It is an assurance full of sweet comfort, especially to the poor, that One sits over against the treasury who estimates at its full value the widow’s mite, knowing as He does out of what love and self-denial it comes. With a check for the last instalment of $100 from the estate of a poor widow, comes a brief sketch of a life that was beautiful and touching; a life that was full of struggle, and sorrow, and benefaction; which closed in blindness after 88 years. After a brief married life, she was left a widow with one child, in great poverty. She won a home with her needle, in which she lived for forty-two years, the last twenty-six of these entirely alone, as her daughter had been taken from her by death.
She lived her brave, self-forgetful, helpful life; active in all good words and works in church and neighborhood, economizing where her own wants were concerned, keeping guard even over the use of matches; liberal to the limit, not only of what she had, but of what she could earn, where the needs of others were known. Intelligently acquainted with the work of the Church, at home and abroad, from a wide reading of all our home and foreign missionary journals, she accepted it as the highest duty and most honored privilege of life to fill up, according to her measure in her own body, what remains behind of the sufferings of the divine Redeemer. Such gifts are as precious ointment poured upon the head of the Master, and He accepts them with the pledge that they shall not be lost. It were almost a sacrilege to write a name upon our pages by way of eulogy which the Master himself has pronounced with honor before His angels: “Thou hast been faithful over a very little.” “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
And He still sits over against the treasury, noting not alone the widow’s mite, but the larger gifts of those who give, if not abundantly, yet out, of their abundance.
GRADATIONS, NATURAL AND HELPFUL.
Can civilization reach the state of nature, that state which God meant for it, until men know how to divide society equally, from top to bottom? I do not mean by this that there will ever come a time when two will not be more than one, when four will not be more than two, and when eight will not be more than four; I do not mean that we shall ever see the time when there will not be gradations in society from the top to the bottom—gradations of power, gradations of intelligence, gradations of wealth, gradations of refinement; but there is to be in society just that which exists in households—namely, a disposition, that runs from the top to the bottom, of love and sympathy; and when you have so stratified society, and organized it, and made every member of it, from the lowest to the highest, feel, “My brother above me is pulling me up higher,” we shall begin to realize our true relation, and fulfil our appointed duty one to another. When in society it is as it is on the sides of mountains, where men, being helped by those who are above them, turn round and help those who are below them, and go on a few steps and again are helped by those that are above them, and again help those that are below them, and so on until they reach the top, then gradation will not be an evil. Gradation is now an evil because there is a stratum of prosperity, and a thick slice of selfishness; then another stratum of prosperity, and a thicker slice of selfishness; and so on, selfishness growing thicker and thicker as you go toward the bottom. It has got to be broken up. The low places, the valleys, have got to be exalted, the mountains have got to be brought down, and men have got to mix and coalesce. In other words, the day has got to come when that simple sentence, a million times repeated, and a million times not understood, shall be fulfilled, and love to God and love to man shall be the law of the universe, and of universal conditions. We have got to come to it first or last.—Christian Union.
ITEMS FROM THE FIELD.
N. C., Lassiter’s Mills.—“The church is greatly revived; six converts this week, and many more seeking the Lord.”
N. C., Raleigh.—“The revival still goes on. There have been over 200 conversions since Mr. Brown left us, and many are still anxious. There are revival meetings in every colored church in the city every night without the least rivalry. We have twenty-two converts in our church already.”