“TOILED all the night, and have taken nothing!” and the man of God turned wearily homewards, treading the dusty road, with head bent down, in anxious thought why so few yielded before the power of the word of God.
Plead as he might of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come,” hearts remained as hard as the rocky precipices of the Swiss mountains that surrounded them.
But not only thoughts of the unsaved knit his brow so sorrowfully, and brought that careworn look to his face; the lukewarmness of the children of God he felt even more deeply; the cold indifference with which they listened when he tried to rouse them to return to their “first love,” and to be more wholly for Christ. Turn which way he would, his path seemed hedged around with trial and difficulty, and now each perplexing circumstance came before him to add to the depression caused by what he feared had been hours of unsuccessful toil in the Master’s service.
A cheerful “Bon jour, monsieur!” (“Good day, sir!”) broke in on his reverie.
Looking up, he saw a poor man sitting breaking stones by the roadside. The tired preacher stopped and returned the greeting, hoping this might be another opening to speak of his Saviour.
“You have a heavy job for this hot afternoon, my friend.”
“Ah, monsieur, no rest for old Francois until the broiling sun has set; and I find some very hard stones in this heap.”
“You are not the only man, Francois, who has hard stones to break. I have many very hard ones, and, try as I may, I cannot manage to break them.”
“Well, monsieur, I can only tell you how I break mine. When I find a stone so hard that it will not give way before the hammer as I sit here, I just get down, and break it on my knees, and I never found that fail yet.”
The man of God turned away. Be had thought to speak a word to the poor stonebreaker of the Christ he served, but the Lord had sent by him a word to his own heart—a lesson he felt he sorely needed: “I get down and break it on my knees.”
D. & A. C.