A New Trick for the Gladstones.
In French forests they cut down trees after a fashion that Gladstone would think extremely lazy. These shrewd Frenchmen, that know how to make their brains save their hands, when they want to subdue to earth a monarch of the forest, do not haggle away for hours with an ax, or break their backs over a cross-cut saw. They merely take a little platinum wire and heat it white-hot with electricity. Then they burn the tree in two in one-eighth the time it took by the old method. There are no chips. There is no sawdust. The scar is charred and so the lumber is preserved. The trick is easy, and cheap.
But I care little for that side of the matter. I want to apply the method to higher affairs, to things of the soul.
For I am trying to clear off my spiritual field. It is a regular jungle. Great, ruling passions, that have been growing no one knows how many centuries, and are rooted deep in ancestral generations. A matted thicket, poisonous vines, tangled underbrush,—oh, what a wilderness it is! And I must let in the healing light. I must clear the ground for the drain, the plow, and the seed. How shall I do it?
I have been chopping away with ineffectual hatchets and nagging axes. The chips litter the ground, but the wood is hard, and the jungle really seems to grow up as fast as I cut into it.
I have been sawing away persistently, and have had the best of helpers at the other end of the saw, and between us we have made no end of sawdust; but when we get to a certain point the wood closes on our saw, it sticks, and I stop.
I'll have no more cold-blooded methods. The fire, the fire for me! The flame of the Spirit, the heat of divine indignation, the purifying power of God's furnace, the burning that seizes upon all waste and harm and melts it to nothingness! No more chopping and sawing of human will and way; my means shall be the electricity of heaven, the trenchant tongues of Pentecost! For God's Spirit alone is adequate to the extermination of evil within me and around me, "and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."
By Contrast.
The broom-boy at the barber-shop wanted to clean a last summer's straw hat belonging to one of the customers.
"No," said the customer; "it's as good as new."
Thereupon the broom-boy quietly hung up the debatable article between two straw hats of the present season. The contrast was astonishing. Grimy and yellow, the "good-as-new" straw hat cut a perfectly disgraceful figure.
The customer gave a glance at it, as he settled himself in the chair.
"Here," he said to the sagacious broom-boy, "I've changed my mind. You may take that hat, and give it a thorough cleaning. Hurry up, now."
Thereat the broom-boy chuckled, and a moral was afforded the observer.
For it is very easy to be satisfied with one's self, in any department of one's life. A man goes to pieces so gradually. Souls grow grimy so unnoticeably. We started out new. Day by day makes little difference,—no difference, that we can see.
But there is a difference, and a big one, unless we keep cleaned up. And if you want to know whether you need that cleansing or not, first set your life alongside the one pure Life, and then stand back and look at the two!
House-Cleaning.
It is a foolish superstition that spring is the time for house-cleaning.
It is the time, but so is summer, so is autumn, so is winter; so is any time when the house needs cleaning.
A dirty house breeds disease. A disorderly house breeds inefficiency. A house out of repair breeds expense.
And the longer the condition continues, the larger is the bill of damages.
We see this—at least, the women see this—in regard to our houses of wood and plaster and brick. How many of us see it also in regard to our houses of muscle and nerve, and our ethereal but enduring houses of spirit?
We let our physical organs grow clogged, foul, disorganized. We let our muscles become flabby, our nerves ragged, our lungs cramped, our blood impure. We let our spirits become morbid, sour, selfish, hard, cold, cruel.
We look forward to some housecleaning day, in some springtime coming, when we shall have leisure and feel just like it; in the meantime, we live right on in the house.
Is it any wonder that physicians have their hands full, that hospitals flourish, and that churches are aghast at the problems they must meet even within their own doors?