The age-herald., 1902-01-19

cough and the rheumatic twinge or those who through destitution find life in winter an agony. Suppose each one ol us take under charge one poverty strlck- en household or one disabled man or one invallded woman. On our way home from such charity, though the wind may be bowling and the night tempestuous. l should not wonder if we could hear voice that was heard on Galilee and at the gates of Main and by the pool of Bethesda, ye did it to me"
 Victories of the Frost.
 Oh. the might of the cold The artie and antarctic invading the temperate zone! The victories of the frost-as when the Thames in 1905 became firm as any bridge and the inhabitants crossed and recross- ed on the ice and booths and places of temporary amusement were built on the hardened surface; as when many years ago New York harbor was paved with ice so that the peope passed on foot to the adjoining islands But the full story of the cold will never be known. The lips which would have told it were frog en and the fingers that would have writ ten it were benumbed. Only here and th/re fact appears. In 1891 the cold was so terrific that the wolves entered Yien- na. In 146S it was so cold that wine was cut with hatchets and distributed among the soldiers. In 1234 a whole forest was killed by the cold at Ravenna. In 765 the Black sea was frozen over. As we go further back tho frosts are mightier, but as we come further down the frosts les sen. The worst seventies have been halt ed, and the snows have lost their depths, and the thermometers announce less ter rife falls of temperature, and the time will come when the year will be one long summer of foliage and bloom. While the worlds moral condition will be reform ed the worst climates will be corrected You could not have a millennium with a | January blast possible.
 | Behold, also as it is possible in no other month of the year, the wondrous l anatomy of the trees in January. the | leaves of the last year all gone and not so much as a bud of a new botanical wardrobe appearing the trees standing with arms stretched toward heaven, one l of the greatest evidences of the wisdom and the power of the Creator. The leaves | appear only once and then die. but these | great arms are stretched up toward heav- | en in silent prayer for scores of years, l now mailed with ice, now robed In snow | or lowing to the God of the tempests as he passes in the midnight hurricane. In | July the trees stand glorifying the earth; l in January they stand defying the win | with his toy and growing up to man. hood. sits under 1t in sentimental or phil osophic mood and, having passed on to | old age, rests himself under it's shade. In | these January days the trees seem to | say: "The leaves that rustled their music | in the last summer are dead and gone but the leaves that will adorn this un- | covered brow and these bare arms shall have as much beauty and glory as their | n..I tiful and lovely things in your life, O human spectator Oh. the treel Only the Almighty and the Infinite could have made one Gothic architecture was sug- gested by 1t. But for the arch of it's bough and the pointing of it's branches the St. Chapelle O. Paris and other speci- mems of Gothic arch would never have been lifted. No wonder the world has ta- ken from it many styles of suggestive ness-the laurel for the victor, the will low for the sorrowing, the aspen for the trembling, the cypress for the buriall But, unlike ourselves, they cannot change their places and so stand watering all that passes. Some of them are solemn monuments of the centuries. Thank God l for the trees. their beauty, their shelter, | their interlacing branches-not only for | the trees in June time coronation but in January privation of everything but l RraceIul structure! Let the 1cOnoclaStic axe not be lifted against them. "Woodmna spare that tree.'
 The increasing Daylight.
 Behold also in this January month the increasing daylight. Last month the sun went down at 4:30, but in this month the days are getting longer. The sunrise and the sunset are farther apart. Sunlight in stead of artificial light, and there is for our dear old battered earth growing light
 "The day-spring from on high hath visit ed us" We shall have more light for the home, more light for the church. more light for the nation, more light for the world-light of intelligence, light of com fort, light of rescue, light of evangeliza- ton. light from the face of God, light from the throne. But you say, the light increases so slowly, eacn day of this Jan uary only one minute longer than it's pre- decessor, the sun setting the 1st day of January at o'clock and 43 minutes, the 41.. I..w q