Connecticut western news., 1900-02-01

excited brow, or uecKon Into saIeIy. Oh, the helping hands. There are hun ireds of thousands of them, and the world wants at least 1.6oo,oo0,o00 of them. Hands to bless others: hands to rescue others; hands to save others. What are all these schools and church, es and asylums of mercy? outstretch, ed hands. What are all those hands tracts and carrying medi- cines and trying to cure blind eyes and deaf ears and broken bones and disor- dered inteilects and wayward sonsf Helping hands. Let each one of us add to that number. if we have two. or If through casualty only one add that one. If these hands which we have so long kept thrust into pockets incidence or folded in ind!ffer- ence or employed in writing wrong things or doing mean things or heaving up obstacles in the way of righteous progress might from this hour be con seerated to helping others out and up and on. they would be hands worth being raised on the resurrection morn and worth clapping in eternal gladness over world redeemed.
 The great artists of the ages-Ra- phael and Leonardo da Ninci and Quentin Matsys and Rembrandt and Albert Durer and Titian-have done their best in picturing the face of Christ, but none except Ary Sche fer seems to have put much stress upon the hand of Christ. Indeed, the mercy of that hand. the gentleneSs of that hand. is beyond all artistic portrayal Some of his miracles he performed by word of mouth and without touching the subject before him, but most of them he performed through the hand Was the dead damsel to be raised to life?. He took her by the hand" Was the blind man to have optic nerve re- stored? "He took him by the hand" Was the demon to be exercised from a suffering man? He took him by the hand" The people saw this and be- sought him to put his hand upon their afflicted ones.
 The Lords Sympathy.
 His own hands free, see how the Lord sympathized with the man who had lost the use of his hand. It was a case of atrophy, a wasting away until the arm and hand had been reduced in size beyond any medical or surgical Moreover, it was his right hand. the most important of the two, for the left side in all it's parts is weak CT than the right side. and we involun- tarily in any eXigency put out the right hand because we know it is the best hand. So that poor man had lost more than half of his physical armament. It would not have been so bad if it had been the left hand But Christ looked at that shriveled' up right hand dangling uselessly at the mans side and then cried out with a voice that had omnipotence in it, Stretch forth thy hand," and the record is, "He stretched 1t forth whole as the other" The blood rushed through the shrunk- en veins, and the shortened muscles and the dead nerves thrill ed, and the lifeless fingers tingled with circulation, and the restored man held up in the presence of the skeptical PhariSeeS one of Sehovah's perfect hand. No won der that story Is put three times in the Bible. so that if a sailor were cast away on a barren island or a soldiers 8 New Testament got mutilated in battle and whole pages are destroyed the or wounded man in hos pital would probably have at least one of those three radiant stories of what Christ thought of the human hand.
 How often has the hand decided a destiny, Mary, queen of Scots, was escaping from imprisonment at Loch- lever in the dress of laundress and had her face thickly yelled. When a boatman attempted to remove the veil, she put up her hand to defend it and so revealed the white and fair hand of a queen, and so the boatman took her back to captivity. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the hand hath a language as certainly as the mouth. Palmistry, or the science by which character and destiny are read in the lines of the hand. Is yet crude and uncertain and unsatisfactory. but as astrology was the mother of astron- omy and alchemy was the mother of chemistry it may be that palmistry will result in science yet to be born.
 Again. as the chief executive officer of the soul, behold the hand busy in the arts. What a comparatively dull place this world would be without pie lures, without statuary. without music, without architectural Have you ever realized what 50 seeming miracles are in the five minutes lingering of piano or harp or flute? Who but the eternal God could make hand capable of that swift sweep of the keys or that quick feeling of the pulses of a flute or the twirl of the fingers amid the strings of the harp? All the composers of music who dreamed out the oratorios and the cantatas of the ages would have had their work dropped flat and useless but for the translations of the hand. Un- der the delft fingers of the performer what cavalries gallop and what bat teries boom and what birds carol and what tempests march and what oceans pillow, The great architects of the earth might have thought out the AL hambras and the Parthenons and the St. Sophias and the Tai Mahals, but all those visions would have vanished had 1t not been for the hand on hammer, on plummet, on trowel, on wall, on arch, on pillar, on stairs, on dome.
 The Triumphant Hand.
 In two discourses, one concerning the ear and the other concerning the eye, i spoke from the potent text in the Psalms, He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?" and "He that formed the eye, shall he not see?' but what use in the eye and what use in the ear if the hand had not been strung with all it's nerves and nAoved with all it's muscles and reticulated with all its joints and with all it's bones and contrived with all its ingenuities, The hand hath forwarded all the arts and tunneled the mountains through which hn To