While her husband was still lying in prison for debt, the Archbishop of York asked Susannah Wesley:
“Tell me, Mrs. Wesley, whether you were ever really in want of bread?”
“My lord,” she answered, “strictly speaking, I never did want bread. But then I had so much care to get it before it was eaten, and to pay for it after, as has often made it very unpleasant to me; and I think to have bread under such terms is the next degree of wretchedness to having none at all.”—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
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PRIVILEGE
In “The Gospel of Life,” Charles Wagner writes this sound wisdom:
Never is knowledge more touching or art more radiant than when they illumine the brow of the obscure. I am quite familiar with the fact that there are certain privileged ones of the earth who believe that this kind of good is reserved for them, that these are meats too delicate to be set before common folk. Scandalized at seeing the people walking about in the Louvre or in the halls of the Hotel de Ville, some one said to me one day, “Do you think that it was for these people that Puvis de Chavannes painted his ceilings?” “I don’t know as a matter of fact,” I said, “whether it was for them that he painted them. But I know another ceiling more beautiful than are these of earth; that which at night the myriads of stars cover with their constellations, that on which according to the magnificent image of the poet:
“‘God paints the dawn, like a fresco, on the dark wall of night.’” (Text.)
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PRIVILEGE INVOLVES RESPONSIBILITY