The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-02-05
A. LATADY CONTRIBUTES STRIKING LETTER ON THE
 RESURRECTION THEME,

l very helplessness to drive them off; who was the personification of reproach for scorn to point it's slow, unmoving finger
 at, shall have no hope beyond such pitt | ful existence? Shall he, if he entertain
 any idea of a God, entertain no higher 1 ideal of a just God than that his misery
 in that Gods idea of human happiness? | And if he suffer patiently and without
 cursing his God that he may die and end | his misery, by what energy of his inmost
 soul is he sustained in patience in res ignation? Call it faith call it hope; call 1 it beliefl invent. some new term of your
 own which shall convey to the intelligent
 mind some suggestion of your own idea 1 of this inward energy and resignation of ! ed in the patience and resignation of | this suffering bit of human flesh to the vistations which have been heaped upon
 it by a just God, and let us see if after
 all your own chosen term is not. express
 sive of the substance of the deep-rooted | convictions of this man of afflictions. | Shall it be that on this earth by some l caprice of chance, some feat of thauma- turgy, he shall be suddenly transformed ] into some prince or potentate, and there 1 by brought into the joys of this world?
 This will not serve; he may be some quite | matter of fact Chrstofer Sly after all, | who is sufficiently acquainted with him. self and his antecedents to know that being himself a tinker he is the son of a tinker who was the son of tinker, who was the son of a tinker, and who l cannot be brought to believe that in his veins the blood of potentate prince | could ever flow. Or, rising above all | Christofer Slys, he may be some Job | whose intelligence so far outdistances the | most eXtravagant aspirations of distress
 and poverty as to set at naught all mere | ly idle fancies and fairy tales The most l pXt thaun11
 make no appeal to him; this trust is in | the power of God alone, yet he looks not for it's exercise upon him in this life, | trough in the case of Job it came, and 1 yet the pearl of thought we are consd ering, dropped from his lips when he was steeped to them in afflictons and the pencil of the sacred annalist has labored | more in depicting the afflictions of Job, ] than in the record of his felicities. There
 I is in man that something higher than the realization of human comfort, saturation
 and satation. These are to be achieved | through no energy of the soul but the rather through the energies of the flesh l to the too frequent suppression and suf-
 rocation of all energy of the soul; and yet when this same despcable, miserable l body is chained down by poverty, afflic- 1 tion and sorrow, then, as it were does the I soul assert itself, nor is there any known
 terrestrial power which can place upon 1 the limitless boundaries and duration of l its energies, the temporal limits of an | earthly existence. Although this dull 1 slow-moving bit of clay be quite un- | equal to the flight, yet can the soul of | man take the wings of the morning, and l herewith go to the uttermost parts of 1 the earth in the twinking of an eye. And who shall hinder it? Shall the hu- 1 man wind entertain its beautiful conceit
 of angels upbearing some sweet little child ] which has been beguiled to everlasting sleep like some flower unfolding to its last l suspiring breath; and shall it be denied | the conceit of this same heavenly tender
 ness and ministration bestowed upon yon- der unfortunate conscript of yours and
 or mine, whose horny palm and knotted l fingers bespeak our labors performed; ! whose back so bent over is eloquent of your burdens and mine so patiently l borne; whose eyes so bedimmed look at us 1 is pitying appeal for ray of the light which has gladdened us; and shall we be so ungenerous as to deny the thought: | ''Of the closing, enow, of that long, sun l less day,
 Which imprisoned his soul in his mis- shapen clay:
 | Of his dum inarticulate sobs and his prayers
 1 For surcease from his sorrows, his | troubles and cares"
 | Ndu we ueny nlm ms COnCelt Of his 1 shabby garments now made winter than ! snow; of his care-worn face so deeply furroWed by the tillage of time, now made sun bright and joyful (for the most unpoetical would not send him into an- other life with all the deformities and 1 infrmities of this one) and can you deny | to the ear of that tempest-tossed soul some echo of the chorus for which he has listened patiently: Well done good and faithful" Our conscript and cherub have both vanished from this earth in a vision of loveliness; they have gone to their God, to my God, and to thine; to their Father in heaven. thy Father. and mine; to the Father which in every grass blade doth beam, and by whom cen the fall of a sparrow is seen, and the joys of the one and the sorrows of the other are soon forgotten-but we have had our dream, for which the heay- ems be praised.
 But returning to the realities of life again are the conceits of the rich, and of the learned. and of the pampered and petted Of this world to be the mea sure or those of the poor, the unlearned the starved and neglected of this world Deep down in the hearts of men are there not some well grounded suspicious that wealth and learning and pampering and betting tend to the deadening of the senses to the legimate energies of the souls Of the poor, and of the unlearned and of the starved and of the neglected of this world, to justice and equity? Is not this same consoling idea of future life. in this very skin and flesh. born of this same energy of the souls of the poor. the unfortunate and the neglected, to justice which, in what we term their faith, their love. their belief, or what you will, has found expression? Was it not through this same energy of the soul that the multitudes in Judea adhered to the Pharisee who believed in the resurrection; and do not the multi tudes even now, Jew and Christian alike. still adhere to the opponents of the idea
 which, as we have proposed above. is in this y-voicedness, the voice of God? It is written: God choose them that are poor to this world to be rich in faith"
 and does there not turk herein the inter- pretation of the comparison of faith with
 milk and honey for neither milk nor
 honey may be preserved in vessels of gold
 or silver, but in vessels of earthenware
 only, which are of the humblest, even
 as faith is best preserved in the hearts
 and minds Of the meek, and the humble
 and tha lnWlv pf this world Tbaxx ,ra