| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 14 |
Page 6 |
We may settle it, therefore, that every one has his own place and his own part in the body of the church. Some are to preach with eloquent tongue the gospel of Christ. Some who have not the gift of eloquence are to pray beside the altar. There is a story of a monk who spoke with power, and souls were melted. But he was told from heaven that “hearts were stirred, and saints were edified, and sinners won, by his, the poor lay brother’s humble aid, who sat upon the pulpit stairs and prayed.” If we cannot preach we can pray, and there may be more power in the praying than in the most eloquent preaching we could do.
Our little part is all we have to do in the Master’s work, but we must make sure that we do that. To fail in the lowliest place is to leave a flaw in God’s great plan. All duty is summed up in one – that we love one another. We are bound up in the bundle of life in most sacred associations with our fellow men. Whenever, through willfulness or through neglect, we fail in any duty of love, we leave some one helped who needed just what we could have given him.
It will be pathetic for any redeemed one to come home with no fruit of service. A guest at the Hospice of St. Bernard in the Alps tells this incident of one of the noble St. Bernard dogs that have saved so many men. This dog came struggling home one morning through the snow, exhausted and faint, till he reached the kennel. There he was wildly welcomed by the dogs. But sad and crest-fallen, he held his head and tail to the floor, and crept away and lay down in a dark corner of the kennel. The monks explained that he was grieved and ashamed because he had found no one to rescue that morning from the storm drifts. How shall we feel, we whom Christ has redeemed, if we come home at last, ourselves, without having brought any one with us?
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