to the office a well woman. She felt like a different person. She needed no medicine. (Text.)
(2027)
MIND, THE HUMAN
In the yard stands the locomotive. It is a masterpiece of the mechanic’s art. Burnished and lubricated journals fit in boxes and connecting-rods are welded to connection. Valves, pistons and wheels are all ready for the harmonious interplay which makes this mass of metal a thing of power. The twin rails beckon it to be on its way; the machine itself pants impatiently; impulsively sobs the pop-valve. But the locomotive waits, must wait for the driver’s will. Not stoutest boiler or greatest head of steam can draw the train until the man reveals his mind to the locomotive.—T. C. McClelland.
(2028)
MINIATURE WORK
I have to-day a paper at home, as long as half my hand, on which was photographed the whole contents of a London newspaper. It was put under a dove’s wing, and sent into Paris, where they enlarged it, and read the news.—Wendell Phillips.
(2029)
Minister, The Little—See [Child Religion].
MINISTRY, DIFFICULTIES OF THE
It is sometimes in order for the members of one profession to plume themselves at the expense of another. Especially does it seem to be the thought at times that the ministry is peculiarly a profession of ease. That there is a truer and deeper view, however, is seen in the following:
A barrister, accustomed to practise in criminal courts, made sneering remarks concerning preachers. “If,” said he, “I were to address a jury in the average way you clergymen do I should never get a conviction.” The elderly clergyman to whom he spoke, replied: “If you had to address the same jury 104 times a year, and your object was not to get them to give a verdict against some other person—which they might be willing to do—but to induce them to convict themselves, I doubt if you would do any better than we do.” Silence on the part of the barrister. (Text.)
(2030)
MINUTE, IMPORTANCE OF A
’Twas only a minute that would not stay,
But how many noticed its flight?
And yet for one it parted the way,
Betwixt life’s bloom and its blight.
It pointed the new-born baby’s breath,
First felt on the mother’s breast;
For another it sounded the summons of death
And a weary one gone to his rest.
At that moment two souls were together wed
Till death should call them apart;
Another to virtue bowed his head
And consecrated his heart.
Ah! big was the moment that flitted away,
And hardly one noticed its flight;
And hundreds of minutes make up the day,
And hundreds are lost in the night.
—Benjamin Reynolds Bulkeley, New England Magazine.
(2031)
MIRACLES
Whether the miracles of Jesus really happened or are merely legendary I do not know, and, if I may say it without irreverence, I do not care. They are not necessary to my Christianity, which, to say the truth, can better do without them. What is it to me, and to such as me, whether, in the little village of Bethany, Jesus did or did not raise to life one poor dead body, when I know that in the centuries since he has raised to life millions of dead souls? And what, after all, does it matter whether on the shores of the lake of Galilee on a late afternoon nearly two thousand years ago he gave one meal to five thousand persons by feeding them with a few loaves and fishes, when I know that all the world over, every day, every night, this very night, he is feeding countless millions of the poor, the opprest and the broken-hearted, making them forget their hunger and thirst and all the sufferings of their earthly existence in the bread of the Spirit that is the bread of life?—Hall Caine, Christian Commonwealth.
(2032)
Some wealthy Africans, with whom Kruger was traveling in the desert, found the food-hampers gone astray. “You are a great believer in miracles, Oom Paul,” said one of them. “Why can’t you arrange for heaven to send me victuals by the crows, as they were sent by the ravens to Elijah.” “Because,” said Oom, dryly, “Elijah was a prophet with a mission; you are a fool with an appetite.”
(2033)
MIRACLES, EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF
Whatever effect or lack of effect miracles have on modern minds, the following account shows that they are of first value to simple-minded natives. The writer is Sophie B. Titterington:
When the rumor flew around Aniwa that “Missi” (Dr. John G. Paton), was trying to dig water out of the ground, the old Christian chief tenderly labored with him. “Oh, Missi, your head is going wrong. Don’t let our people hear you talking about going down into the earth for rain, or they will never listen to your word, or believe you again.”
But the island was greatly in need of good water, and Dr. Paton dug away at the well, single-handed. It was hard, weary work. He hired some of the natives with fish-hooks to get out three pailfuls each, still doing most of the heavy work himself. But when the well was twelve feet deep, one side of it caved in. This gave the loving, troubled old chief another plea. He represented that if Missi had been in the hole that night, he would have been killed, and an English warship would have come to find out what had happened to the white man. They would not believe that Missi had gone into that hole of his own accord, but would punish them for his supposed murder.
When he was thirty feet down the earth became damp. That evening he said to the old chief with earnest solemnity, “I think that Jehovah God will give us water to-morrow from that hole.”
“No, Missi,” the faithful old fellow sighed. “You will never get rain coming up from the earth in Aniwa. We expect daily, if you reach water, to see you drop into the sea where the sharks will eat you!”
At daybreak. Dr. Paton went down and made a little hole in the center of the bottom of his well. He says: “I trembled in every limb when the water rushed up and began to fill the hole. Muddy tho it was, I eagerly tasted it, and the little cup almost dropt from my hand in sheer joy, and I fell upon my knees in that muddy bottom to praise the Lord. It was water! It was living water from Jehovah’s well!”
With superstitious fear the people gazed upon the jugful their Missi carried up. The old chief shook it, touched it, tasted it. “Rain! rain. Yes, it is rain!”
The back of heathenism was broken. A new order of things began in Aniwa. Family prayers and reverence for the Sabbath spontaneously grew up. The wonderful transformation which was wrought in the Aniwans became household talk all over the world. All this was hastened because the ambassador of Jehovah God had done what none of the gods of the islanders could have done—brought up rain from the ground! (Text.)
(2034)
Mirror, The, as a Revealer—See [Self-inspection].
MISCALCULATION
What is said to be the largest plow in the world was made some years ago at Bakersfield, Cal. This plow was the result of the ingenuity of a ranch superintendent, who had authority to make improvements, but not to introduce steam-plows. The superintendent had grown very tired of preparing three thousand acres of land for wheat with ordinary nine- or twelve-inch plows drawn by two horses.
He argued that if two horses could pull a twelve-inch plow, six horses could pull a plow thirty-six inches wide, and that eight horses could pull a plow forty-eight inches wide. He made the calculations carefully, and, being clever with his pencil, made drawings also, and sent for blacksmiths and machinists to construct a plow on his principle.
Some simple folk told him that his great plow would not work, but they contented themselves with saying this dogmatically, without giving any mathematical reason therefore. So the superintendent went on with his plans.
The blacksmiths and machinists finished the plow in due time. The share was made to cut a fifty-inch furrow; the top of it reached five feet above the ground, to give room to throw the earth. The beam was more than a foot thick; but the machine was constructed to run between two great wheels, so that it could be turned around easily; and on the axle between these wheels was the seat for the man who was to drive the ten horses which were hitched to it.
The plow was brought to the great field, the ten horses were attached to it, the handles were raised, the driver mounted his seat, and the team was started. But as soon as the share struck well into the ground the horses stopt short. They were stuck fast. And yet the plow had not gone too deeply into the earth. But it was evident that they could not pull the plow. More horses were brought out, but not until fifty were attached did the plow move along.
Even then it required four men to hold the handles, in order to keep the plow in the furrow. It was an economic failure.
Then the superintendent, through the intervention of some one who was a better mathematician than he, learned that he should have cubed the capacity of his twelve-inch plow every time he doubled the width of it.—Harper’s Weekly.
(2035)
MISER, A WORTHLESS
A certain John Hopkins, familiarly known in his day for his rapacity as “Vulture Hopkins,” lived a worthless life but died possest of a million and a half dollars, left so as not to be inherited until after the second generation, so that, as he said, “his heirs would be as long spending it as he had been in getting it.” Pope preserved his memory in this couplet:
“When Hopkins dies a thousand lights attend
The wretch who, living, saved a candle’s end.”
Such a life is properly to be condemned, altho its results may be useful to a subsequent generation.
(2036)
Miserliness—See [Mammon-worship]; [Saving Disapproved].
MISERY AN EDUCATOR
How often I had traced the boy who had robbed the box-car with unerring precision to the big, lawless business man who controlled or directed a trust, debauched a legislature, bought a senatorship or united with the gamblers and dive-keepers to steal a public franchise. Why was there so much kindness and so little justice? Why were men good to children, to churches and universities, and still so unjust? And when the other fights were won, the fights for the playgrounds, the detention home school, the juvenile court and all it implies, the biggest fight of all was yet ahead. But that little fight helped us to see the necessity for the big fight. We were being educated through the misery and misfortune of the children.—Ben B. Lindsey, The Survey.
(2037)
MISERY EXCITING SYMPATHY
The subjects which especially awakened the pencil of Thomas Rowlandson were the denizens of the squalid quarters of London. Muther says of him: “The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great cities had been first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.” (Text.)
(2038)
Misfortune—See [Desires Inordinate].
Misfortune, Meeting—See [Nature, Enjoyment of].
MISFORTUNE, SUPERIORITY TO
The Caucasian mountaineers have this proverb: “Heroism is endurance for one moment more.” The fact is recognized that the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and accidents of environment. In a recent psychological story called “My Friend Will,” Charles F. Lummis pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over accident and chance, when he makes his “friend Will” say: “I am bigger than anything that can happen to me; all those things—sorrow, misfortune and suffering—are outside my door. I’m in the house and I’ve got the key!” (Text.)
(2039)
Misrepresentation Rebuked—See [Honesty in Business].
MISSION FRUIT
A young married woman, wife of a Mohammedan, was lying ill in one of the mission hospitals in North India. While there she was daily taught of the love and compassion of the Savior, and she soon desired to know and serve Him. Her husband was told of her wish and was exceedingly angry and had her removed immediately from the hospital. He prohibited the mission ladies from visiting her. But just before the conveyance came to take her away she called the doctor and missionary to her and said: “I can be taken away from you, but not from Christ, for I can pray to Him even behind the purdah, but I want you to remember my desire. You know Jesus well, I only know Him a little; when you meet me at the judgment seat of heaven, just go to Him and tell Him who I am and how anxious I was to publicly confess Him on earth. Make it plain to Him, please.”
(2040)
There is an old Indian legend that a poor man threw a bud of charity into Buddha’s bowl and it blossomed into a thousand flowers. So we throw the bud of Christian truth into isolated and scattered communities, into the far-off lands, and lo, it bursts forth into a thousand fragrant blossoms and bears fruit in every activity of human life.—J. A. Huntley.
(2041)
The first fruits of the gospel on mission fields are growing and ripening by the river of the water of life, day by day. No more weighty proof of the success of missions can be found than the transformation of individual character and the every-day life.
One of the Chinese brethren is a ferryman, poor in money, but rich in faith. One evening he ferried a passenger over the river, who had a lot of things tied up in a cloth. After throwing the cash for his fare into the bottom of the boat, the man departed hurriedly. The Christian went to pick up the money, and found a pair of gold bracelets, worth $400, which the man had dropt. He tied up his boat and tried to find the man, but he was lost in the crowd. The boatman went home much troubled. According to Chinese law, he could keep them if unclaimed. After prayer, he decided to go to the chapel. The preacher heard the story. Said he: “Your passenger doubtless was a robber, and these things have been stolen. I will go with you to the mandarin, and we will give the bracelets up to him. A search will be made, and the owner found.”
This was done, and the mandarin said: “Well, I have never seen or heard anything like this. Your religion must be a true religion, and your God a living God, thus to influence a poor man to give up wealth for conscience’s sake.” (Text.)
(2042)
See [Transformation].
MISSION SURGERY
On many fields missionaries have found that ministry to the ills of the body has assisted in the conversion of souls. Thus in Formosa:
Dr. Mackay, a well-known medical missionary, has found it a help to his work to minister to bodily ills. He extracted twenty-one thousand teeth in twenty-one years, and thirty-nine thousand in all, and has dispensed considerable medicine. Extracting teeth is cheaper than dealing out medicine, for beyond the instrument there is no outlay. The natives have lost all faith in their old doctors.—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”
(2043)
Mission Work—See [Service with Hardship].
