Salvation is by character, but character is the gift of God. Far up on the northeastern coast of Maine there is a little spring; through all the hours of a sunny afternoon it poured its crystal flood that ran singing toward the sea. Then, the briny sea turned to a salt the spring. The waves with their bitterness came in and buried it, and the sweet water seemed lost forever. Then in the eastern sky God hung His orb of light, and silently by that invisible pull, and with its secret voice it called to the waves of salt, and drew back the briny flood with its mire and filth, that ebbed away, and lo, the little spring flowed on, fed by the pure fountains on the hillside far above the ocean’s brine. And the soul’s life comes down from the mountains, where its hidden springs are in God. Aspiration, hope and love gush on forever pure. Temptations may rise, like the tide. Troubles, ingratitudes and hatreds may sweep on like hungry waves, the world may cast up its mire, but soon these troubles will recede, and leave the spring of life within the soul, to gush forth once more. It is the river of God, the well that springs up into everlasting life.—N. D. Hillis.
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SPRINGS OF LIFE
In ancient pagan religions there was a peculiar sacredness attached to running water in springs or rivers. The famous oracle of Delphi was beside the Castalian spring; and in the haunted grotto of Egeria, inspired by the murmurs of its beautiful fountain, the first king of Rome received from the celestial nymph the laws and the religious rites which he imparted to the primitive community. Rivers in prehistoric times were everywhere worshiped; shrines were erected on their banks, and they had priests of their own. Men swore by them, for the spirit of the waters could drown those who proved false to their word; and the most awful form of oath is that which the Hindu still takes who swears by a divine river more sacred even than the Ganges—of which the Ganges is only an earthly manifestation. The office of the Hebrew prophets received its name in the original from a root signifying the bursting forth and the overflowing of a copious fountain. As the spring bursts forth from the heart of the rock in full flood, so the inspiration of God bursts forth from the heart of the prophet. This origin of the name would indicate that springs and rivers were at first chosen as the medium of a divine revelation—The Quiver.
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Spurious Virtue—See [Pretense].
Stage to Pulpit—See [Evangelism, Unusual].
STAGNANCY
Sailors tell us that there is a dead spot in the Caribbean Sea. It lies midway between Carthagena in Columbia and Kingston, Jamaica. It is out of the track of steamers and the action of the great currents going one way and another has left a space of stagnant water without any real movement at all. Anything that gets into “the dead spot” is apt to stay there unless driven out by some big storm, and will simply drift round and round, gathering sea-grass and barnacles.
Is there not “a dead spot” in the sea of life, a place out of the currents of earnest activities where souls drift and gather worthless accretions? (Text.)