Wauwatosa News

ten minutes' walk there are stores, shops, and factories, and homes where as brave deeds have been done as those of Leonidas at Thermopylae, as that of Horatius at the bridge, as that of Colin Campbell at Balaklava. Tell them what Napoleon said to his staff officer when that officer declared a certain military attempt to be impossible. "Impossible!" said the great commander. "Impossible is the adjective of fools."

Show them also that what is true in worldly directions is more true in spiritual directions. Call the roll of prophets apostles and martyrs and private Christians from the time the world began and ask them to mention one man or woman greatly good or useful who was not depreciated and flailed and made a laughing stock. Racks and prisons and whips and shipwrecks and axes of beheadment did their worst, yet the heroes were more than conquerors. With such things you will illustrate that word "courage," and they will go out from your presence to start anew and right, challenging all earth and hell to the combat.

"Good morning! How do you do today?" said a clergyman in New Haven many years ago to a stonemason who was covered with dust and mortar. The stonemason was sour with the world and cross and crabbed, but at that salutation of the clergyman looked up in surprise and stopped and asked some one who was passing who that man was who spoke to him so kindly and was told he was the pastor of a church on that street. The stonemason next Sunday went to that church to hear its pastor preach. The stonemason was converted under the sermon and prepared for the ministry and became one of the most useful and brilliant and foremost ministers in the Baptist denomination. I heard him in my boyhood say on the anniversary platform in Broadway tabernacle that that good morning on the street of New Haven many years before saved him for this world and the next.

Words of Comfort.

That word "courage" fitly spoken with compressed lips and stout grip of the hand and an intelligent flash of the eye— well, the finest apples that ever thumped on the ground in an autumnal orchard and were placed in the most beautiful basket of silver network before keen appetites could not be more attractive.

Furthermore, a comforting word fitly spoken is a beautiful thing. No one but God could give the inventory of sick beds and bereft homes and broken hearts. We ought not to let a day pass without a visit or a letter or a message or a prayer consolatory. You could call five minutes on your way to the factory. you could leave a half hour earlier in the afternoon and fill a mission of solace. You could brighten a sick room with one chrysanthemum. You could send your carriage and give an afternoon airing to an invalid on a neighboring street. You could loan a book with some chapters most adapted to some particular misfortune. Go home to-day and make out a list of things you can do that will show sympathetic thoughtfulness for the hardly bestead. How many dark places you might illumine! How many tears you could stop, or, if already started, you could wipe away: How much like Jesus Christ you might get to be! So sympathetic was he with beggary, so helpful was he for the fallen, and so stirred was he at the sight of dropsy, epilepsy. paralysis and ophthalmia that whether he saw it by the roadside, or at the sea beach, or at the mineral baths of Bethesda. he offered relief. Cultivate genuine sympathy, Christlike sympathy. You cannot successfully dramatize it. False sympathy Alexander Pope sketches in two lines:

Before her face her handkerchief she spread To hide the flood of tears she did not shed

There are four or five words which. fitly spoken, might soothe and emancipate and rescue. Go to those from whose homes Christ has taken to himself a loved one and try the word "reunion" not under wintry sky. but in everlasting springtide: not a land where they can be struck with disease. but where the inhabitant never says, "I am sick." not a reunion that can be followed by separation. but in a place "from which they shall go no more out forever." For emaciation and sighing, immortal health. Reunion, or, if you like the word better, anticipation. There is nothing left for them in this world. Try them with heaven. With a chapter from the great book open one of the twelve gates. Give them one note of seraphic harp, one flash from the sea of glass, one clatter of the hoofs of the horses on which victors ride. That word reunion, or anticipation. fitly spoken—well, no fruit heaped in silver baskets could equal it. Of the 2,000 kinds of apples that have blessed the world not one is so mellow or so rich or so aromatic, but we take the suggestion of the text and compare that word of comfort. fitly spoken, to apples of gold in baskets of silver.

A Word of Warning.

So also is a word of warning. A ship may sail out of harbor when the sea has not so much as a ripple, but what a fool hardy ship company would they be that made no provision for high winds and wrathful seas. However smoothly the voyage of life may begin we will get rough weather before we harbor on the other side, and we need ever and anon to have some one uttering in most decided tones and words "beware." There are all the temptations to make this life everything and to forget that an inch of ground is larger as compared with the whole earth than this life as compared with our eternal existence. There are all the temptations of the wine cup and the demijohn, which have taken down as grand men as this or any other century has heard of. There are all the temptations of pride and avarice and base indulgence and ungovernable temper. There is no word we all need oftener to hear than the word "beware."

The trouble is that the warning word is apt to come too late. We allow our friends to be overcome in a fight with some evil habit before we sound all alarm. After a man is all on fire with evil habit your word of warning will have no more effect than would a address to a house on fire asking it to stop burning, no more use than a steam tug going out to help a ship after it has sunk to the bottom of the ocean. What use in word of warning to that inebriate whose