MISSIONARIES, MEDICAL
Africa has 135,000,000 inhabitants and 75 medical missionaries.
India has 300,000,000 inhabitants and 200 medical missionaries.
China has 350,000,000 inhabitants and 241 medical missionaries.
Japan has 42,000,000 inhabitants and 15 medical missionaries.
Turkey has 22,000,000 inhabitants and 38 medical missionaries.
Persia has 9,000,000 inhabitants and 11 medical missionaries.
Burmah has 7,500,000 inhabitants and 9 medical missionaries.
India alone contains 66,300 lunatics, 153,000 deaf and dumb, 354,000 blind and 400,000 lepers.
All missionary hospitals (Protestant) in the world can accommodate 100,000 in-patients and 2,500,000 outpatients annually.
These facts point to the need of men and means in order that the world may be Christianized.
(2044)
See [Medical Missions].
MISSIONARIES’ MISTAKES
Prof. Harlan P. Beach, in an address before the Fifth International convention of the Student Volunteer Movement for foreign missions on the subject “Efficiency is limited and the kingdom is retarded by violating reasonable standards of taste or propriety,” said:
In speaking on this subject, I can show its importance, perhaps, by an incident which happened about twenty years ago near Peking. One night I heard a loud knocking at the outer gate of our compound. The gatekeeper went out and was astonished to see a dust-laden, wobegone new missionary. He had arrived at Tientsin, his station, about four days before. He found himself in a new community, where he could not get his bearings, and had come to our station to learn what to do from two of our prominent missionaries. I was glad to meet the newcomer, but I said, “Why did you arrive so late?” “Well,” he replied, “I couldn’t help it.” I looked at his cart; he had three mules attached to it tandem by a great tangle of ropes. He added: “The trouble is, I had hardly gotten started from Tientsin when this front mule, who is young, took a notion that he would desert the beaten track. He left the roadway suddenly before the carter could prevent it and made a dash straight for a china-shop. There was a terrific crash. The ropes got caught between the legs of the second mule and dragged him over into a great lot of jars which went to pieces, and even the wheel-mule, hemmed in by the vast timbers that do duty as shafts in China, yielding to the shock, crashed into the china-shop.” It took a long time to get that difficulty righted, and hence he was late.
This incident illustrates my subject in six respects: (1) Missionaries, like those mules, make many breaks; (2) they usually make them at the start; (3) the breaks are generally due to ignorance, or to wilfulness; (4) the work of missions is retarded greatly by these mistakes, just as my friend was delayed until late that night; (5) mistakes of missionaries involve their associates, as the action of this frisky front mule brought the whole outfit into disrepute; (6) what is most important of all, they bring loss to superiors. Those mules were mere animals, but there was a carter there and also my friend, who was anxious to hasten the coming of the kingdom that he took the trip at great inconvenience for that very purpose. Tho we missionaries are only rarely mules, we are all and always servants of a great Master, and are retarding His cause and bringing reproach upon His name and upon the Church of God, if we are guilty of such breaches of etiquette as are suggested by this parable.
(2045)
MISSIONARY, A, IN THE MAKING
At the age of ten, David Livingstone went to work in the cotton factory as a piecer, and after some years was promoted to be a spinner. The first half-crown he earned he gave to his mother. With part of his first week’s wages he bought a Latin text-book and studied that language with ardor in an evening class between eight and ten. He had to be in the factory at six in the morning and his work ended at eight at night. But by working at Latin until midnight he mastered Vergil and Horace by the time he was sixteen. He used to read in the factory by putting the book on the spinning-jenny so that he could catch a sentence at a time as he passed at his work. He was fond of botany and geology and zoology, and when he could get out would scour the country for specimens.—Robert E. Speer, “Servants of the King.”
(2046)
MISSIONARY, A LITTLE
“I can not afford it,” said John Hale, the rich farmer, when asked to give to the cause of missions.
Harry, his wide-awake grandson, was grieved and indignant.
“But the poor heathen,” he replied; “is it not too bad they can not have churches and schoolhouses and books?”
“What do you know about the heathen?” exclaimed the old man testily. “Do you wish me to give away my hard earnings? I tell you, I can not afford it.”
But Harry was well posted in missionary intelligence, and day after day puzzled his curly head with plans for extracting money for the noble cause from his unwilling relative. At last, seizing an opportunity when his grandfather was in a good humor over the election news, he said: “Grandfather, if you do not feel able to give money to the missionary board, will you give a potato?”
“A potato?” ejaculated Mr. Hale, looking up from his paper.
“Yes, sir; and land enough to plant it in, and what it produces for four years?”
“Oh, yes!” replied the unsuspecting grandparent, settling his glasses on his calculating nose in such a way that showed he was glad to escape on such cheap terms from the lad’s persecution.
Harry planted the potato, and it rewarded him the first year by producing nine; these, the following season, became a peck; the next, seven and a half bushels, and when the fourth harvest came, lo, the potato had increased to seventy bushels. And, when sold, the amount realized was put with a glad heart into the treasury of the Lord. Even the aged farmer exclaimed: “Why, I did not feel that donation in the least! And, Harry, I’ve been thinking that if there were a little missionary like you in every house, and each one got a potato, or something else as productive, for the cause, there would be quite a large sum gathered.”—Friend for Boys and Girls.
(2047)
MISSIONARY ACCOMPLISHMENTS
When the American missionaries came to the Sandwich Islands, they struck off the shackles from the whole race, breaking the power of the kings and chiefs. They set the common man free, elevated his wife to a position of equality with him, and gave a piece of land to each to hold forever. They set up schools and churches, and imbued the people with the spirit of the Christian religion. If they had had the power to augment the capacities of the people, they could have made them perfect; and they would have done it, no doubt.
The missionaries taught the whole nation to read and write, with facility, in the native tongue. I don’t suppose there is to-day a single uneducated person above eight years of age in the Sandwich Islands! It is the best educated country in the world, I believe. That has been all done by the American missionaries. And in a large degree it was paid for by the American Sunday-school children with their pennies. I know that I contributed.—Samuel L. Clemens.
(2048)
MISSIONARY ADAPTATION
In 1881 James Robertson left the pastorate to accept the newly created post of superintendent of home missions for Manitoba and the Northwest. He set off at once on his first missionary tour, driving two thousand miles, at first through heat and dust and rain and then through frosts and blizzards. He preached where he could, and was not to be discouraged by any situation. Once, coming to a settlement late on a Saturday evening, where the largest building was the hotel and the largest room the bar, he inquired of the hotel man:
“Is there any place where I can hold a service to-morrow?” “Service?” “Yes, a preaching service.” “Preaching? Oh, yes, I’ll get you one,” he replied with genial heartiness. Next day Mr. Robertson came into the bar, which was crowded with men. “Well, have you found a room for my service?” he inquired of his genial host. “Here you are, boss, right here. Get in behind that bar and here’s your crowd. Give it to ’em. God knows they need it.”
Mr. Robertson caught the wink intended for the boys only. Behind the bar were bottles and kegs and other implements of the trade; before it men standing up for their drinks, chaffing, laughing, swearing. The atmosphere could hardly be called congenial, but the missionary was “on to his job,” as the boys afterward admiringly said. He gave out a hymn. Some of the men took off their hats and joined in the singing, one or two whistling the accompaniment. As he was getting into his sermon one of the men, evidently the smart one of the company, broke in:
“Say, boss,” he drawled, “I like yer nerve, but I don’t believe yer talk.” “All right,” replied Mr. Robertson, “give me a chance. When I get through you can ask any questions you like. If I can I will answer them; if I can’t I’ll do my best.”
The reply appealed to the sense of fair play in the crowd. They speedily shut up their companion and told the missionary to “fire ahead,” which he did, and to such good purpose that when he had finished there was no one ready to gibe or question. After the service was closed, however, one of them observed earnestly: “I believe every word you said, sir. I haven’t heard anything like that since I was a kid, from my Sunday-school teacher. I guess I gave her a pretty hard time. But look here, can’t you send us a missionary for ourselves? We’ll chip in, won’t we, boys?”—Robert E. Speer, “Servants of the King.”
(2049)
Missionary Beginnings—See [One, Winning].
MISSIONARY CALL
Friends were trying to dissuade one whose ancestors were not three generations out of cannibalism from going as a missionary to one of the savage islands of Polynesia. They recounted all the hardships and dangers to be encountered. “Are there men there?” asked the volunteer.
“Men? Yes; horrible cannibals, who will probably kill you and eat you.”
“That settles it!” was the sublime rejoinder. “That settles it! Wherever there are men, there missionaries are bound to go!”
(2050)
MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE
On October 15, 1819, in the Park Street Church, Boston, a mission to the Hawaiian Islands was organized with the following members: Messrs. Bingham and Thurston, ministers; Messrs. Whitney and Ruddles, teachers; Thomas Holman, physician; Elisha Loomis, printer; Daniel Chamberlain, farmer, together with their wives, and three Hawaiian young men from the Cornwall Missionary School. These seventeen went forth to erect a Christian civilization upon pagan shores, for they represented the Church, the common school, the printing-press, the medicine-chest, and the implements of agriculture. They set sail from Boston October 23, 1819, and reached the Hawaiian coast March 31, 1820, after somewhat more than five months.—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”
(2051)
Missionary Giving—See [Crowning Christ].
Missionary Good Sense—See [Diplomat, A, and Missions].
MISSIONARY LITERATURE
There came into our office the other day a man who had only recently closed a very successful missionary pastorate of several years to become the minister of a large church which was not so strongly missionary. He ignored that fact, however, and began to employ his former methods, which included the observance of the monthly concert of prayer for missions. He made out his program, based on the missionary magazine of his denomination, and as he met one after another of those whom he had assigned to help him, he gave them their parts. One of the prominent members of the church he called to his study and said to him, “I want you to read such and such an article in your magazine and give us the gist of it at the next missionary meeting.” “My magazine,” replied the man. “I haven’t—I don’t take any magazine with that article in it.” “What, don’t you take the missionary magazine? Just look at it,” said he, laying it out before him. “Oh, is that it? Never saw it before. How much is it? Thirty-five cents? I guess if you are going to have this concert business every month, I might as well subscribe for it and have my own copy. Looks pretty good, too, doesn’t it? Didn’t know missions could be drest up so well. Cover looks like one of our regular magazines.” This pastor knows how to do it. Other wise pastors will mention the best missionary books; they will see that their people know of the latest missionary literature.—F. P. Haggard, “Student Volunteer Movement,” 1906.
(2052)
MISSIONARY MARTYRDOM
A convert from Islam took advantage of the Ameer’s visit to Kandahar and crossed the frontier, unbidden and uninvited, to preach Christianity in Afghanistan. He was arrested, taken before the Ameer, and sent in chains to Kabul, but was murdered before reaching there. He was named Abdul Karim, and was at one time one of the workers at Bannu. Mrs. Pennell wrote that when he was taken prisoner and refused to repeat the “Kalima,” saying he was a Christian, he was taken to Kandahar. The Ameer questioned him, and on his again refusing to repeat the “Kalima,” and saying he had come to preach the gospel, he was ordered to be flogged, put in chains, and to be taken to Kabul, where he was to await the return of the Ameer, and unless he changed his mind would get due punishment.
Heavily chained hand and foot, he set out with an escort for Kabul; that at the villages he was spat upon, and the hairs of his beard pulled out—and at length the poor, weary sufferer, at a village before reaching Kabul, was murdered. (Text.)
(2053)
Missionary Power—See [God in Missions].
MISSIONARY PRAYER
The late Joseph Cook is the author of this prayer in verse for the spread and triumph of God’s kingdom:
One field the wheeling world,
Vast furrows open lie;
Broadcast let seed be hurled
By us before we die.
Winds, east or west,
Let no tares fall;
Wide waft the best;
God winnow all.
Heaven hath a single sun,
All gates swing open wide;
All lands at last are one,
And seas no more divide.
In every zone,
Arise and shine;
Earth’s only throne,
Our God, be Thine.
On every desert rain,
Make green earth’s flintiest sands;
Above the land and main
Reveal Thy pierced hands.
