Newport weekly independent., 1901-08-30

the pOrthOleS ready to open battle, but the tiny craft on the Nile seems to be armed with all the guns of thunder that bombarded Sinai at the lawgiyinr. On how fragile craft sailed how much of historical Importance!
 An English ship stopped at Pitcairn island, and right in the midst of sur rounding cannibalism and squalor the passengers discovered a Christian col ony of churches and schools and beau tiful homes and highest style of reli- zion and civilization. Fir 50 years no missionary and no Christian influence had landed there. Why this oasis of
 light amid a desert of heathendom? Sixty years before a ship had met dis aster, and one of the sailors, una ble to save anything else, went to his trunk and took out a Bible which his mother had placed there and swan ashore, the Bible in his teeth. The book was read on all sides until the rough and vicious | population were evangelized, and a church was started and an enlightened commonwealth esta blished, and the worlds history has no more brilliant
 
 formation of nation by one book. It | did not seem of much importance whether the sailor continued to hold the book in his teeth or let it fall in the breakers, but upon what small circumstances depended what mighty results!
 Practical inference: There are no lnSlOnjfipanpoc ir, ,,o; thing is part of magnitude. Infin- ity is made up of infnitesimals; great things an aggregation of small things. Bethlehem manager pulling on a star in the eastern sky. One book in drenched sailors mouth the evan- gelization of multitude One boat of papyrus on the Nile freighted with events for all ages. The fate of Christendom in a basket let down from window on the wall. What you do, do well. If you make a rope, make it strong and true, for you know not how much may depend on your workmanship. If you fashion boat, let it be waterproof, for you know not who may sail in it. If you put Bible in the trunk of your boy as he goes from home, let it be re- membered in your prayers, for it may have mission as farreachng as the book which the sailor carried in his teeth to the Pitcairn beach, The plalnest mans life is an island be- tween two eternities-eternity past ripping against his shoulders, eter- nlty to come touching his brow. The casual, the accidental, that which merely happened so, are parts of great plan, and the rope that lets the fugitive apostle from the Damascus wall is the cable that holds to it's mooring the ship of the church in the storm of the centuries.
 Again, notice unrecognized and un- recorded service. Who spun that rope? Who tried it to the basket? Who steadied the illustrious preacher as he stepped into it? Who relaxed not a muscle of the arm or dismissed an anxious look from his face until the basket touched the ground and discharged it's magnificent cargo? Not one of their names has come to us. But there was no work done that day in Damascus or in all the earth compared with the importance of their work. What if they had in their agitation tied knot that could slip? What if the sound of the mob at the door had led them to say: Paul must take care of himself and we will take care of ourselves" No, no! They held the rope, and in doing so did more for the Christian church than any thousand of us will ever ac- complish. But God knows and has made record of their undertaking. And they know.
 How exultant they must have felt when they read his letters to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, to the Colossians, to the Thess alonians, and when they heard how he walked out of prison, with the earthquake unlocking the door for him, and took command of the Alexandrian corn ship when the sailors were nearly scared to death and preached sermon that nearly shook Felix off his judgment seat l hear the men and women who helped him down through the window and over the wall talking in private over the matter and saying: "How glad am that we effected that rescue. In coming times others may get the glory of Paul's work, but no one shall rob us of the satisfaction of knowing that we held the rope"
 But there must come a time when we shall find out who these Damascenes were who lowered Paul l>oel,o+ o,l o,.o>4 I,