Panaceas and Specifics.
A panacea is a cure-all. A specific is a sure cure.
In medicine there is no panacea, and quinine is about the only specific.
In morals there is only one panacea and only one specific, namely, love.
In government there are a thousand alleged panaceas and specifics—initiative and referendum, single tax, universal suffrage, short ballot, free trade, arbitration, and so on ad infinitum; but there is only one real panacea and specific, namely, brotherhood; that same love.
The formula is the Golden Rule.
Hammering the Rails.
The large number of railroad wrecks, especially those of express passenger trains, has set men to thinking and to writing. Many reasons have been assigned, pre-eminently the too great speed of the trains; but a leading specialist believes that a large factor in these accidents is defective rolling stock. If a wheel is imperfect in one part, that part wears out first, and the wheel becomes what is called "flat" at that place. Whenever in each revolution it reaches that part of its circumference, it slaps the rail with a tremendous concussion. If the wheel is not perfectly round but slightly oval, there is a similar result. So also if the wheel, though round, is not perfectly concentric with the axle on which it revolves.
This steady pounding of the rails by defective wheels may be noted almost any time if we listen when traveling on the cars to what is happening beneath us. And when we remember how heavy the cars and the locomotives are, we can see that the destructive effect of this constant pounding upon the rails is very great, great enough to account for most, if not all, of the broken rails that cause so many fatal and terrible accidents.
Nor is the case very different when I come to my own life and the lives of those around me. Some move rapidly and accomplish an enormous amount of work, but there is no jar; their lives run so smoothly that you would hardly know they are running. They live to a good old age, and do not die in the ditch.
On the other hand, most workers go thump, thump, thump over every mile of the way. Their toil is a steady pounding. They punish everyone that comes into contact with them. It is blows, blows, blows from morning till night, and if not blows on the face it is the heavier blows of the tongue. They are running on flat wheels.
Ah, brothers, there is only one machine-shop where they turn out wheels that can be trusted to run smoothly all through their life.
And the firm which runs that machine-shop?
Love and Co.
Their Golden Wedding.
I once received a very beautiful and touching missive. It was written with loving care, in a fine penmanship. Evidently the letter was duplicated with tender painstaking and sent to other friends.
It was a memorial of a wife who had been dead for a number of years, and it was sent out by her husband on the fiftieth anniversary of his marriage to her.
I like the spirit of that. It pleased me and moved me more than any communication I received for a long time.
Love—true love—is eternal. When souls are bound together, there is no separation.
Our dear ones who have stepped into the other room, just out of our sight for a little while, are still so near that we can almost hear their sweet voices through the partition walls, can almost touch their hands through the doorway.
They are interested still in all that interests us. The anniversaries that we were wont to keep so happily together,—shall we not keep them still, they in the other room and we in this? Yes, and happily still! for soon the door will open for us.
Golden weddings, and all other golden events, are possible still, though our loved ones walk the golden streets. May it not be that they are even the more possible and likely? Earth and heaven are very close together, after all!
"I Won't."
A California girl was being married, but evidently had her doubts. She broke into the ceremony with the cry, "I won't do it, that's all; I simply can't." And she didn't. She was a trifle late in making up her mind, but she did well to make it up at last. Many a girl gets insensibly involved in a love affair and is whirled on to a marriage before she realizes what she is about.
Flirting may have done it. Matchmaking friends or relatives may have done it. Sheer recklessness may have done it. The first thing she knows she is before the marriage altar. She has not moral courage to back out. She gasps, and the thing is done.
Boys! girls! don't play with fire. Learn to say "I won't," before the saying will cover you with confusion, fill you with lasting shame, and leave a scar upon your conscience for life.
Self-Mending Tires.
An Australian has invented a substance that he calls "miraculum." His modesty was evidently on a vacation when he named the compound, and yet it certainly possesses wonderfully useful qualities. It is to be applied to pneumatic tires to remedy punctures, and this is the way it works:
It is a semi-liquid, looking like cream, and about as thick. It is pumped through the valve into the inner tube of the tire, and the revolution of the wheel throws it in a coat over the inner surface. When the tire is punctured it oozes out of the opening, solidifies as soon as it reaches the air, and behold! there is no opening. It has been tested, and is found to do what is claimed for it.
Now I want some miraculum in all the wheels of my life chariot! I want a good supply of it.
How constantly those tires get punctured! Unkind words, malicious sneers, hateful slanders, bitter ridicule, foolish misunderstandings, angry recriminations—all these are strewn along my road, and their edges are sharper than ever was broken glass. Bang! go the tires nearly every time I ride out.
O yes, I patch them up and roll along after a fashion. My tires are covered with sticking-plaster of every hue. They look like veterans of a thousand battles.
But what I want is no exterior application, but an inner remedy like miraculum. I know the name of what I want. It is a shorter name, but it means far more. It is "love." Love!