Thy cross heaven wins;
Lift it on high;
And in his sins
Let no man die.
(2054)
Missionary Preaching—See [Text, Power of a].
MISSIONARY RESULTS
Charles Darwin, the scientist, described the Terra Del Fuegans as the most degraded specimens of humanity he had ever seen. He considered them beyond the reach of civilization. The missionaries carried the gospel to them, and Darwin, seeing the change wrought, said with great frankness and willing publicity, “Truly the missionary’s message is a magician’s wand.”
(2055)
Rev. Egerton R. Young, a missionary among the Indians of Canada, tells of an obdurate old man whose heart had been touched by the missionary whose ministrations had brought his child back to health:
He attended an open-air meeting standing at first a quarter of a mile off. At the next meeting he drew a bit nearer, then nearer still. Six weeks later he was among the circle kneeling at the foot of the cross, making his confession. “Missionary,” he said, “I was a fool, but now I have got the moss out of my ears, and the sand out of my eyes, and I see clearly, and I hear all right. I am so glad I came.”
Was it not of such scenes as these that the prophet was thinking when he wrote, “The eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopt.” (Text.)
(2056)
MISSIONARY SACRIFICE
San Quala was one of the first converts among the degraded Karens. From the lowest state the gospel raised him, with a rapidity that no civilization ever knew, to a noble Christian manhood. His first impulse was to tell others of Jesus. He helped to translate the Bible into the Karen tongue, for fifteen years guided the missionaries through the jungles, and then himself began to preach and to plant new churches. In one year he had formed nine, with 741 converts; in less than three years the nine had grown to thirty, with 2,000 converts. He did his work without salary, and when the English Government offered him a position, with large compensation, he at once declined, tho his poverty was such as prevented him from taking his wife with him in his missionary tours.—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”
(2057)
Missionary’s Gallant Action—See [Courage, Christian].
Missionary’s Liberation—See [Intervention, Divine].
MISSIONARY TESTIMONY
Mr. Darwin was not regarded as a Christian, but he had the greatest respect for good in Christianity, and was candid enough to acknowledge it. This is the way in which he answered some shallow critics of foreign missionaries:
They forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifice and the power of an idolatrous priesthood; a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world; infanticide, a consequence of that system; bloody wars where the conquerors spared neither women nor children—that all these things have been abolished, and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced by the introduction of Christianity. For a voyager to forget these things is a base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far.
(2058)
F. A. McKenzie, the well-known foreign correspondent of the London Mail, says, in the London Christian World:
A stranger stopt me, one day. “I can not understand,” said he, “why you, a newspaper man, should advocate missionary work; it is not your business. Why do you meddle with it?”
“I do so because I am a Christian imperialist,” I replied. “The white man’s civilization is the best the world has seen, and the white man’s civilization is rooted in Christianity. I know that every missionary is an active campaigner, not merely for a new theology, but also for a new life, based on the foundation-stone of our civilization—the cross. I want the white man’s ideas to triumph not for the glory of the whites, but for the betterment of woman-life and child-life throughout the world.”
(2059)
Missionary Work—See [Song, Effective].
Missionary Work Admired by Atheist—See [Atheist’s Gift to Missions].
MISSIONARY WORK AT HOME
Whitefield found himself in the presence of what seemed an urgent and overwhelming call to preach. Here were the Kingswood miners, a community ignorant, vicious, forgotten, who, beyond all others, needed the care and teaching of the Christian Church, and yet were left completely outside, not merely of its agencies, but even of its very remembrance. When Whitefield was setting out for America some wise and keen-sighted friend said to him, “If you have a mind to convert Indians, there are colliers enough in Kingswood.”—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
(2060)
MISSIONARY WORK, VALUE OF
Belle M. Brain tells the following in her book, “The Transformation of Hawaii”:
A visitor to the Hawaiian Islands a few years ago said to King Kamehameha V: “Really now, don’t you think things are in a worse condition than before the advent of the missionaries?”
“I leave you to judge,” answered the king. “Since you have come into my presence you have broken the ancient law of tabu in three ways. You walked into my presence instead of crawling, you crossed my shadow, you are even now sitting before me. In the old days any one of these things would have cost you your life.”
(2061)
MISSIONARY ZEAL
If all Christians had the willing zeal of these poor South Sea islanders, the world would soon be converted to Christ:
On one occasion Mr. Williams explained the manner in which English Christians raised money to send the gospel to the heathen, and the natives of Raralonga exprest great regret at not having money that they might help in the same good work of causing the Word of God to grow. Mr. Williams replied: “If you have no money, you have something that takes the place of money; something to buy money with”; he then referred to the pigs that he had brought to the island on his first visit, and which had so increased that every family possest them; and he suggested that, if every family in the island would set apart a pig for causing the Word of God to grow, and, when the ships came, would sell the pigs for money, a large offering might be raised. The natives were delighted with the idea, and the next morning the squeaking of the pigs, which were receiving the “mark of the Lord” in their ears, was heard from one end of the settlement to the other.—Pierson, “The Miracles of Missions.”
(2062)
See [Courage, Christian].
MISSIONS
Carlyle, in his life of Cromwell, says that he ranks the foreign missionary and his convert with the greatest heroes in history. It is in his story of Kapiolani. These Christian teachers in the South Seas brought the queen to faith in God, and to the new ideas of home, school, government and social progress. But the people still worshiped the gods whose home was in the crater, whose column of fire was on the sky. So the missionary and the queen told the people that they would dare the native god. They made their way to the foot of the mountain. The people shrieked, wept, implored, but these two walked bravely on. They stood on the edge of the crater, breathing the sulfurous gases. The queen hurled stones into the abyss and shouted her threats and denials. When they came down, in safety, superstition was dead. Carlyle says that a Christian missionary slew a cult in that hour, and that the event will always rank in history with Elijah at Baal and the Christian convert who cut down the sacred oak of Thor for Germany. But foreign missions have produced scores of heroes and heroines like these. The history of missions is a sky that is ablaze with light that will shine forever and forever.—N. D. Hillis.
(2063)
See Advice to Missionaries.
[Calls and Conveyances in the East.]
[Child Religion, Changes Wrought by.]
[Christianity, Practical Proof of.]
[Functions and Gifts in the East.]
[Gestures and Use of Hands in the East.]
[Husband and Wife, Relations Between.]
[Inadequacy of Non-Christian Religions.]
[India, Medical Opportunities in.]
[Intelligence Outdoing Ignorance.]
[Miracles, Evidential Value of.]
[Persistence in Missionaries.]
[Propriety, Observing the Rules of.]
[Religious Infractions of Propriety.]
MISSIONS A SUCCESS
The Christian Century says there are yet a few intellectual provincials that scoff at the missionary enterprise, but their ignorance is so coming to shame them that their dolorous and caustic voices are not often heard. No one but a moral agnostic, a medieval race-hater, or a dogmatic religious quack could be cynical about an enterprise that shows such amazing success as does the missionary propaganda. Here are some figures that show the growth of thirteen years:
| 1895. | 1909. | |
| Total amount given | $13,470,318 | $24,613,075 |
| Given by native churches | 1,458,464 | 4,859,605 |
| (Not included in above.) | ||
| Number of missionaries | 11,033 | 21,834 |
| Number of native workers | 49,566 | 92,272 |
| Number of stations | 18,545 | 43,934 |
| Number of actual church-members | 1,030,776 | 2,097,963 |
| Number of adherents | 2,770,240 | 4,866,661 |
| Number of accessions to church in year | 62,256 | 135,141 |
| Number of schools | 19,384 | 29,190 |
| Number of pupils | 860,287 | 1,413,995 |
The grand total of receipts for the great cause is seen to be a total of nearly $30,000,000, and the number of workers employed to be more than 114,000. In each case the numbers have about doubled in the thirteen years, while the number of stations has increased in a like proportion. The total of actual communicants in the churches has more than doubled, while that of the adherents has fallen but little below the same rate of increase. As the missions grow older and the life of the communities about them is elevated, the number of church-members will advance in an increasing ratio over that of adherents. The total number now in the Christian communities in the foreign field reaches practically 7,000,000.
(2064)
MISSIONS AND COMMERCE
Commenting on the work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Dr. N. D. Hillis says:
What if the American News Company should send a shipload of books to Borneo? The people can not read. What if they send a shipload of typewriters to western Africa? The people can not write. What if you send a cargo of sewing-machines to the Hottentots? Well, they do not wear clothes. Wealth comes through selling manufactured goods. But savages do not want these conveniences. Now, think of what this American Board has done. Once they sent out a band to civilize a South Sea island. In the band were six carpenters, two blacksmiths, two bricklayers, one architect, two tailors, two shoemakers, two weavers, two farmers, one physician, four preachers. In forty years after they landed, one ship a week unloaded its cargo at that port—that tells the whole story. Since then the trade from New England ports alone has yielded enough profit to merchants in a single year to pay for the entire missionary enterprise.
(2065)
MISSIONS APPROVED
Jacob A. Riis says that he once “growled against foreign missions, like many others who know no better.” He writes that now he has learned that “for every dollar you give away to convert the heathen abroad, God gives you ten dollars’ worth of purpose to deal with your heathen at home.”
(2066)
MISSIONS AS SOCIAL SAFEGUARDS
The influence of a Christian mission in safeguarding a community is set forth in the following:
“During the great dock strike September, 1889, which shook London to its center, the strikers—gaunt, grim and desperate—were marching en masse past the mission premises, when a socialistic leader, who stood watching, turned to Mr. George Holland (a notable promoter of London missionary work), and said, ‘Do you know what keeps these men from sacking London?’ ‘What do you mean?’ was the reply. ‘Only this, it is the influence of such missions of mercy as yours.’ All thoughtful, observant men know that this witness is true.”
(2067)
Missions, Medical—See [Renewal].
MISSIONS, REASONS FOR
In the Peninsular war, for every Frenchman killed there was sent out by England the weight of a man in lead and eight times his weight in iron, not to speak of the cost in blood and treasure. In the Indian wars in this country it has sometimes cost on the average a million dollars to kill an Indian, while an average expenditure of $200 was spent in converting them. There is no lack of money nor means to compass the evangelization of the world within the present century if there were but the spirit of enterprise to dare and undertake for our Redeemer. Talleyrand boasted that he “kept his watch ten minutes ahead of the rest of mankind.” The Christian Church should surpass rather than be surpast by others in her enterprise. The time will come when disciples will look back to this age of missions with as much surprize as we now look back to those days when a learned prelate in the House of Lords, and a defender of orthodoxy too, could calmly argue against sending missionaries to the Orient! or as we contemplate with amazement speeches against the suppression of the slave-trade that have no interest to us except as fossils and petrifactions of an antediluvian era!—A. T. Pierson, Missionary Review of the World.
(2068)
MISSIONS, SUCCESSFUL
In the course of his cruising in the South Seas, Lord Byron (a cousin of the poet), landed on an island of which he thought he was the discoverer. Suddenly a canoe appeared. Instead of containing armed savages, its occupants were two noble-looking men, clothed in cotton shirts and very fine mats. They boarded the ship and presented a document from a missionary stating that they were native teachers employed in preaching the gospel to the people of the island. Lord Byron then went ashore. In the center of a wide lawn stood a spacious chapel, and neat native cottages peeped through the foliage of banana trees. On entering a cottage, he found on a table a portion of the New Testament in the native language.
This story of Lord Byron’s surprize visit was told at an overflow meeting in Exeter Hall at the anniversary of the Bible Society in 1836. When the speaker had concluded, a stranger arose and introduced himself to the audience as the missionary who had discovered the island, had made Christianity known to its people, and had translated the very portion of the Scripture which Lord Byron had found. It was John Williams, the heroic missionary of the London Missionary Society, whose noble work had drawn those savages from cannibalism and idolatry to the worship of the true God.
