The people were horrified that the man should, in a moment of ill temper, thus destroy a $5,000 instrument. As the manager gathered up the fragments, the musician exclaimed, “Friends, this instrument was a $2 violin I purchased on my way here and played on that you might know that it is not the price of the instrument which determines the value of the music. That depends on the player’s touch. I will now play on my $5,000 violin.”
So everywhere it is “the man behind the gun” that counts in the final results. (Text.)
(2352)
PERSONAL EVANGELISM
President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton, gives this incident of Dwight L. Moody:
Whenever I came into contact with Mr. Moody I got the impression that he was coming separately into contact with one person at a time. I remember that I was once in a very plebeian place; I was in a barbershop, lying in a chair, and I was aware that a personality had entered the room. A man came quietly in upon the same errand that I had come in on and sat in the chair next to me. Every word that he uttered, tho it was not in the least didactic, showed a personal and vital interest in the man who was serving him, and before I got through with what was being done to me I was aware that I had attended an evangelistic service, because Mr. Moody was in the next chair. I purposely lingered in the room after he left and noted the singular effect his visit had upon the barbers in that shop. They talked in undertones. They did not know his name. They did not know who had been there, but they knew that something had elevated their thought. And I felt that I left that place as I should have left a place of worship. Mr. Moody always sought and found the individual. (Text.)
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PERSONAL INFLUENCE
“The Catch-my-pal Movement” is attracting great public attention in the northern or Protestant section of Ireland. The nature of the movement will scarcely be suspected from the designation which has attached to it in popular speech; it is really an organization for the reclamation of drunkards. The originator, who is a Presbyterian layman living at Armagh—Patterson by name—had no intention of launching a general reform work; he stumbled into his present great service in a spontaneous attempt to help a poor fellow whom he found dead drunk at the foot of an Armagh lamp-post one day last July. By dint of genuine Christian sympathy and much hard work, Mr. Patterson succeeded in sobering the man up and persuading him to quit the drink. Then he sent the fellow to get a drunken “pal” and together they saved him. The three then went to work for a fourth. By the time Mr. Patterson had reformed six of the tipplers, he found to his surprize that he had actually started a “movement.” It was organized later under the dignified name of “The Protestant Total Abstinence Union,” but the public has not been able to remember that title. The main idea of using drunkards to save drunkards has been so perfectly exprest in the phrase “Catch my pal” that only that name is known to the “man in the street.”
(2354)