This story used to be told by Mr. Spurgeon:
An American gentleman said to a friend, “I wish you would come down to my garden, and taste my apples.” He asked him about a dozen times, but the friend did not come; and at last the fruit-grower said, “I suppose you think my apples are good for nothing, so you won’t come and try them.” “Well, to tell the truth,” said his friend, “I have tasted them. As I went along the road I picked one up that fell over the wall, and I never tasted anything so sour in all my life; I do not particularly wish to have any more of your fruit.” “Oh,” said the owner of the garden, “I thought it must be so. Those apples around the outside are for the special benefit of the boys. I went fifty miles to select the sourest sorts to plant all around the orchard, so the boys might give them up as not worth stealing; but if you will come inside, you will find that we grow a very different quality there, sweet as honey.”
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Sandals—See [Bible Customs To-day].
Sanity is Social—See [Concert, Lack of].
Satan, Defeating—See [Mastery by Intelligence].
Satanic Possession—See [Diabolical Possession].
SATIRE
Satire—that is, a literary work which searches out the faults of men or institutions in order to hold them up to ridicule—is at best a destructive kind of criticism. A satirist is like a laborer who clears away the ruins and rubbish of an old house before the architect and builders begin on a new and beautiful structure. The work may sometimes be necessary, but it rarely arouses our enthusiasm. While the satires of Pope, Swift, and Addison are doubtless the best in our language, we hardly place them with our great literature, which is always constructive in spirit; and we have the feeling that all these men were capable of better things than they ever wrote.—William J. Long, “English Literature.”
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