(2069)
MISSIONS, TESTIMONY TO
Edgar Wallace, the war correspondent of the London Daily Mail, writes in the highest terms of what he saw of the Kongo Balolo missions. He said in part:
“No battle I have ever witnessed, no prowess of arms, no exhibition of splendid courage in the face of overwhelming odds, has inspired me as has the work of these outposts of Christianity. People who talk glibly of work in the mission field are apt to associate that work merely with house-to-house visitations and devotional services and the distribution of charity. In reality it means all these things plus the building of the houses one visits, building of the church for the devotional services, and the inculcation in the native of a spirit of manliness which renders charity superfluous.
Somebody told me there was difficulty in getting men and women for the missionary work in Kongoland. Speaking frankly as a man of the world, I do not wonder. I would not be a missionary in the Kongo for five thousand pounds a year. That is a worldly point of view, and it is not a high standpoint. It is a simple confession that I prefer the “flesh-pots of Egypt” to the self-sacrifice that the missionary life claims. Yet were I a good Christian, and were I a missionary hesitating in my choice of a field, I would say, with Desdemona, “I do perceive here a divine duty.”
(2070)
A singular tribute to missions was that exprest to me by the editor of a North China newspaper: “Broadly speaking, it is a fact that the only white man who is in China for China’s good is the missionary. It never occurs to the average business man here that he has any obligation to the Chinese. Yet only on that ground can he justify his presence.”—William T. Ellis, Men and Missions.
(2071)
Mistaken Spiritual Judgment—See [Illusion, Spiritual].
MISTAKEN VIEW OF CAUSE
In winter, when millions of city dwellers breathe the air of ill-ventilated dwelling-houses, lung infections are more frequent than in midsummer, when ventilation is enforced by the horrors of stagnant heat. But the coincidence of frosts and catarrhs has decided the bias of the popular hypothesis, and in sixteen different European languages the word cold has become a synonym of an infection which the absolutely conclusive evidence of physiological facts proves to be a result of vitiated warm indoor air, and to be curable by cold outdoor air. In other words, the best remedy has been mistaken for the cause, and as a consequence catarrhs are considerably more frequent than all the other disorders of the human organism taken together.—Felix Oswald, North American Review.
(2072)
In October, when the first night-frosts expurgate the atmosphere of our Southern swamps, ague and yellow fever subside with a suddenness which would certainly have suggested the idea of curing climatic diseases by artificial refrigeration, if cold had not somehow become the hygienic bugbear of the Caucasian race. Gout, rheumatism, indigestion, toothaches and all sorts of pulmonary disorders are ascribed to the influence of a low temperature, with persistent disregard of the fact that the outdoor laborers of the highest latitudes are the halest representatives of our species. “Catching cold” is the stereotyped explanation for the consequences of our manifold sins against the health laws of nature; but the secret of the delusion can be traced to the curious mistakes which logicians used to sum up under the head of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy—the tendency of the human mind to mistake an incidental concomitance for a causal connection. Woodpeckers pick insects from the trunks of dead trees, and the logic of concomitance infers that the decay of the tree has been caused by the visits of the birds, which in our Southern States are known as “sap-suckers.” Young frogs emerge from their hiding-places when a long drought is broken by a brisk rain, and the coincidence of the two phenomena has not failed to evolve the theory of a frog-shower.—Felix Oswald, North American Review.
(2073)
Mistakes of Missionaries—See [Missionaries’ Mistakes].
MISUSE OF TALENT
The life of Swift is a living tragedy. He had the power of gaining wealth, like the hero of the Jew of Malta; yet he used it scornfully, and in sad irony left what remained to him of a large property to found a hospital for lunatics. By hard work he won enormous literary power, and used it to satirize our common humanity. He wrested political power from the hands of the Tories, and used it to insult the very men who had helped him, and who held his fate in their hands. By his dominant personality he exercised a curious power over women, and used it brutally to make them feel their inferiority. Being loved supremely by two good women, he brought sorrow and death to both, and endless misery to himself. So his power brought always tragedy in its wake.—William J. Long, “English Literature.”
(2074)
Mnemonics, An Exercise in—See [Memory].
Mobility—See [Movement Unceasing].
Model, The Mouth as a—See [Nature as a Model].
MODELS
At the University of Glasgow stands a statue of James Watt; and by his side is the original model of a steam-engine, the identical engine, indeed, on which Watt exercised his inventive genius and the pattern substantially of every steam-engine in the world.
There is just as truly a model for every man in the world. (Text.)
(2075)
Models in Nature—See [Insect, a Model].
Moderation in Diet—See [Diet and Endurance].
MODERN LIFE
Except his own immortal poem and a few suggestions of the art and architecture of his time, there is nothing on this continent that Homer, resurrected and transported here, would recognize as belonging to the world in which he lived. The steamships, railways, telegraphs, telephones, electric motors, printing-machines, factories, and, indeed, all that we use, all that we enjoy, on land or sea, in peace or war, in our homes, in our places of business, on our farms, in our mines, or wherever we toil or rest—all, all is new, all belongs to the new world. The inventions of recent years have so changed the world that the man of thirty is older than Methuselah—older in that he has seen more, experienced more than the oldest of all the ancients.—Inventive Age.
(2076)
MODERNITY
Many a moral failure has resulted from not keeping up with God’s moral progress, just as this mechanic failed through not keeping up with the new inventions:
The very great changes that have been wrought in machine-shop equipment during the past few years have hit many of the older mechanics pretty hard. A good deal of significance is contained in the remark of one such man: “I have had to learn over my trade three times and I’m too old to learn it again.” He had been given a difficult job to do on a modern engine-lathe containing the latest useful mechanisms for saving labor and procuring accurate work, and because he did not understand the tool he failed in his efforts until a younger machinist came to his assistance. (Text.)
(2077)
MODESTY
Colonel Nicholas Smith, in “Grant, the Man of Mystery,” gives us the following side-light upon Grant’s character:
During a strenuous campaign, the opposition resorted to every means to discredit him and made the most virulent attacks upon his personal character. Grant remained silent and took no part in the campaign. He retired to his little home in Galena, received his friends, drove and walked about the streets, took tea and chatted in the most familiar way with his neighbors, and seemed totally unconscious of the fact that he was the central figure in one of the great political struggles of the century.
(2078)
Of Grant’s demeanor after the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, Colonel Smith says:
The little man, in the dress of a private soldier, who commanded the armies which brought about this glorious consummation, was not among those who joined in the demonstration of joy. When he reached his camp that night he was none other than the real Grant—modest, quiet, regardless of the greatness of the occasion. General Horace Porter, who was with him at the time, says Grant had little to say about the surrender.
(2079)
A group of church-members, on a tour, were delayed at a railway station. One of them, after looking at a locomotive engine, asked his friends what part of the engine they would choose to be if it represented the Church. One replied, “I would be the brake, for that is often needed for safety.” Another said, “I would prefer to be the whistle, calling people’s attention to the fact that ‘the King’s business requireth haste.’” “And I would like to be the boiler, for that is an essential part of the engine.” “What would you like to be, brother?” said one to a quiet man who had not replied. “Oh,” said he, “I think I am only fit to be the coal, ready to be consumed so long as the engine moves.”
(2080)
A story is told among the friends of Gen. Samuel S. Sumner, U.S.A., retired, who was until recently the commanding officer of the Pacific Division.
General Sumner, after the San Francisco earthquake, went to San Rafael. There he was informed by one of the guiding spirits of the village that he must aid in patrolling and guarding against fire and unruly refugees. Something in General Sumner’s bearing evidently imprest the man, for after a moment’s thought he said: “I think I’ll make you a second lieutenant.” “Thank you,” answered General Sumner. “I don’t think any rank ever conferred upon me ever pleased me more unless it was when I was made a major-general in the regular army.” (Text.)
(2081)
The grace of modesty seems sometimes rare and its exhibition is always pleasing. An instance of modest reticence is given in this concerning a well-known author:
They had met in Brooklyn at a little evening party—the young man and an older one—and were coming back to Manhattan together. The young man inquired the elder’s vocation in life, and the elder replied that he had practised law for eighteen years.
“And, later,” he added, “I have done a little writing.”
“Ever get anything published?” asked the young man.
“Yes, a few things,” replied the elder.
“Write under your own name?”
“Yes.”
“By the way, I don’t believe I quite caught your name.”
“Thomas Nelson Page,” replied the other quietly.
(2082)
See [Humility of a Scientist].
Mohammedans and the Bible—See [Bible, Grip of the].
Molding Children—See [Religious Training]; [Training Children].
Molding Men—See [Tenderness of God].
MOMENTUM
The obstacles in a man’s way are determined by the gait he is going. An old negro driving a mule down the street three miles an hour has to get out of the way for everything, but when the chief of the fire department comes down the street a mile a minute everything roosts on the sidewalk and gives him the right of way.—Famous Stories of Sam P. Jones.
(2083)
Many men fail to overcome sharp temptation because they have not by long previous habits acquired the momentum of right thought and right action. We can not fly unless we have learned to walk and to run.
“Any one who has ever watched a heavy bird rise from the ground,” says the American Inventor, “has doubtless noticed that it runs along the ground for a few feet before it rises; the bird must acquire some momentum before its wings can lift its heavy body into the air. The natives in certain parts of the Andes understand this fact very well and by means of it catch the great Andean vultures, the condors. A small space is shut in with a high fence and left open at the top. Then a lamb or a piece of carrion is placed on the ground inside. Presently a vulture sees the bait and swoops down upon it; but when once he finds he has alighted on the ground inside he can not get out, for he has no running space in which to acquire the momentum that is necessary before his wings can lift him.”
(2084)
Money and Precedence—See [Medical Missions].
Money, Discreditable Use of—See [Vulgarity in the Rich].
MONEY, EARNING
Mr. Lincoln earned his first dollar by taking two men and their trunks to a Mississippi steamer which waited for them in midstream.
“I was about eighteen years of age,” he said, “and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the ‘scrubs.’ I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed each of the men would give me a couple of bits. I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’ Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat.
“You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”—James Morgan, “Abraham Lincoln, The Boy and the Man.”
(2085)
Money-getting, a Game—See [Game of Greed].
MONEY, GREED FOR
The individual man thinks in the beginning, “If I could only make myself worth a hundred thousand dollars, I should be willing to retire from business.” Not a bit of it. A hundred thousand dollars is only an index of five hundred thousand; and when he has come to five hundred thousand he is like Moses—and very unlike him—standing on the top of the mountain and looking over the promised land, and he says to himself, “A million! a million!” and a million draws another million, until at last he has more than he can use, more than is useful to him, and he won’t give it away—not till after his death.—Henry Ward Beecher.
(2086)
MONEY, IGNORANCE OF.
A sick-nurse in a Vienna hospital administered by nuns was observed burning up a bunch of paper money which she had found in the bed of a deceased patient.
She thought the bank-notes were rubbish, and it took the authority of the mother superior to convince her that the rubbish represented a small fortune.
Subsequently it turned out that the sister, who had lived in the nunnery since her third year, never went outside, and had nothing to do with the administration or with worldly things whatsoever, had never heard of the existence or use of money in any shape or form.—Boston Post.
(2088)
MONEY, HOW WE SPEND OUR
The diagram below is designed to show how much the people of the United States spend every year for the drink traffic as contrasted with church work, education and the leading standard articles of food, clothing and shelter.
The cost of liquors and tobacco is based upon the Internal Revenue reports for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1908. The other expenses are estimated for the year 1909 from the reports of the Secretary of Agriculture, the census of manufacturers for 1905, the report of the Commissioner of Education and other Government and census figures.—“American Prohibition Yearbook.”
(2087)
MONEY NO TEMPTATION
A certain Parson Scott was sent to Goldsmith to induce him to write in favor of the administration. “I found him,” says Scott, “in a miserable set of chambers in the temple. I told him of my authority; I told him that I was empowered to pay most liberally for his exertions, and, would you believe it, he was so absurd as to say, ‘I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the assistance you offer is therefore unnecessary to me.’ And so,” said the reverend plenipotentiary, with unstinted contempt, “I left him in his garret.” What Goldsmith’s exact earnings were at this time, it would be interesting to know: what sum it was that he found sufficient for his wants; but we know that this offer came at the close of twelve years’ desperate struggle for bread, during which his first work had brought him little profit, and “The Vicar of Wakefield” had been sold for £60 to pay his landlady.—W. J. Dawson, “The Makers of English Prose.”
