Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1890-12-07
The Rev. George Hodges Finds an
Abundance of Good in His Book,
In Darkest England.
A WORK NO ONE ELSE is DOING
Has Been Taken Up With Great Success by
the Salvation Army and It's
Energetic. Leader.
GREAT PROMISE IN THE NEW STEP.
Dinner, Bed and Prayer Nesting Applied TO the Be-
d.nption Of the World
WRITTEN roR TIE prsrLrcH.l

bountifulness, which causeth through us
thanksgiving to God"
After this fashion the preacher eIhorted
the Thanksgiving Day congregation:
We ought not to be content with being
thankful. We ought to try to make some
body else thankful. In the ideal life there
Is a constant balance kept between blessing
and bounty.
That is what st. Paul said long ago to the
Corinthians. The words are just as true in
English as they were in Greek. God had
given the Corinthians suficiency in all
things, and they were accord ingly bound,
ST. Paul said, to be diligent il every good
work. 'Fbeing enriched III everything 10 all
bountifulness, which causeth through Us
Thanksgiving to God" The result of the
possession of riches ought to be the generous
spirit of bountifulness, and the result OF one
mans bountifulness is another mans
thanksgiving. You are thankful. Very
well; make some neighbor of yours thankful.
Nobody has any business to keep Thanks
giving Day all alone. Thanksgiving Day
may be perverted into an annual festival of
selfshness. You may sit down in your easy
chair, and stretch out your feet toward the
about at the pleasant pictures on your walls,
and at the delightful and inviting company
of YOUR books, and into the beloved faces of
your family, and be profoundly thankful.
And that, so far as it goes, is right You
ought to be thankful,
OTHERS IN THE WORLD.
But you have no right to draw the cur
tains OF your windows, and thrust bars
Ioors and tho fhODSands
and hundreds of thousands who are
keeping fast day, who have no fire,
and no dinner, and no home, and
no hope. You must remember them.
You know that it is quite possible to
be viciouslY thankful. There is a thanks
giving which ministers to pride and self
cOmplacence and unbrotherliness. You re-
member how one man, at church and in his
prayers, began his sacrifice OF thanksgiving
after this fashion: GOD, 1 thank Thee"
he said, ''that am not rs other men are"
That turned the virtue of thanksgiving
straight about, reversed il, made contradic-
ton OF it. Genuine thanksgiving has always
q bit of regret about it-of regret that all
men are not we are, enjoying the same
blessings, graced and upIiited by the same
privileges.
We are apt to think that when everything
is right with US everything is righ; with the
whole world. We are sound in body, and
everybody else's sickness is a sort of deiu-
sion, or at least state of things which we
can but dimly understand. We live our pleas
ant lives, with a roof over our heads, and
dinner every day-and particularly good
one on Thanksgiving Day-with clean
clothes to wear and steady work to do. and
good friends. And we have an idea that
that sort of life is pretty common among
men. = few are poor, others are in Jail;
but for the most part human beings are
fairly comfortable. II they are not, some
thing is the matter with their morals. The
worli is Oh the whole a pretty decent, COM
Portable and well-conducted world. And
then we read a bit of poetry like this:
With gates of silver and bars of gold,
Ye have fenced my sheep from my Fathers
fold;
Ihave heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven, these eighteen hundred years.
Q Lord and Master. not ours the guilt
We build but our fathers built;
Behold Thine im2 -, how they stand,
Sovereign and So. through all our land.
Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A lOw-browed, stunted. haggard man,
Anu q motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her family want and sin.
These set He in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear OF defilement, 10, here" sand He,
4 4uG tHtOgtS 9t nave HlduC Va D1S.
GENERAL BOOTHS PICTURES.
We read that, and it goes straight to our
hearts. We know that that is true. And
then We take up such book as SIN Dark
est England, filled paragraph upon para
graph, ard page after page, with the story
OF the life, for which there is no adjective
in human speech-the life for which hun
dreds of thousands OF our brothers and our
sisters are living at this very hour. And
we are oppressed with CONSERVATION. We
are saddeued beyond utterance. 1t
is well that we should be. And we
want to do something. Oh to
beiriend these riendless to seek and to save
these lost, to uplift these fallen, to feed these
armies of hunger, to bring little of the
light of heaven iuto this blackness of HE'LL,
And we remember, perhaps, that just that
was the work which Christ did. l suppose
that we think we are following Christ when
we try to assist the deserving poor. And
we are following Him a very little way. But
was that precisely what He came to do?
Those publicars and sinners with whom He
spent His days-do you imagine that they
were the deserving publicans and sinners?
He came to seek and save the lost, He said.
The lost the poor in whom the Lord Christ
was particularly interested were the unde'
serving poor
And when we sit down upon our feast Of
national gratitude, to reckon up what this
nation is doing Tor the undeserving poor,
what is the sum of il? We offer the unde'
serving poor the workhouse, the reform
school, the Jail and the penitentiary.
A little child is born in a city slum.
mot so much born as damned into the
world" His parents are drunken and un.
clean reprobates. He is cradled in dirt, and
gets his teaching in the street. Decency,
honesty, reverence are absolutely unknown
virtues. He is born a criminal as in the
damp and painless Congo forests children
are born savages. He has no chance. You
and 1, put in his place, seeing from child
hood what he sees, breathing the poisoned
air he breatnes, would be what he is.
AND HE HAS TO SUFFER.
When we get our hands upon this rasca
we punish him for being rascal. That il
the best we know. Weare not hard-hearteC
people We do not hate these children o
the slums, these undeserving poor, whom
our Master came to seek and save. But We
simply do not know anything better to do
Lock them up when they do anything yer,
bad. Kill them by electricity or otherwise
when they DO anything intolerably bad
What else can we do? e.
Neither were the old physicians cruel ol
hard hearted who went about among thei
patients with a sharp lancet in one hand anc
stout dose OF calomel in the other. They
simply did not know any better.
But here is a man who has q plan. Wht
Is he? He is st. Francis of Assist dwelling
in London. He is John Wesley alive il
u, ;.vt