Ah, love! No life chariot will be troubled with punctured tires when love is used within. It heals every thrust, however cruel, and cures every wound, often before it is known to be a wound.
For love suffereth long and is kind. Love thinketh no evil. Love is the miraculum of the soul.
Keep Sweet.
They have discovered in England that if they soak wood in a solution of beet-sugar, and then dry it in an oven, the wood becomes
Tougher,
More durable,
Heavier,
Stronger,
More ornamental when planed and polished.
Soft woods are thus greatly improved.
Unseasoned timber, after treatment, can be used at once and will not warp or shrink.
The treatment fills the pores of the wood and renders it more sanitary.
Wood thus treated resists dry rot.
Poison may be added to the sugar solution and the wood made proof against destructive insects.
There! Quite an idea, isn't it? And the moral-for a man-is:
KEEP SWEET!
Boil your soul in sugar.
Soak your life in loving kindness.
Let it enter every pore.
The process will make you also Stronger, More durable, More beautiful, More constant, More healthful, And proof against those little gnawing frets and worries that are worse than white ants to eat out character.
Try it, and see.
The Art of Lubrication.
When a man buys an automobile, he figures up the probable cost of the gasoline, but he does not figure up the probable cost of the oil and grease. Yet the lubrication of the great machine is of as much importance as is the power, and the car would not go very long without either. The motion of the parts of the engine is very rapid, the surfaces of the driving mechanism that play upon one another are numerous, the heat evolved is very great, and without oil and grease in abundance not only would the automobile begin to squeak and grind insufferably, but the parts very soon would wear out, if they did not first fuse together. So oil and grease, expensive oil and grease, must be lavished upon the machine, and the cost is promptly discovered to be no inconsiderable element in the cost of the upkeep of an automobile. This expense is next, indeed, to that of gas and tires.
I was dismayed when first I began to "oil up." I had no idea what a long and complicated process it would prove to be. I counted eighty different places in the machine which had to be oiled or greased, and since then I have discovered several more. I am not at all sure that I have found them all yet. A friend of mine did not learn about one rather important oil-hole till he had run his car a year, and all the time that place was a danger spot.
There are grease cups all over the car—four or more to a spring, some on the wheels, and others stuck in all over the driving mechanism. To reach them you bend and twist, and get down underneath, and stretch up groping hands into dark regions, whence they emerge dripping with oily blackness. These grease cups must be turned down frequently in order to drive the grease into the machinery. They must be unscrewed and filled up frequently. Often they are lost and must be replaced.
Then the engine must have its tank kept full of light oil. A splasher works up and down in this tank, lifting the oil and forcing it into different parts of the engine. It is also forced into a tube which runs to a glass box on the dashboard, down which it visibly drips. The driver must watch this box and see if the drip continues. If it stops, the oil may be exhausted or the tube choked up. Immediate investigation is necessary, or the machinery may be ruined.
Still further, a very heavy oil is needed for the transmission, the speed gears, and for the differential, which transmits the power immediately to the rear wheels, to say nothing of the packing for the universal joints in between. Then, neat's-foot oil must be applied occasionally to the leather surface of the clutch, and vaseline to the armature of the little dynamo, and light oil to other parts of the starter and the spark apparatus, as well as on all the numerous moving joints and shafts. Grease, heavy oil, light oil, neat's-foot oil, and vaseline-five kinds of lubricants in use in my machine in something like ninety different places. Does anyone doubt me when I say that the oiling and greasing of my car, which should be done at least once a week, means at least two solid hours of hard and rapid work? No one owns a car long before he comes to have a much higher respect for the art of lubrication.
For lubrication is an art. It is an art in the automobile, and a very much greater art in life. It is not easy to keep things running smoothly in even the simplest mode of existence; and the more possessions you have to work with, the harder it is. Many of the most brilliant men and women fail right here. They would be all right if all they had to do was to forge ahead with the power of their gasoline and the plunge of their engines, twenty, thirty, fifty miles an hour! They are all wrong when it comes to fussing with grease cups and oil cans. They are great in personal achievement; they are perfect bunglers in the little amenities, the small kindnesses and courtesies which make the great personal achievements possible, or utilize them to the full when they are accomplished.
Without lubrication, business offices go awry, and the greatest commercial institutions tumble into bankruptcy. Without lubrication, schools and colleges become hotbeds of dissatisfaction. Without lubrication, governments and political parties lose their prestige, because they lose their working efficiency. Without lubrication, even Sunday schools and Christian Endeavor societies and churches fail of their great work for the Master.
Throughout both Old and New Testaments, the Bible significantly refers to "the oil of the Spirit" to suggest the efficacious working of God's grace in the world. It interposes between clashing temperaments, it removes the friction of opposing plans and differing methods, it enables men of all sorts to work together for a common end, and to produce grand results which they alone could not produce. This is the world's one harmony.
Have we received this "oil of the Spirit" as the element of love in our lives?