(2089)
MONEY POWER IN CANADA
I wrote to a friend of mine in Toronto for some figures. I shall leave out the hundred thousands.
In 1881 the population of Canada was between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000; in 1901 it was 5,372,000; in 1908 it was 6,940,000; and in 1909, between 7,000,000 and 7,500,000. Now, then, what are their bank deposits? In 1880, thirty years ago, they were $96,000,000; in 1884, $131,000,000; in 1890, 176,000,000; in 1900, $358,000,000; in 1908, $593,000,000; in 1909, $917,000,000; showing an increase of almost 63 per cent. in one year.
What was the value of the farm products of the Dominion last year? $532,000,000, an increase of one hundred million in one year. They have the largest continuous wheat-field in the world. One field nine hundred miles by three hundred miles. I am talking about money, and this is Canadian money, with a population of between seven and seven and a half millions; and they have deposits of $917,000,000 in the bank.
We all know the phenomenal growth that Canada has had and is destined to have. When I asked, “What are the resources of Canada?” my friend replied, “I don’t know, Marling, but they are beyond the dreams of avarice.” Then I got this telegram from him to back it up:
“According to the census of 1901, the capital invested in Canada was $2,356,000,000 and the value of the products $992,200,000.”—Alfred E. Marling, “Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions,” 1910.
(2090)
MONEY POWER IN THE UNITED STATES
Do you know how many people there were in the country in 1880, thirty years ago? There were fifty millions. Do you know what the wealth was then estimated to be? $43,000,000,000. Ten years afterward, in 1890, there were 62,000,000 persons living in this country; that is a growth of 24 per cent. in ten years. But the growth of the wealth in those ten years was from $43,000,000,000 to $65,000,000,000, which is a growth of 51 per cent. in that decade. Population grows 21 per cent.; wealth grows 51 per cent. In 1900 there were 76,000,000 people; a growth of 22 per cent. in ten years. The growth in wealth was $88,000,000,000, or 35 per cent. in those same ten years. In 1904, the year of our last census, the population was 82,000,000, showing an increase of 8 per cent.; and the growth in wealth was $107,000,000,000. That is 21 per cent. in wealth in four years, while the population was growing only 8 per cent.
The estimated average daily savings in the United States between 1900 and 1904 over and above all consumption, was thirteen millions of dollars.
In 1900, the savings-bank deposits in the United States were $2,300,000,000; and in 1908, eight years later, they were $3,400,000,000, an increase of 47 per cent.
I have it on the authority of the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of New York that the banking power of the United States is practically 40 per cent. of the banking power of the world. And this I read in a commercial review a few days ago: “The bank deposits of the United States amount to more than double the whole world’s known supply of gold. They are about equal to the whole volume of money in the world, counting gold, legal tender, currency, etc. They are greater in value than the world’s total amount of gold and silver since the discovery of America, and they would be sufficient to pay more than one-third of the entire debt of fifty leading nations of the world.”—Alfred E. Marling.—“Student Volunteer Movement,” 1910.
(2091)
Money Safe With Men of Principle—See [Principle].
MONEY, TAINTED
Dr. Watkinson tells us that some years ago two scientists of Vienna made a series of bacteriological experiments on a number of bank-notes which had been in circulation for some time. The result of their researches was sufficiently startling. On each bank-note they discovered the presence of 19,000 microbes of disease—some of tuberculosis, some of diphtheria, and some of erysipelas. More than that, they found one bacillus peculiar to the bank-note—the bank-note microbe, so to speak, because it is found nowhere else. It thrives and fattens and multiplies on the peculiar paper of which a bank-note is made. Is there not a parable here?
If every evil use that is made of money were to leave its mark on the coin or bill, how great would be the moral infection thus recorded.
(2092)
Money Transmitting Disease—See [Contamination].
MONOTONY
Before each of a row of machines in a certain Pittsburg shop, as described in Charities, sits a girl. Each girl picks up a bolt with her left hand, takes it from the left with her right hand, feeds it point downward into the machine. When she has done this 16,000 times, she will have earned ninety-six cents. Unless she or the machine breaks down, such is her ten-hour day.
In these machine-made days, it is not the monotony of such a task which is most impressive. The girl of the 16,000 motions attracts and holds the attention.
With motions fewer in number but infinitely greater in variety, the day’s work of a family is done. The house-worker is not tied to a machine. She stands up to her tasks one moment and sits down the next. She may think of other things, and to-morrow will be in its duties and performances a little different from to-day.
The house-worker gets tired. Is it really the same grinding, breaking weariness as that of the girl who sits before the machine and makes 16,000 identical motions in a ten-hour day?
(2093)
Monstrous Treatment—See [Cruel Greed].
Monument—See [Love, Filial].
Monument of Christ—See [Peace].
MONUMENTS, MEANING OF
A great monument is erected not because the man to whom it is dedicated needs it, nor because it will alleviate the bodily ailments of other human beings. It is erected in honor of the great ideas which the man represented. It is built for the future as much as for the past; even more for the future. It is raised above the earth as a lofty sign which will teach coming generations a great lesson in a way that books never can. The American sculptor, Greenough, who designed the Bunker Hill monument, wrote: “The obelisk has a singular aptitude in its form and character to call attention to a spot memorable in history. It says but one word, but it speaks loud. It says, ‘Here!’ That is enough. It claims the notice of every one. No matter how careless, how skeptical or illiterate the passer-by may be, he can not escape the appeal of a monument.”—New York Star.
(2094)
Moods and Apparel—See [Dress Affecting Moods].
MOODS DETERMINING DESIRES
An unidentified writer points out how different moods affect our minds:
When I am tired and weary,
And nothing goes my way.
I thank the heavenly Father
For two nights to every day.
But when, once more, I’m rested,
And all the world looks bright,
I thank Him that He sends me
Two days to every night!
There’s the pause before the battle,
There’s the respite from the fray;
And that is how I reckon
Two nights to every day.
When the sunset glow has faded,
In a little while ’tis light!
And that is how I reckon
Two days to every night.
And so ’tis due, believe me,
To the way we look at things,
Whether we sigh and falter
Or whether we soar on wings!
(2095)
MOODS OF THE SPIRIT
Pantheism, atheism, agnosticism, materialism, pessimism—how many ugly, dangerous words there are in the dictionary, and how many young men imagine that they have all these spiritual diseases when, as a matter of fact, they are only in the way of normal spiritual development. A man comes to say of certain things that are mysterious, of which he thought he knew, “I don’t know.” Then he labels himself or allows himself to be labeled an “Agnostic.” No religious life for him. Another man sees that the great God can not stand apart from His universe, but must be working in it and through it all. He labels himself “Pantheist,” or is so labeled. Another man suddenly discovers the abyss of actual wo in the world, the evil that, for the present at least, is without remedy. He is called a “Pessimist.” Another man looks to the right hand and to the left hand, and for the time he sees not God. The final word for him is “Atheist.” Now, we can not have a free expression of what people from time to time are actually believing until we get over our fear of all such names. We must have a faith that is wholesome enough and large enough to keep us from being afraid of our own thought. The fact is, that we are continually mistaking the passing moods of the spirit for the finalities of thought. These moods through which we pass have been familiar to the most profoundly religious minds.—Samuel M. Crothers.
(2096)
MOORINGS, SAFE
Before the era of steam, men used to tow their boats wearily up the lower Ohio, or the Mississippi, with a long line. At night it was not always safe for them to fasten their boats on the bank while they slept, because there was danger from the wash of the underflowing current that they would find themselves drifting and pulling a tree after them. Therefore, they sought out well-planted, solid, enduring trees, and tied to them, and the phrase became popular, “That man will do to tie to.”
(2097)
Moral Contagion—See [Retort, Personal].
Moral Decay—See [Corruption, Inner].
Moral Meaning of the World—See [Faith in a Moral Universe].
Moral Pervasiveness—See [Character Imparted].
MORAL SATISFACTION
Mr. Robert E. Speer says:
When I was in the city of Tokyo, I went to the house of a missionary to meet half a dozen of the leading native Christian men of Japan. They were thoughtful, well-read, thoroughly educated, keen students. There was scarcely a school of Christian thought with which they were not familiar. I asked them what it was in Christianity that had most appealed to them. I supposed, of course, they would answer that they were glad of their faith because it had thrown light on the dark, perplexing problems of life which Buddhism and Shintoism were unable to solve. Instead, every one said that what they valued most in Christianity was the moral rest that they had found there. The intellectual satisfaction was little compared with the sweet voice that was now sounding in their hearts, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
(2098)
Morality, Sum Total of—See [Love and Law].
Morally Weak, Financially Strong—See [Drink, Peril of].
Morning—See [Dawn of Christian Light].
Mortal Pomp—See [Glory Faded].
MORTALITY RESISTED
The Christian would naturally call the attention of persons like those mentioned in the extract to Jesus’ words, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die”:
A fantastic organization is described in The British Medical Journal. It is a league against illness and death, which has been formed, so we are assured, in the State of Iowa. Says the paper named above:
“Already several hundreds of persons have joined. A condition of membership is that every one on admission must sign a pledge that he or she will continually assert that it is nothing but custom and habit of thought that causes people to be sick, grow old, or die. Any member who is reported sick from any disease and is confined to his bed for a continuous period of three days is to be fined for the first offense; for a second offense he is to be suspended from membership; a third offense entails expulsion from the society.” (Text.)
(2099)
MOSAIC OF THE KINGDOM
Bishop Simpson gives this illustration of the composition of Christ’s completed kingdom:
In some of the great halls of Europe may be seen pictures not painted with the brush, but mosaics, which are made up of small pieces of stone, glass, or other material. The artist takes these little pieces, and, polishing and arranging them, he forms them into the grand and beautiful picture. Each individual part of the picture may be a little worthless piece of glass or marble or shell; but with each in its place, the whole constitutes the masterpiece of art. So I think it will be with humanity in the hands of the great artist. God is picking up the little worthless pieces of stone and brass, that might be trodden under foot unnoticed, and is making of them His great masterpiece.
(2100)
Moslem Life—See [Persia, The Moslem Situation in].
MOTHER
So long as young men and maidens honor and love their parents there is hope and success awaiting them. We do not know the author of these lines:
Of all the names to memory dear,
One name to me alone is dearest;
Tho many names to me are near
Yet this shall ever be the nearest.
For on my heart’s most sacred place
’Tis deeper graved than any other;
Nor naught from thence shall e’er erase
The lovely, honored name of mother.
(2101)
Hester I. Radford, in The Atlantic Monthly, writes the following:
You struggled blindly for my soul
And wept for me such bitter tears
That through your faith my faith grew whole
And fearless of the coming years.
For in the path of doubt and dread
You would not let me walk alone,
But prayed the prayers I left unsaid
And sought the God I did disown.
You gave to me no word of blame
But wrapt me in your love’s belief,
Dear love, that burnt my sin like flame,
And left me worthy of your grief.
(2102)
MOTHER, A BRAVE
From his mother Ben Jonson received certain strong characteristics, and by a single short reference in Jonson’s works we are led to see the kind of woman she was. It is while Jonson is telling Drummond (who wrote the records of his life) of the occasion when he was thrown into prison, because some passages in the comedy of “Eastward Ho!” gave offense to King James, and he was in danger of a horrible death, after having his ears and nose cut off. He tells us how, after his pardon, he was banqueting with his friends, when his “old mother” came in and showed a paper full of “lusty strong poison,” which she intended to mix with his drink just before the execution. And to show that she “was no churl,” she intended first to drink of the poison herself. The incident is all the more suggestive from the fact that Chapman and Marston, one his friend and the other his enemy, were first cast into prison as the authors of “Eastward Ho!” and rough Ben Jonson at once declared that he too had had a small hand in the writing and went to join them in prison.—William J. Long, English Literature.
(2103)
Mother, A Heart Broken—See [Juvenile Court Experience].
Mother, A Reminder of—See [Reminders].
Mother Caution—See [Reasoning Power in Animals].
MOTHER INSTINCT
A cow’s melancholy over the loss of her calf led to a strange incident at the home of Josiah Brown, near Mount Carmel.
