It is only when we link ourselves with the power that lifts that we can accomplish results which are beyond our strength.
A great weight was to be lifted a little way out from the shore. Vain efforts had been made to bring it to the surface. Great chains had been wrapt about the mass and stout steam-tugs had puffed and strained without avail, and engines from the shore had exerted all their power with no result. A young man offered to raise the weight and he was told to try. A great flat barge was towed out over the sunken hulk, about which chains had been passed, and these were fastened to the barge. When the tide was out, the chains were wrapt still closer; then the young man sat down and waited. In the night the tide came in and the barge rose steadily with the incoming tide, bringing with it the burden to which it was chained. Higher and higher it rose, till at last it was out of the mud and mire. The seemingly impossible had been accomplished by linking the obstacle to the power of the tide. (Text.)
(2420)
POWER WITHIN
Men and churches often wait for outside help to draw them along. They need the lesson taught in this anecdote:
When an engineer in Bolivia brought over the Cordilleras the first locomotive ever seen in these latitudes, the native Indians came up from the Amazon basin to see this sight, and sat on their haunches discussing what this strange monster could be. They said: “It is made to go; let’s make it go”; and so they lassoed the buffers, and about thirty of them began to pull, and drew the locomotive a few yards. They exclaimed, “Ay-ay-ay-ay Tatai Tatito.” “The great and little father hath enabled us to do something wonderful!”
The next day the engineer got up steam and hitched a couple of cattle trucks to the locomotive and, when the Indians came again, put them into the trucks and locked them in. Then he stood on the fire-plate of the locomotive and opened the regulator, and let the steam into the cylinder, and it began to move the piston, and the piston the crank, and the crank the wheel, and the wheel the locomotive; and the locomotive carried the Indians along ten miles an hour! What did they not say to their “great and little father!” But they learned this great lesson—that locomotives are not made to be moved along by outside human power, but by means of a power within, and so to carry human beings along.
(2421)
Practicable and Impracticable—See [Prediction, False].
PRACTICAL RESPONSES CLARIFY CONFUSION