News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1895-07-25

fairs Of that woman who keeps thread
and needle store as we'll as all the affairs
of Rothschild and a Stewart,
Tillers Of tie soil.
TEcn there axe all the ordinary farm
ers. We talk about agricultural life, and
we Immediately shoot off to talk about
Cincirnatus, the patrician, who went
from the pillow to a high position, and
after he got through the dictatorship in
2 days went back again to the plow
What encouragement is that to ordinary
farmers? The vast majority of them,
none Of them, will be patricians. Per-
haps none of them will be senators. If
any of them have relationships, it will
be over 40 or so or 100 acres of the old
homestead. What those men want is
grace to keep their patience while plow-
ing with balky oxen and to keep cheerful
amid the drought that destroys the corn
crop and that enables them to restore
the garden the day after the neighbor's
cattle have broken i'll and trampled out
the strawberry bed and gone through the
lima bean patch and eaten up the sweet
corn in such large quantities that they
must be kept from the " .lter lest they
swell up and die; grace in catching
weather that enables them Without i'm
precation to spread out the hay the third
time, although again and again and again
it has been almost ready for the NOW a
grace to doctor the COW with hollow
horn, and the sheep Tith the footrot, and
the horse with the distemper, and to COM
pei the unwilling acres to yield a liveli-
hood for the family, and schooling for
the children, and little extras to help the
older boy in business and something for
the daughters wedding outfit and lit
tie surplus for the time when the ankles
will get stiff with age and the breath
will be little short and the swinging
of the cradle through the hot harvest
field will bring on the old man S vertigo.
Better close up about Cincinnatus. l
know 500 farmers just as noble as he
was.
What they want is to know that they
have the friendship Of that Christ who
often drew his SMILES from the farmers
life, as when he said, "a sower went
forth to SOW" as when he built his best
parable out Of the scene Of a farmers
| boy coming back from his wanderings,
and the old farmhouse shook that night
with rural jubilee, and who compared
himself to lamb III the pasture field,
and who said the eternal God is farm
er, declaring, "My Father is the hus-
| boD1D,an },
Those stonemasons do not want to
hear about Christopher Wren, the archi'
tect, who built st. Paul's cathedral 1t
would be better to tell them how to
carry the nod Of brick up the ladder
without slipping, and how on cold
morning with the trowel to smooth off
the mortar and keep cheerful, and how
to be thankful to God for the plain food
taken from the pail by the roadside.
Carpenters standing amid the adj, and
the bit, and the plane and the broadax
need to be told that Christ was a car
penter, with his own hand welding
saw and hammer. Oh, this is tired
world, and it is an overworked world,
and it is an underfed world, and it is a
wrung out world, and men and women
need to know that there is rest and re-
cuperation in God and i'll that religion
which was not so much intended for
extraordinary people as for ordinary peo-
pie, because there are more Of them.
Healers of the Sick.
The healing profession has had its
Abercrombies and its Abernethys and its
Valentine Motifs and its Willard Par
kers, but the ordinary physicians do the
most Of the worlds medicining, and
they need to understand that while tax
ing diagnosis or prOgnOsis or writing
prescription Or compounding medica-
ment or holding the delicate pulse Of a
dying child they may have the presence
and the dictatiCn of the almighty doc
tor who took the case of the mailman,
and after he had torn off his garments
in foaming dementia clothed him again,
body and mind, and who lifted up the
woman who fer IS years had been bent
almost double with the rheumatism in
to graceful stature, and who turned the
scabs of leprosy into rubicund complex
ion, and who rubbed the numbness out
of paralysis, and who swung wide open
the closed windows of hereditary or ac-
cidental blindness until the morning
light came streaming through the feshly
easements, and who knows all the dis
eases and all the remedies and all the
herbs and all the catholicons, and is
monarch Of pharmacy and therapeutics,
and who has sent out 10000 doctors of
whom the world makes no record, bat
to prove that they are angels of mercy I
invoke the thousands of men whose all
ments have been assuaged and the thou
sands Of women to whom in crises of
pain they have been next to God in
benefaction.
Come, now, let us have q religion for
ordinary people in professions, in occu-
pations, in agriculture, in the household,
i'll merchandise, in everything. | salute
across the centuries Asyncritus, Phlegon,
Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, Philologus
and Julia.
First Of all, if you feel that you are
ordinary, thank God that you are not
extraordinary. l am tired and sick and
bored almost to death with extraordi-
nary people, They take all their time to
tell us how very extraordinary they
really are. You know as well as / do,
my brother and sister, that the most of
the useful work of the world is done by
unpretentious people who toll right on,
by nennla who do NOT oct 1nr1ch an