Brown owned a cow with a spotted calf which was so peculiarly marked that some time ago, when it was killed for veal, the skin was made into a rug. The mother cow was downcast and bellowed continually.
Mrs. Brown went into her front parlor, and there on the floor lay the cow, placidly licking the calfskin rug. It is supposed the cow approached the house and by chance saw the calfskin through the window, then quietly pushed the doors open and walked in. One barred door had been forced open by the cow’s horns.—Boston Journal.
(2104)
MOTHER LOVE
Not long ago a woman fifty years old went to a teacher in School No. 2, and with tears in her eyes, begged permission to sit down with the little ones five to six years old, that she might learn to read and write. She explained that she had two boys in the West, and desired to learn her letters that she might be able to communicate with them. Her daughter had done this for her, but three years ago the daughter died, and now the hungry-hearted mother was willing to make any sacrifice to keep in touch with her sons. So she entered school without telling any one, even her husband. Four weeks from the day she entered she was able to read through the primer, first reader, and almost through the second. Now she can write so any one can easily read every word. She learns ten new words at home every day, and always knows her lesson perfectly. She has learned to begin and end a letter, and it will not be long before she can write a love-letter—a genuine mother love-letter—to her boys. Through the goodness of my friend, I have in my possession a yellow sheet of paper containing one of her writing exercises. Reading between the lines, there is something inexpressibly touching about it. The words are such as may be found in the copy-book of any schoolboy, but the mother, with her hard hands and tender heart, as she copied the words imagined herself writing a letter to one of her sons. After writing her address and the date, this imaginary epistle, brimming with a real love, reads: “My dear son Hugh:
Be the matter what it may,
Always speak the truth.
If at work or if at play,
Always speak the truth.”
Surely there is no ordinary clay in this vessel! She may not be able to understand the plan of her soul’s divine Potter, but a brave trust and a high hope reside at the center of her being.—F. F. Shannon.
(2105)
One calm, bright, sweet, sunshiny day an angel stole out of heaven and came down to this old world, and roamed field and forest, city and hamlet; and just as the sun went down he plumed his wings and said: “Now my visit is out, and I must go back to the world of light, but before I go I must gather some mementos of my visit here”; and he looked over into a beautiful flower-garden and said, “How lovely and fragrant these flowers are,” and he plucked the rarest roses, and made a bouquet, and said, “I see nothing more beautiful and fragrant than these; I will take them with me.” But he looked a little farther and there saw a little bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked babe, smiling into its mother’s face, and he said, “Oh, that baby’s smile is prettier than this bouquet; I will take that, too.” Then he looked just beyond the cradle, and there was a mother’s love pouring out like the gush of a river, toward the cradle and the baby, and he said, “Oh, that mother’s love is the prettiest thing I have seen on earth; I will carry that, too!” With the three treasures he winged his way to the pearly gates, and lit just on the outside, and said, “Before I go in I will examine my mementos,” and he looked at the flowers and they had withered; he looked at the baby’s smile and it had faded away; he looked at the mother’s love and there it was in all its pristine beauty and fragrance. He threw aside the withered flowers and the faded smile and winged his way through the gates and led all the hosts of heaven together and said, “Here is the only thing I found on earth that would keep its fragrance all the way to heaven—a mother’s love.”—“Popular Lectures of Sam P. Jones.”
(2106)
See [Artifice]; [Prodigal, The]; [Wayward, Seeking the].
MOTHER LOVE IN BIRDS
The loon, or great northern diver, is reported to have displayed her mother love and anxiety to a sportsman fishing in Sebago Lake in Maine: He surprized the mother with one young one near his canoe. She was employing every artifice to call the little one away, but the infant swam so near the boat that the fisherman took him aboard in his landing-net, and, holding him on his knee, gently stroked his downy coat, to the evident satisfaction of the youngster. Meanwhile the mother was in an agony of distress. At first, forgetting her native wildness and timidity in her mother love, she boldly approached the canoe, and, rising in the water till she appeared to stand upon it, furiously flapped her wings, uttering menacing cries. Finding this of no avail, she pretended that she was wounded, rolling over in the water and finally lying still as if dead, evidently to attract attention to herself and away from the young one. The fisherman, touched by these displays of motherly affection, put the young loon into the water, upon which the mother instantly came to life and again tried to entice her little one to go with her. (Text.)—Olive Thorne Miller, “The Bird Our Brother.”
(2107)
MOTHER, MEMORY OF
Lamar Fontaine, looking back after a long life of adventure, writes thus of a parting with his mother:
Those long-ago days now rise before me in all their vividness. As I pen these lines, nearing the seventy-seventh milestone in life’s rugged pathway, I feel the loving kiss yet burning on my lips where she prest it as she bade me “good-by.” There are some things in our life that time does not efface, and this is one of them. They are like the brand of red-hot iron that sears the tender hide of the bleating calf; once burned in, it lasts as long as life. I can see the last wave of her hand as she watched us move off across the prairie, and the picture is branded in my brain.—“My Life and My Lectures.”
(2108)
MOTHER, PRAYER OF A
John Wesley might well be expected to become, as he did, the great religious leader of his day with such a mother behind him.
“His mother, with the finer prescience that love gives to a mother, saw in her second son the hint of some great, unguessed future, and she writes in her diary under the head of ‘Evening, May 17, 1717, Son John:
“‘What shall I render to the Lord for all His mercies? I would offer myself and all that Thou hast given me; and I would resolve—oh, give me grace to do it!—that the residue of my life shall be all devoted to Thy service. And I do intend to be more particularly careful with the soul of this child, that Thou hast so mercifully provided for, than ever I have been; that I may instil into his mind the principles of true religion and virtue. Lord give me grace to do it sincerely and prudently.’”—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
(2109)
Mothers as Protectors—See [Father Animals Unparental].
MOTHER’S INFLUENCE, A
Grant’s love for his family was one of the strongest and most attractive traits of his character. He never failed to appreciate the worth of his mother’s love, patience and wisdom during his early years at Georgetown. When she died in 1883, at Jersey City Heights, New Jersey, the General, when at the funeral, said to Dr. Howard Henderson, her pastor: “In the remarks which you make, speak of her only as a pure-minded, simple-hearted, earnest, Methodist Christian. Make no reference to me; she gained nothing by any position I have filled or honors that may have been paid me. I owe all this and all I am to her earnest, modest and sincere piety.”—Nicholas Smith, “Grant, the Man of Mystery.”
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In a letter written by Grover Cleveland on the eve of his election to the governorship of New York State, he stated to his brother:
“I have just voted, and I sit here in the office alone. If mother were alive I should be writing to her, and I feel as if it were time for me to write to some one who will believe what I write.... I shall have no idea of reelection or of any high political preferment in my head, but be very thankful and happy if I serve one term as the people’s governor. Do you know that if mother were alive I should feel so much safer. I have always thought her prayers had much to do with my successes. I shall expect you to help me in that way.”
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MOTHERS NOT IN FICTION
A sick youth was lying in bed, watching with quiet eyes his mother’s form moving gently about the room where for weeks she had been ministering to him with tenderest heart and hands. There had been stillness there for a little while, when the boy spoke: “I wonder why there are no mothers in fiction.” “Why, there are, dear; there must be,” the mother answered quickly, but when she tried to name one, she found that none came at the call. When she related me the little incident, I too immediately said that our memory must be strangely at fault that it did not furnish us with examples in plenty. Maternal love! Why, art was filled with illustrations of it, and so was literature. And yet, on making search, I too have failed to find the typical mother where it seems she would so easily be found.—Atlantic Monthly.
(2112)
Mother, The, and the Lambs—See [Father’s Voice].
Mother Wisdom—See [Wealth and Work].
MOTHERHOOD
We can understand how Tennyson was preserved from the fatality of recklessness, how it is he wore the white flower of a blameless life, and ruled himself with chivalrous regard for womanhood, when we study his mother’s face. What such a woman must have been in the home, and what sort of home it must have been where she moved like a ministering spirit, we can readily imagine.—W. J. Dawson, “The Makers of English Poetry.”
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Alexander the Great never wore any garments save those made by his mother. These beautiful robes he showed to the Persian princes who came to visit his court as marks of the skill of Olympia, who was the daughter of a chieftain, the wife of a sovereign and the mother of a conqueror.
Every child does not have mother-made garments; but is it not true that every child is mother-made? And does he not more than continue the succession of her royal soul?
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MOTHERHOOD, DIVINE
I remember going one day into a great church in Paris and seeing, round back of the altar, in a little chapel sacred to the Virgin Mary and above a little altar in the little chapel, a bas relief. It represented the figure of a woman with a babe in her arms standing on the world; and under her feet, crusht and bleeding, was a serpent. It is only a woman with a babe in her arms that is going to crush the serpent after all.—Hugh Birkhead.
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MOTHERHOOD IN ANIMALS
Louis Albert Banks tells of a man who killed a she bear and brought her young cubs home to train up as pets:
When they got to camp the motherless pets were put in a box and given something to eat; but eat they would not and yelp they would, making a distressing noise. He took a switch and whipt them, but they only cried the louder. At first every one was sorry for them; but by and by, as the crying was continued, everybody began to scold on account of the noise. He thought that on account of the noise they made he would have to kill them. At length, however, he brought the mother-bearskin, and covering this over something, he put it in a corner of the box. The men stept back so that they could see without being seen, and pretty soon each little cub had smelled the motherskin and had nestled up close to it as contented as could be, and soon they were sound asleep. (Text.)
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MOTION, CHANGE BY
The effect of rotation in changing the shape of plastic bodies can readily be shown in simple experiments. A light metal ring is mounted on a vertical axis about which it can be rotated with great rapidity. When the ring is at rest it is circular in shape, but when it is rotated it becomes flattened along the axis, bulging out at what we may call the equator. The faster the ring is rotated the greater and greater becomes its departure from circular shape.—Charles Lane Poor, “The Solar System.”
(2117)
Motion Desired—See [Home, Choice of a].
MOTION WITHOUT PROGRESS
There’s one kind of an engine that’s always a nuisance to me, and that’s these little switching-engines down by the station. They run up and down side-tracks, shoving cars; and that’s all they do from week to week and from month to month. They’re always getting in the way of wagons and scaring horses. But when I see a grand locomotive start to the seacoast cities, there is music in her whistle. There is something which says she’s determined to land her passengers at their destination on time. There are a great many of us Christians just switching backward and forward on side-tracks.—“Famous Stories of Sam P. Jones.”
(2118)
Motive, A Pure—See [Pride in One’s Task].
MOTIVE, MERCENARY
Portrait-painting was the deliberate choice of Sir Godfrey Kneller because it was profitable. It was said of him: “Where he offered one picture to fame, he sacrificed twenty to lucre.” He said of himself: “Painters of history make the dead live, and do not begin to live themselves till they are dead; I paint the living and they enable me to live.” And in this he succeeded, for he painted ten sovereigns, and among other celebrities, Marlborough, Newton and Dryden. He was rewarded, too, by poems written in his honor by Pope, Addison, Steele and others. King William got him to paint the beauties of Hampton Court. (Text.)
(2119)
Mountain, The—See [Viewpoint, The].
Mourning—See [Bible Customs To-day].
Movement—See [Slowness].
MOVEMENT UNCEASING
There is nothing absolutely stable in the universe. From the ultimate eon to the largest world in space everything is moving. If we believe in progress we shall say that everything is moving on. If anything should actually stop it would be instantly destroyed. If a man could go to the top of a high tower, or a mountain, and there could come to absolute rest, the atmosphere of our earth, light as it seems, but traveling about nineteen miles in a second, would by its friction probably reduce him in a second to a patch of flame and dissipate him as a fiery gas in every direction.
So, if in our life progress we should try to stop and live in a dead past, or turn back to old conditions, the world’s rush of progress would leave us behind, or its frictions would wear our spirits out.
(2120)
Moving Pictures in Churches—See [Churches and the Crowd].
Much in Little—See [Miniature Work]; [Economy].
Much in Little Space—See [Useless Labor].
