"There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat; and he that watereth shall be watered also himself.” "Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For the same measure you mete withal it shall be measured to you again." "He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly." "He who would sacrifice at manhood's altar must come with no mean offering. He must be generous and broad as Nature herself." "He who has little, to him who has less can spare." "The great depend on their hearts, not on their purses." "It is not the wealthy who are the generous givers." In our eagerness to make the most of life we must never forget the great paradox that we can get only by giving. Only he who loses his life shall find it. No sowing, no reaping, however warm the sun, gentle the rain, or congenial the soil. Gladstone in the midst of pressing duties found time to visit a poor sick boy whom he had seen sweeping the street crossings. He endeared himself to the heart of the English people by this more than by many of the great things he did; as did Phillips Brooks by caring for a baby in the slums of Boston, that its mother might go out and get fresh air, endear himself to the American people more than by many great acts of his noble life. "The door between us and heaven cannot be open while that between us and our fellow-men is shut." The best thing about giving of ourselves is that what we get is always better than what we give. The reaction is greater than the action. We give time and money to the poor and unfortunate, but we develop charity and benevolence—the most divine virtues. "It is now pouring rain," wrote William Howard Russell from the English camp at the Crimea; "the skies are black as ink; the wind is howling over the staggering tents; the trenches are turned into dikes; in the tents the water is sometimes a foot deep; our men have neither warm nor waterproof clothing; they are out for twelve hours at a time in the trenches; they are plunged into the inevitable miseries of a winter campaign,and not a soul seems to care for their comfort, or even for their lives. These are hard truths, but the people of England must hear them. They must know that the wretched beggar who wanders about the streets of London in the rain leads the life of a prince, compared with the British soldiers who are fighting out here for their country. The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting; there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness. The fetid air can barely struggle out to taint the atmosphere, save through the chinks in the walls and roofs; and, for all I can observe, these men die without the least effort being made to save them. The sick appear to be tended by the sick, and the dying by the dying." The winter of 1854 brought snow three feet deep on a level, and many were frozen in their tents. Of an army of forty-five thousand, over eighteen thousand were in the hospitals, with a death rate of sixty per cent. in the "Great Barrack." As if from the heaven that bent so blue above, it seemed to the suffering soldiers, the "Angel of the Crimea" appeared. But no, she was flesh and blood, from one of the most beautiful homes of England; a wealthy, handsome, accomplished maiden, whose heart had been touched by the smothered wail of distress that quivered in the southern breezes. Florence Nightingale came with an idea and thirty-four trained nurses. She found cholera raging in a camp where water was a foot deep, and the air was reeking with the poisonous. effluvia from the unburied dead. The country was almost impassable for the horses which should have brought supplies, men were but half clothed or fed, and filth and pestilence were reaping a ghastly harvest. She established a laundry, an invalid's kitchen, a course of entertaining lectures for convalescents; arranged for draining the camp; and then began to give personal attention to the sufferers. She was nobly aided by her sister nurses. Now gently smoothing the pillow of a dying man, now writing letters home for those whose nerveless hands were unequal to the task, here speaking an encouraging word, and there bestowing a smile of sympathy, these angels in human form flitted around the beds of the suffering soldiers to such good effect that in a year and a half the death rate was reduced to a little over one per cent. "Blessed are the merciful," took on a new meaning to many a sick man as he watched those radiant faces and lissome forms that seemed to float in Godlike ministry through the crowded wards of the Crimean hospitals. "Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the spoiler most distressingly nigh," wrote the correspondent of the London "Times," "there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a 'ministering angel,' without any exaggeration, in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon these miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed, alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds." "She would speak to one and another," a soldier wrote home, "and nod and smile to many more; but she could not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on our pillows again content." I often wonder what the selfishness and hard-hearted ness of the human race would lead to had not a kind Providence placed amongst us the poor and wretched, that the sight of their misfortunes might stimulate us to keep alive the spark of charity and benevolence which He implanted in the human breast. The poor and unfortunate are our opportunity, our character-builders, the great schoolmasters of our moral and Christian growth. Every kind and noble deed performed for others is transmuted into food which nourishes the motive promoting its performance, and strengthens the muscles of habit. Grander discoveries than any that have yet been made, revelations that lay beyond the ken of Bacon's far-seeing vision, and beauties that shone outside the imagination of Shakespeare, await the evoking power of philanthropic genius. Benevolence is a world of itself, a world which mankind, as yet, has hardly begun to explore. Justice, love, honor, truth, are the corner-stones of the holy government which is yet to be organized upon earth. For all true-hearted adventurers into these new realms of enterprise there are moral Edens to be planted, such as Milton with his celestial verse could never describe; and there are heights of moral sublimity to be attained, such as Rosse, with his telescope, could never descry. "I was only twenty-four years of age when in Paris, whither I had gone with means given me by a friend," said Louis Agassiz, the great zoologist; "but I was at last about to resign my studies, from want of ability to meet my expenses. Professor Mitscherlich was then on a visit in Paris, and he had asked me what was the cause of my depressed feelings; I told him I had to go for I had nothing left. The next morning, as I was seated at breakfast, in front of the yard of the hotel where I lived, I saw the servant of Humboldt approach. He handed me a note, saying there was no answer, and disappeared. I opened the note, and I see it now be fore me as distinctly as if I held the paper in my hand. It said: "My friend, I hear that you intend leaving Paris in consequence of some embarrassment. That shall not be. I wish you to remain here as long as the object for which you came is not accomplished. I inclose you a check for fifty pounds. It is a loan which you may repay when you can." Charity never faileth. From a lighted candle a thousand others may be lit without diminishing its flame. What an abounding charity was shown in the life of Christ! Reviled, He reviled not again, but steadily, earnestly, unfalteringly pursued His object, the leadership and love of mankind. The same yesterday, to-day, and forever, He wins his onward way by the influence of His perfect humanity in scarcely less degree than by His divine attributes. "True," "Every man shall bear his own burden." says Bulwer, "but now turn to an easier verse in the same chapter, 'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ."" "If any little word of mine can make a life the brighter, If any little song of mine can make a heart the lighter, God help me speak the little word, and take my bit of singing |