The enterprise. [volume] (Wellington, Ohio) 188?-1899, 1898-05-11

NOlhdIlg WIZ IloCS dI lldll- Ddob ~ III blAC
morning and retires after midnight,
one of the trashiest of novels in her
hands most of the time between the
late rising and the late retirement-a
thousand of them not worth one Zip
porah.
There is question that every father
and mother ought to ask the daughter
at breakfast or tea table, and that all
the daughters of the wealthy sheik
ought to ask each other: What would
you do if the family fortune should fail,
if sickness should PROSTATE the bread
winner, if the focks of Jethro should be
destroyed by sudden excursion of
wolves and bears and hyenas from the
mountain? What would you do for a
living? Could you support yourself?
Can you take care of an invalid mother
or brother or sister as well as your
self?" Yea, bring it down to what
any day might come to prosperous
family. Can you cook a dinner if
the servants should make strike for
higher wages and leave that morn
ing" Every minute of every hour of
every day of every year there are fam
lilies flung from prosperity into hard
ship, and, alas! if in such exigency the
seven daughters of Jethro can do moth
ing but sit around and cry and wait
for some one to come and hunt them
up situation for which they have no
qualification. Get at something use
full; get at it right away. Do not say:
eff were thrown upon my own re-
sources would become a music teach
er." There are now more music teach
ers than could be supported if they
were all Mozarts and Wagners and
Handels. Do not say: 81 will go to
embroidering slippers" There are
more slippers now than there are feet.
Our hearts are every day wrung by the
story of elegant women who were
once atfiuent, but through catastrophe
have fallen helpless, with n ability to
take care of themselves.
And you will have to go down before
you go up. From the pit into which
his brothers threw him and the prison
in which his enemies incarcerated him,
Joseph rose to be Egyptian prime min
lister. Elijah, who was to be the great
est of all the ancient prophets, Elijah,
who made King Ahab's knees knock to-
gether with the prophecy that the
dogs would be his only undertakers
Elijah, whose one prayer brought more
than three years of drought, and whose
other prayer brought drenching show
ers; the man who wrapped up his cape
of sheepskin into a roll and with it cut
path through raging Jordan for just
two to pass over; the man who with
wheel of fire rode over death and es
capped into the skies without mortuary
disintegration; the man who, thousands
of years after. was called out of the
eternities to stand beside Jesus Christ
on Mount Tabor when it was s5lazt
with the splendors of TRANSFORMATION
this man could look back to the time
when voracious and filthy ravens were
his only caterers.
See also in this call of Moses thai
God has great memory. Four hun
dred years before he had promised thu
deliverance of the oppressed Israelite'
of Egypt. The clock of time hal
struck the hour, and now Moses il
called to the work of rescue. Foul
hundred years is very long time, bu
you see God can remember promise
400 years as well as you can remember
400 minutes. Four hundred years in
cludes all your ancestry that you know
anything about and all the promise.
made to them, and we may eXpec
fulfillment in our heart and life of al
the blessings predicted to our Chris
tian ancestry centuries ago. You have
dim remembrance, if any remem
brance at all, of your great-grand
father, but God sees those who were
on their knees in 1898 as well as thosC
on their knees in 1898, and all tn,
blessings he promised the former ant
their descendants have arrived, or vii
arrive While piety is not hereditary
it is grand thing to have had a piou'
ancestry. So God in this chapter CALL
up the pedigree of the people whom
Moses was to deliver, and Moses is or
dered to say to them, 1.-THE Lord Goo
of your fathers, the God of Abraham
the God of Isaac and the God of Jacol
hath sent me unto you" If tina
thought be divinely accurate, let m,
ask, What are we doing by prayer ant
by holy life for the redemption o
the next 400 years? Our work is no
only with the people of the latter par
of the nineteenth century, but will
those in the closing of the twentieth
century, and the closing of the twenty
first century, and the closing of tn,
twenty-second century, and the clos
ing of the twenty-third century. Fo
400 years, if the world continues t.
swing until that time, or if it drops
then Notwithstanding the infuenc,
will go on in other latitudes and longi
tudes of Gods universe.
No one realizes how great he is fol
good or for evil. There are branching'
out and rebounds, and reverberations
and Celebrations of influence that can
not be estimated. The fifty or one
hundred years of our earthly stay il
only small part of our sphere. The
flap of the wing of the destroying an
gel that smote the Egyptian oppress
ors, the wash of the Red sea over the
heads of the drowned Egyptians, were
all fulfllments of promises four cen
turies old. And things occur in YOU
life and in mine that we cannot accoun'
for. They may be the echoes of what
was promised in the sixteenth or seven
teenth century. Oh, the prolongatior