The intelligencer. [volume] (Lexington, Mo.) 1887-1891, 1890-08-30

| You are to live them down. / saw a
farmer go out to get back q swarm of
bees that had wandered off from the
hive. AS he moved amid them they
buzzed around his head. and buzzeI,
around ms hands, and bu2zed around
his feet. II he had killed one of them
they would have stung him to death.
But he moved in their midst in perfect
placidity until he had captured the
swarm of wandering ices. And so l
have seen mon moving amid the annoy
ances, and the vexations and the assaults
Of life in such calm, Christian delibera-
ton that all the buzzing around about
their soul amounted to nothing. They
conquered, and above all they conquered
themselves.
60" you say, that's q very good the
DRY to preach on a hot day, but 1t won't
work" 1t will work. 1t has worked.
l believe it is the last Christian grace
we win. You know there are fruits
which we gather in June, and others in
July, and others in August, and others
In September, and still others in Octo-
Der; and nave to admit that this grace
of Christian forgiveness is about the
last fruit of the Christian soul.
We rear a great deal about the bitter
tongue. and the sarcastic tongue, and the
quick tongue, and the singing tongue;
but we know very little about the soft
tongue that breaketh the bone" We
read Hudibras, and Sterne, and Dear
Swift, and other apostles of acrimony,
but give little time to studying the ex-
ample of Him who was reviled, and yet
reviled not again. o. that the Lord, by
His spirit would endow us all with ''the
soft tongue that breaketh the bone"
1 pass now to the other thought that
/ desire to present, and that is, kind
ness as q means of usefulness. In all
communities you find skeptical men.
Through early education, or through
the maltreatment of professed Christian
people, or through prying curiosity
about the future world, there are a great
many people who become skeptical in
religious things. How shall you capture
them for God? Sharp argument and
sarcastic retort never won q single soul
from skepticism to the Christian relig-
ion. While powerful books on the
Evidences of Christianity" rave their
mission in confirming Christian people
in the faith they have already adopted,
l have noticed that when skeptical peo-
pie are brought into the Kingdom of
Christ 1t is through the charm Of genial
soul and not by argument at all. Men
are not saved through the head; they are
saved through the heart. A storm comes
out of it's hiding place. 1t says: Nov
we'll just rouse up all this sea-" and it
uoa1ran a rrroot h1,,a1o, bat - Ioaa -at
succeed. Part Of the sea is reused Up
perhaps one half OF 1t or one-fourth of
it. After a while the calm moon, placid
and beautiful, looks down, and the ocean
begins to rise. 1t ONE up to high
water mark. 1t embraces the great
headlands. 1t submerges the beaches
of all the continents. 1t is the heart
throb of one world against the heart
throb of another world.
And 1 nave to tell you hat while all
your storms of ridicule and storms Of
sarcasm may rouse up the passion of an
immortal nature, nothing less than the
attractive power of Christian kindness
can ever raise the deathless spirit to
happiness and to God. l have more
faith in the prayer of a child five years
old, in the way Of bringing an inidel
back to Christ and to Heaven, than 1
have in all the Kissing thunderbolts of
ecclesiastical controversy.
You can not overcome men with re-
ligious augmentation. II you come at
a skeptical man with an argument on
behalf of the Christian religion, you
put the man on his mettle. He says:
81 see that man a a carbine. I'll use
my carbine. I'll answer his argument
with my argument" But If you come
to that man, persuading him hat you
desire his happiness on earth. and his
eternal welfare in the world to come,
he can not answer 1t.
What / nave said is just as true in the
reclamation of the openly vicious. Did
you ever know q drunkard to be saved
through the caricature of q drunkard?
Your mimicry of the staggering step,
and he thick tongue, and the disgust
ing ~hiccough, only worse maddens his
brain. But If you come to him in kind
ness and sympathy; If you show him
that you appreciate the awful grip Of q
depraved appetite; If you persuade him
of the fact hat thousands who had the
| PPi hOOho Vi cNll INCLINATION
clutched in their soul as firmly as ip his
have been delivered, then a ray of light
will flash across his vision, and it will
seem as If a supernatural hand were
steadying his gait.
A good many years g there lay in
the streets a man dead drunk, his face
exposed to the blistering noon day sun.
A Christian woman passed along, looked
at him, and said: "Poor fellow" She
took her handkerchief and spread 1t
over his face, and passed on. The man
reused himself up from hisdebauch, and
began to look at the handkerchief, and,
lol or 1t was the name of a highly re-
spectacle Christian woman of the city.
He went to her, he thanked her for her
kindness, and that one little deed saved
him for this life and saved him for tho
life that is to come. lie was afterward
Acknowledgement OF the United States,
but, higher h a all, he became the con-
secrated disciple of Jesus Christ.
Kind words are so cheap it is a won
der we do not use them o~ftener. There
are ems of thousands of people who are
dying for the lack of one kind word.
There Is n business man who has fought
against trouble until he is perfectly ex-
hausted. He has been thinking about
forgery, about robbery, about suicide.
Go to that business nan Tell him that
better times are coming, and tell him
that you yourself were in a tight bust
ness pass and the Lord delivered you.
Tell him to put his trust in God. Tell
him that Jesus Christ stands beside
every business man in his perplexities.
Tell him Of the sweet promises of Gods
comforting grace. That man is dying
for the lack of just n kind work. Go
tomorrow and utter that one saving,
omnipotent kind word. Here is a soul
thathas been swamped in sin. He wants
to find tho light of the Gospel. He feels
like a shipwrecked mariner looking out
over the beach, watching for a sail
against the sky. o, bear down on him.
Tell him hat the Lord waits to be gra-
cious to him, and though he has been a
great sinner there is a great Saviour
provided. Tell him that though his
sins are as scarlet they shall be as snow,
though they are red like crimson theI