Multiformity of Life—See [Individuality].
MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS
Newspaper readers have been furnished with the details of the case of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, which may be briefly recalled. Some years ago a stranger arrived in Norristown, Pa., rented a store, stocked it, and began business in a quiet, business-like way which attracted no attention and aroused no suspicion as to any mental difficulty. Some two months later one of his neighbors was startled by a call from the newcomer, who, in a bewildered way, demanded to know where he was, and after a time explained that he was a Rhode Island clergyman, could not account for his presence in Norristown, knew nothing of any of his actions while there, and could only recall that he had drawn some money from a bank in his native place two months before, after which his life was a blank. And yet, during the entire period his actions had been apparently rational, altho certainly in nowise suggestive of the clerical profession—rather the reverse. For two months he had been the sharp, shrewd business man during business hours, and a genial and by no means straight-laced companion after his store was closed. These instances of “multiplex personality” have been recognized by alienists since the time of the historic cases of Louis V and Felida X. In one state the patient is cheerful, frank, generous; in another, morose, taciturn, miserly; now belligerent and then the most peaceable of mortals; by turns mendacious and truthful, the soul of honor, and the most depraved of wretches, reveling in immorality, and leading the life of an ascetic. That the different states are due to changes in the psychical activity of different portions of the brain is now the accepted theory, borne out by experiment. This activity may be set up, modified, perverted, or totally arrested by disease; but it may also be caused by the influence of one will over another, as in the familiar illustrations of hypnotism. A few years ago Dr. Hammond hypnotized a young man before the New York Medico-Legal Society, causing him to commit imaginary thefts, assaults, etc., and the phenomena are now the common property of the medical lecture-room.—Chicago News.
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MUSIC
When Gainsborough was asked how he had obtained the marvelous expression of inward peace on the face of the “Parish Clerk,” he said he painted it in time and tune with the sweet singing of a voice next door, the movements of the brush forming the beautiful face, and that it was the music that looked out from the eyes and smiled on the mouth.—“Stories of the English Artists.”
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During the Civil War a Union regiment was camping in a Southern town, and the people stubbornly refused to fraternize with the men. Houses and shops were closed to them, and the citizens kept inside. The commanding officer ordered his band to strike up “Dixie.” Instantly, as if by magic, doors opened, shutters came down, and soon the street was alive with men, women and children—all merry and hospitable.
The music had unlocked their hearts.
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MUSIC AND CHILDREN
Music, especially singing, has a fascination and power over children that is truly wonderful. It soothes and subdues their passions and awakens every noble emotion. The school day is always brighter and better if it is begun with a stirring song. If the children are tired and nervous or ill-tempered, a song will quiet them as oil upon a troubled sea. “Music,” says Luther, “is the art of the prophets, the only art which can calm the agitation of the soul.” Its moral and religious power has long been recognized by the Church, but the school is just beginning to realize its value.—John W. Carr, “Journal of the Religious Education Association,” 1903.
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Music and History—See [History and Music Correlated].
MUSIC AND SPIDERS
While a gentleman was watching some spiders it occurred to him to try what effect a tuning-fork would have on the insects. He suspected that they would regard the sound just as they were in the habit of regarding the sound made by a fly. And sure enough they did. He selected a large, ugly spider that had been feasting on flies for two months. The spider was at one edge of its web. Sounding the fork, he touched a thread at the other side of the web and watched the result. Mr. Spider had the buzzing sound conveyed to him over his telephone wires, but how was he to know on which particular wire the sound was traveling? He ran to the center of the web very quickly, and felt all around until he touched the thread against the other end of which the fork was sounding; and taking another thread along, just as a man would take an extra piece of rope, he ran out to the fork and sprang upon it. Then he retreated a little way and looked at the fork. He was puzzled. He had expected to find a buzzing fly. He got on the fork again and danced with delight. He had caught the sound of the fly and it was music to him. It is said that spiders are so fond of music that they will stop their spinning to listen, and a man once said that when he retired to his room for quiet before dinner and played the flute, large spiders would come onto the table and remain quite still, “running away as fast as their legs could carry them” directly he had finished—Electrical Review.
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MUSIC AS A THERAPEUTIC
Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” says:
Besides the excellent power music hath to expel many other diseases, it is a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself. In proof of the truth of the foregoing, many well-authenticated instances may be cited. Among them may be mentioned the case of King Philip of Spain, who, when suffering from hopeless melancholia, was restored to health by the singing of Farinelli in an adjoining chamber, after every other remedy had proved futile.—Boston Musical Herald.
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Music has a vast future before it. We are only now beginning to find out some of its uses. It has been the toy of the rich; it has often been a source of mere degradation to both rich and poor; it has been treated as mere jingle and noise—supplying a rhythm for the dance, a kind of Terpsichorean tomtom—or serving to start a Bacchanalian chorus, the chief feature of which has certainly not been the music. And yet those who have their eyes and ears open may read in these primitive uses, while they run, the hints of music’s future destiny as a vast civilizer, recreator, health-giver, work-inspirer, and purifier of man’s life. The horse knows what he owes to his bells. The factory girls have been instinctively forced into singing, finding in it a solace and assistance in work. And for music, the health-giver, what an untrodden field is there! Have we never known an invalid to forget pain and weariness under the stimulus of music? Have you never seen a pale cheek flush up, a dull eye sparkle, an alertness and vigor take possession of the whole frame, and animation succeed to apathy? What does all this mean? It means a truth that we have not fully grasped, a truth pregnant with vast results to body and mind. It means that music attacks the nervous system directly, reaches and rouses where physic and change of air can neither reach nor rouse.—H. R. Haweis, “My Musical Memories.”
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MUSIC AS A TRANSFORMING POWER
No one denies the influence of music for good. A teacher told me of a boy, an incorrigible little fellow, who was almost entirely cured of his bad traits by a violet song.
Down in a green and mossy bed
A modest violet grew;
Its stalk was bent; it hung its head,
As if to hide from view.
And tho it was a lovely flower,
Its colors bright and fair,
It might have graced a rosy bower,
Instead of hiding there.
He sang the violet song at home, on the street, on the playground, and in school. He loved and believed it; and its tender thought had helped him to become a noble young man.—Elizabeth Casterton, “Journal of the National Educational Association,” 1905.
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MUSIC AS AN ANESTHETIC
A physician of Geneva, in Switzerland, has successfully employed music to soothe and tranquillize the dreams of persons who have taken ether or chloroform in order to undergo surgical operations.
The music is begun as soon as the anesthetic begins to take effect, and is continued until the patient awakes. It is said that not only does this treatment prevent the hysterical effects sometimes witnessed, but that the patient, on recovering, feels no nausea or illness.
Another physician uses blue light to produce anesthesia. The light from a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp, furnished with a blue bulb, is concentrated upon the patient’s eyes, but the head and the lamp are enveloped in a blue veil, to shut out extraneous light. Insensibility is produced in two or three minutes.—Harper’s Weekly.
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MUSIC, CHARM OF
A bewitching way to win a mate is to charm her by music. This is the fashion of our little house-wren, who arrives first in the nesting region, selects a site for the home, and then draws a mate out of the vast unknown by his charm of voice. No one could do it better, for he is a delightful, tireless singer.—Olive Thorne Miller, “The Bird Our Brother.”
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MUSIC ELEVATING
R. H. Haweis says:
I have known the oratorio of the Messiah draw the lowest dregs of Whitechapel into a church to hear it, and during the performance sobs have broken forth from the silent and attentive throng. Will any one say that for these people to have their feelings for once put through such a noble and long-sustained exercise as that could be otherwise than beneficial? If such performances of both sacred and secular music were more frequent, we should have less drunkenness, less wife-beating, less spending of summer gains, less pauperism in the winter.
(2131)
Music from Pain—See [Suffering Transformed].
MUSIC, GOD’S
Since ever the world was fashioned,
Water and air and sod,
A music of divers meanings,
Has flowed from the hand of God.
In valley and gorge and upland,
On stormy mountain height,
He makes him a harp of the forest,
He sweeps the chords with might.
He puts forth his hand to the ocean,
He speaks and the waters flow—
Now in a chorus of thunder,
Now in a cadence low.
He touches the waving flower-bells,
He plays on the woodland streams—
A tender song—like a mother
Sings to her child in dreams.
But the music divinest and dearest,
Since ever the world began,
Is the manifold passionate music
He draws from the heart of man.
—Temple Bar.
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MUSIC, GOOD CHEER IN
It is related of James Nasmyth that the rhythmic sound of a merry little steam-engine introduced into his machine-shop so quickened the strokes of every hammer, chisel and file in his workmen’s hands that it nearly doubled the output of work for the same wages.
A master tailor employed a number of workmen, who, getting hold of a slow, doleful but catchy air, hummed it to the movement of their needles, much to the retarding of their work. Observing the secret, he treated the men to lively airs, having a merry swing and a rapid movement, and soon the deft and nimble fingers reverted to their accustomed quickness.
There is science as well as philosophy in singing over our tasks.
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MUSIC IN THE SOUL
The orchestra does not make music; it is only an instrument for conveying music from one spirit to other spirits. The orchestra no more makes the music which it conveys than the telegraph wire makes the message which it conveys. Music is not a volume of sound; it is an experience which sound transmits from one soul to another soul. The composer creates in himself the symphony. He translates this creation into symbolic language upon a sheet of paper. The orchestra translates this translation into chords. These chords received through the ear awaken in the hearer an experience similar to that which was in the soul of the original composer.—Lyman Abbott, The Outlook.
(2134)
See [Soul Music].
MUSIC OF DESPAIR AND OF HOPE
On the occasion of the funeral service of King Edward VII, William Maxwell, in the Record and Mail, of Glasgow, writes as follows concerning the pipes and song:
No music can express the abandonment of grief like the pipes, for none is so individual. Its notes are the tradition of centuries of wild freedom, and are bound by no ordinary system. No music is so personal, for the pipes are the retainers of the clans.
They, too, wear the tartan, and voice the feelings of their clan—its joy and grief, its triumph and despair; and none is more national, for it embodies the soul of a people, its strength and its passions.
They are famous ballads to which the music of sorrow has been wedded. For there are two national ballads known as “The Flowers of the Forest,” and both are written by women. The first version was written by Jane Elliot, of Minto, and bewails at Flodden Field—
I’ve heard the lilting at our ewe milking,
Lasses a-lilting before the dawn of day;
But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning,
The flowers of the forest are a’ wede away.
The second song was written on the same subject by Alicia Rutherford, of Fernilie, afterward known as Mrs. Patrick Cockburn, and is generally regarded as the more effective in singing, if not in composition.
I’ve seen the forest, adorned the foremost,
With flowers of the fairest, most pleasant and gay;
Sae bonny was their blooming,
Their scents the air perfuming,
But now they are withered, and weeded away.
Oh, fickle fortune, why this cruel sporting?
Oh, why still perplex us, poor sons of a day?
Nae mair your smiles can cheer me,
Nae mair your frowns can fear me,
For the flowers of the forest are a’ wede away.
The words are beautiful, and instinct with sorrow when spoken or sung. But it is the music of the pipes that gives them supreme interpretation, and makes them the expression of grief so profound that “The Flowers of the Forest” has become the national dirge. Nor is sorrow their only note.
The pipes can sound—and have sounded on many a stricken field and in many an hour of despair—the triumph of hope and of victory over death. They have stirred the blood and cleared the head, and given strength to the arm of many a soldier who has never dreamed of the eagle plume blended with the heather and never heard through the mists of memory the clash of the broadsword on the targe—
I hear the pibroch sounding
Deep o’er the mountain glen,
While light springing footsteps are trampling the heath—
’Tis the march of the Cameron men.
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MUSIC OF NATURE
The Innuits, or Eskimos, of Smith Sound, Greenland, the most northerly people in the world, believe that the aurora borealis has a singing noise; and the inhabitants of the Orkneys, of Finmarken, and those in the region of Hudson Bay believe, with many competent observers, that a peculiar sound like the rustling of silk always accompanies it. The Lapps liken this sound to the cracking in the joints of moving reindeer. (Text.)
