“Margaret,” the old minister said, “come here.”
The girl followed him to the next room, where a mirror hung between the windows. Her reflection, pale and unhappy, faced her wearily.
“All up and down the streets,” the old minister said, “in the cars, the markets, the stores, there are people starving for the bread of life. The church can not reach them—they will not enter a church. Books can not help them—many of them never open a book. There is but one way that they can ever read the gospel of hope, of joy, of courage, and that is in the faces of men and women.
“Two years ago a woman who has known deep trouble came to me one day, and asked your name. ‘I wanted to tell her,’ she said, ‘how much good her happy face did me, but I was afraid that she would think it was presuming on the part of an utter stranger. Some day, perhaps, you will tell her for me.’ Margaret, my child, look in the glass and tell me if the face you see there has anything to give to the souls that are hungry for joy—and they are more than any of us realize—who, unknown to themselves, are hungering for righteousness. Do you think that woman, if she were to meet you now, would say what she said two years ago?”
The girl gave one glance and then turned away, her cheeks crimson with shame. It was hard to answer, but she was no coward. She looked up into her old friend’s grave eyes.
“Thank you,” she said; “I will try to learn my lesson and accept my mission—to the streets.” (Text.)
(1013)
FACING RIGHT
When the Jews, exiled from the Holy Land, died afar off among the pagans and the persecutors, they had themselves laid in their tombs, with their faces turned toward Jerusalem! If your strength betrays you, if it is not for you, during life, to enter into perfect peace, to be delivered from certain enemies of the soul, from certain humiliating miseries that set your best will at defiance, if you must fall in the mêlée, fall at least with your face turned toward Jerusalem.—Charles Wagner, “The Gospel of Life.”
(1014)