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CONSERVATION OF REMAINDERS
A man was in possession of a great farm. The abundant crops finally failed, and other calamities came, and at last the wife of the great landowner lost her reason. Nearly all had been lost, and the farmer was left with only a few feet of ground as his possession. I had not the courage to visit this man in his destitution. After a lapse of time, however, I went to his humble abode, and was amazed to see the little garden in the highest state of cultivation. And I exclaimed: “Why, how is this? How did you have the heart to do this, after you had lost all?”
“Why, what would you have had me do?” was the reply. “This is all I had, and I tried to make the best of it.”
So it is for us to strengthen that which is left in the Church and in ourselves as individuals.—Olin A. Curtis.
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CONSERVATISM, FALSE
There stands the false conservative, anchored to the past. Whatever is, for him, is right and good. He is constitutionally opposed to change. Wagon-wheels make a rut an inch deep across the prairie, but when this man is thirty he is in a rut up to his eyebrows. When he dies, at seventy, you can truly say, that his image is truth lying at the bottom of a well. He loves his father’s house because it is old; he loves old tools; old laws; old creeds. He stands at his gate, like an angry soldier, waving his hands and shouting warnings to all who approach. He has one injunction for every boy starting out to make his fortune: “Watch your anchor, my son; don’t cast off your moorings”; as if any Columbus, who spent all his time throwing out anchors, could ever have crossed the sea! As if any world voyage could be made by a captain who never dared cast off his moorings! In the Arabian tale, when the sheik was lost in the desert, he took off the bridle, and committed the camel to God and his own instincts, trusting the beast to find its way to the water springs. But if the old sheik had been a false conservative, he would first of all have staked the camel down by a lariat, and then committed himself to God, like these church dignitaries and councils that stake the religious or political thinker down by a lariat, which they then label in a humorous moment, “liberty of thought,” and having made progress impossible, they commit themselves to the care of the God of progress.—N. D. Hillis.
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Conservatism Natural—See [Progress].