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MUSIC, POPULAR, VALUE OF
All history reveals the fact that music, wedded to stirring and patriotic words, has in every age had a powerful influence on the course of public events. Nor is this true alone of civilized peoples. Among almost all savage races, the warriors excite themselves to martial ardor by songs which thrill their souls. The war-dances alike of our North American Indians, of the African negroes, and of the semicivilized races which dwell in Asia, are accompanied by songs which, tho wild and incoherent to European ears, have an inspiring influence upon themselves. Carlyle wisely said, “The meaning of song goes deep”; and a more recent writer has declared that “it goes as deep as the heart of man, the throbbings of which it controls more readily and widely than do the speeches of statesmen, the sermons of preachers, or the writings of journalists.” It was clearly because the influence of legend and of patriotic appeal, joined with familiar tunes so strongly roused the emotions of the people, that the ancient bards of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were held in such high honor in the old royal courts and princely castles of these lands, and were regarded with such veneration by the people everywhere. About two centuries ago Lord Wharton wrote a political ballad, which was set to music, the title of which was “Lillibulero.” It was very poor poetry, but somehow the rude verses struck a chord in the popular heart, and were sung everywhere. It was written in opposition to King James the Second; and so wide was its influence that Lord Wharton boasted, it is said, that it “sang James II out of three kingdoms.” The effect of the “Marseillaise” in arousing and exciting the revolutionary spirit of France is one of the prominent facts in the history of that country. To it, in no small degree, is attributed the success of the French arms against the allies who assailed the young republic. So potent, indeed, was the “Marseillaise” felt to be in kindling political passion, that both the Napoleons forbade it being sung or played in France during their reigns.—Youth’s Companion.
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MUSIC REFLECTS THE SOUL
Welsh, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Armenian music is apt to be pitched in plaintive, mournful, minor keys. A Welsh preacher explained to an English congregation why Welsh tunes were thus habitually pathetic. It is because for centuries liberties were lost under Saxon domination. So, in Russia, visitors were imprest by the tender and melancholy tho beautiful strains of the national melodies. People when opprest sing sadly; but liberty and joy emancipate even the music of a nation. (Text.)
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MUTATION
One of the blest effects of the flight of time is that old animosities are forgotten and the nobler things of reconciliation and peace are seen. An instance of this lately occurred in the South:
A group of gentlemen, soldiers of the present and the past, were gathered upon an historic Southern battle-field, Missionary Ridge. They stopt to read the inscription upon a tablet, simple and unpretentious, which marked the position of a Confederate battery. This tablet bore the name of “Luke E. Wright, Second Lieutenant.” Luke E. Wright, Secretary of War of the United States of America, surrounded by his officers and friends, paused a moment to read again this chapter from his youth. A distinguished general of the regular army laid his hand affectionately upon the shoulder of General Wright and remarked: “General, how queerly things turn out! Who could have foreseen that the boy in gray, who served his guns upon this spot, would one day be my chief, at the head of the Army of the United States?”
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The instability of all mundane things is suggested by the following account, which may also remind us of the utterance of Jesus: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away.”
“When, in 1890, Germany bartered away Zanzibar in exchange for Heligoland, great was the rejoicing,” says Shipping Illustrated (New York). “Much concern is now being manifested in Germany owing to the relentless attack of the sea, which has already reduced the island’s area nearly twenty-five per cent since it came under the German flag. At this rate the little island will, in another half-century, have melted entirely away. The North Sea has been from time immemorial an avaricious land-grabber. The Dogger Bank once reared its head above the surface, a fact proved by the bones of animals occasionally brought up in the fishermen’s nets. The eastern coast of England has suffered severely from its insatiable appetite. Dunwick, an important seaport during the Middle Ages, is now a part of the sea-bottom, and fishes and other marine denizens occupy the one-time habitation of men. Visitors to Felixstowe, once a Roman colony and now a modern seaside resort, opposite Harwich, have pointed out to them a rock a mile out to sea, on which the old church formerly stood. The Kaiser may yet live to see his cherished possession torn from his grasp.” (Text.)
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MUTUAL SUFFERING
There is no individual in society; it is one body corporate. If one member sin all suffer with him. The fearful forms of torture loom up yet out of the shadows, the paddle, the rack, the chair, the cangue collar, the strangle-ring, the shin-rod, and various forms of mutilation remind one of what we see in the Tower of London. Truly, we are brethren in cruelty if we go far enough into the dark past. But God, who is rich in mercy, when He transforms an Oriental, seems first of all to take out of his heart the poison of cruelty, and to leave the spirit of self-sacrifice and tenderness instead.—James S. Gale, “Korea in Transition.”
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MUTUALISM
Did you enjoy your breakfast this morning? You were all alone, and got it yourself, did you say? Did you make the Irish linen in your napkin, or were your table furnishings the creations of an idle hour? Did you raise your own coffee? Did the melon grow in your garden, or was the beef fattened in your pasture? The very ends of the earth contributed to your simple meal, and for it you were dependent upon people you had never seen. Your breakfast-table was really a clearing-house for the ends of the earth, so that when you redecorate your dining-room, and are placing upon the walls the familiar legends, “Let good digestion wait on appetite,” and that famous quatrain of Robert Burns:
Some hae meat but can not eat,
And some would eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thank it,
you might most appropriately add to these that thrilling confession of Paul’s, “I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise.” (Text.)—Nehemiah Boynton.
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As the astronomers tell us that it is probable that there are in the universe innumerable solar systems besides ours, to each of which myriads of utterly unknown and unseen stars belong, so it is certain that every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and that it is in the eternal nature of things that he can not really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.—Charles Dickens.
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See [Boy and King].
Mutuality—See [Social Interdependence]; [Social Strength].
Mutuality, True—See [Faithfulness].
MYSELF
What unto me is Nature after all?
I pass her by and softly go my way.
She is the remnant of my little day
Upon this beautiful revolving ball.
I am the real being. At my beck,
The seeming actual pays its vassalage;
I am the reader and the world the page;
I fling a halter round old matter’s neck.
Glad to be taught of things outside, yet I
Find me indifferent to their transient touch;
A life’s to-day is an eternity
Seems not to please my spirit overmuch.
I may not fathom now the end or what
The sweat and blood and tragedy may mean;
But I can fight the fight and falter not.
Above the clouds the hilltops are serene.
So if I stay here years or slip away
While yet the early dawn is dim and dark,
It matters not. I am that living spark
That ever glows ’tho planets have their day.(Text.)
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MYSTERY IN NATURE
What determines which queen shall leave the hive with the swarm? What determines which five thousand out of fifteen thousand worker bees, all apparently similarly stimulated and excited, shall swarm out, and which ten thousand shall stay in? These are questions too hard for us to answer. We may take refuge in Maeterlinck’s poetical conception of the “spirit of the hive.” Let us say that the “spirit of the hive” decides these things; as well as what workers shall forage and what ones clean house; what bees shall ventilate and what make wax and build comb. Which is simply to say that we don’t know what decides all these things. (Text.)—Vernon L. Kellogg, “Insect Stories.”
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MYSTERY IN RELIGION
Here are wood, brass, my hand—any material things. Here are light, electricity, a magnet—things that we all have something to do with. Now let us ask the scientific people to look at them, weigh them, test them, analyze them, describe them—what will they report? Well, part of their report will be this: There is one thing without which all these other things are impossible, without which there could be no wood, no metal, no light, no electric current; and that thing is called ether. This ether is like nothing you have at hand. It is not solid, nor liquid, nor a gas. It does not weigh anything, nor does it move. It is not alive, nor is it capable of division. Yet it is everywhere. It is in the wood, in the brass, in the air. It fills what we call empty space. It is the road by which light travels. It is the medium of electricity. It is the home of magnetism. Well, when the scientist tells us this we can but gasp. It is nothing that we know, yet without it all we know would break down. It can not be seen, nor handled, nor heard, yet without it we could neither see, nor handle, nor hear. It is utterly beyond belief, so strange a bunch of contradictories it is; and yet if we assume it to be real, then and then only can all the things of life which we do know be properly explained.
If in the natural world we follow out carefully all that is before us, if we explore our narrow strip of experience thoroughly, we come to a region getting more and more remote. Send a traveler from Hampstead—he comes back to tell us of India or the Arctic Ocean. Send a scientist out into this world of matter and force, of wood and stone and electricity, and he comes back to tell us of the incredible wonders of the unseen world, of the fathomless mysteries of the ether.
If this is so with material things, how much more is it likely to be so with moral and spiritual things? If it be true of earthly things, how much more of heavenly things? If the findings of science are puzzling, contradictory, mysterious, will the findings of theology—the science of God—be simple and mere common sense? If when we have to do with wood and stones we stand amazed before the doctrine of ether, is it surprizing that when we have to do with Christ and His cross, God and His redemption, we come also to the wonderful teaching, not only of the divinity of Jesus, but of His preexistence from eternity with God? So, then, because the doctrine is marvelous, unheard of, difficult to grasp, do not, therefore, pass it by as incredible.—Newton H. Marshall.
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MYSTERY NO BAR TO BELIEF
Toads are said to have been found in rocks. Such cases are rare, but it would be as unreasonable to doubt them as to believe in some of the miraculous explanations that have been made of the matter. The phenomenon is marvelous, it is true, but it is supported by evidence that we are not able to contest; and skepticism, which is incompatible with science, will have to disappear if rigorous observation shall confirm it. The toad was observed, in one case, in the stone itself, and before recovering from its long lethargy, it had not made any motion. One of these toads was presented to an academy, with the stone which had served it as a coffin or habitation, and it was ascertained that the cavity seemed to correspond exactly with the dimensions and form of the animal. It is remarkable that these toad-stones are very hard and not at all porous, and show no signs of fissure. The mind, completely baffled in the presence of the fact, is equally embarrassed to explain how the toad could live in its singular prison, and how it became shut up there. M. Charles Richet had occasion to study this question some months ago, and came to the conclusion that the fact was real, observing that even if, in the actual condition of science, certain phenomena were still inexplicable, we were not warranted in denying their existence, for new discoveries might at any time furnish an explanation of them. (Text.)—Popular Science Monthly.
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Mystery of Regeneration—See [Discernment, Lack of Spiritual].
MYSTERY TO BE MADE CLEAR
Dr. Abbott tells how, after sailing on the muddy waters of Lake Huron, he came on deck one morning, and, looking over the prow, started back in instinctive terror, for, looking down into the clear waters of Lake Superior, it seemed as if the keel were just going to strike on the sharp pointed rocks below; but he was looking through fifty or sixty feet of clear water at the great rock-bed of the lake. Now we endeavor in vain to fathom God’s judgments. As by a great deep they are hidden from us. But by and by the sea will grow as clear as crystal, and through the mystery we shall see and shall understand. We shall know not only the life that was in the ocean, but shall trace the footprints of Him that walked thereon.
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MYSTERY, VALUE OF
Recently a man called on Edwin Markham, author of “The Man with the Hoe,” we are told by Success, and introduced himself as the writer of a book on which, he said, he had spent twenty-five years of study and research. Mr. Markham, who is unusually kind in listening to and counseling with amateur authors, immediately felt that one who has spent a quarter of a century on his work is rare, and he invited him to his study without delay.
“What is the nature of your work?” asked Mr. Markham.
“I have written the greatest book of the ages,” began the new author; “I have solved the mystery of the world. I know all about it. I am prepared to prove my statements. I know just why the world was made, who really made it, and I have laid bare the mysteries of creation. I—”
“My good man,” said Mr. Markham, interrupting him, “if you have come to me for advice, let me tell you to take your manuscript at once and burn it. If you have solved the mystery of this world, you are its greatest enemy. Why,” continued the poet, “if you have solved the mystery of the world you have robbed men of their greatest joy. You have left us nothing to work for, you have destroyed our ambition, you have reduced us to mere animals. It is the mysteries of the world that have made it great, and I, for one, don’t want to have them solved.”
Mr Markham’s visitor sat dumfounded for a moment. The vision of his twenty-five years of labor flitted before him as he said:
“I guess you’re right—I guess you’re right.” (Text.)
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