A Joke That Isn't Funny.
Not long ago I saw—perhaps you did—the following quatrain. It appeared in one of the very best and most admirable of the comic weeklies. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I read it:—
“A Christian is a man who feels
Repentance on a Sunday
For what he has done on Saturday,
And is going to do on Monday."
Perhaps the majority of the readers of that periodical chuckled over those lines, and thought them "smart." A large majority, however, were certainly offended and disgusted.
Not that hypocrites do not exist. There are many of them in the church, as everyone acknowledges with shame, But that bit of verse ascribes hypocrisy to every Christian.
Some men's religion is a sham, a mere Sunday pretense, sandwiched in between the sins and folly of Saturday and Monday. But not all men's religion is a sham. Nor most men's religion.
Repentance is a solemn thing. No man that has struggled against any sin but knows that the greatest day in his life was when he truly repented of that sin. It may have been on Sunday—it probably was—and he may have committed the sin on Saturday; but he is not going to commit it on Monday, and he wants no heartless cynic to tell him that he will. If he does, it will be a tragedy, perhaps the final tragedy of his life.
I am not a long-faced, whining critic. I enjoy a joke as well as any man.
But in the name of all that is true and manly, let us have no more such jokes as that which I have quoted.
Christians are not ready enough to resent these wholesale slanders on their comrades and themselves. Would the editor of that comic paper have dared to print a similar quatrain aimed at the Republicans or the Democrats, or even at the Presbyterians or the Methodists? Not for a moment.
I do not name the paper, because, so far as I know, this is a first offense. But I shall send these remarks to the editor, and I urge all my readers to address similar communications to every editor who thus defiles the great name we bear.
Profitable Laundry.
Uncle Sam is an expensive individual. Everything about him is so big that what in any other person means an insignificant cost mounts up for him into the thousands of dollars.
For instance, the cloths used to wipe the machines on which our greenbacks are printed. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing at Washington actually pays $8,000 a year to have these cloths washed. They are very dirty, of course, and there are a lot of them, but, nevertheless, it would seem to be a big laundry bill just for cleaning cloths.
Now comes along an economical chap who offers to do it for nothing, and save the government $8,000. Where does his pay come in? He proposes to get enough ink and oil out of the cloths to pay him well for the washing. He has invented a machine which will remove the oil and the ink as the cloths are washed and place them in separate tanks ready to be used over again, and to make more dirty cloths for him to wash.
Good for this wash-tub genius! I have read much about "washing dirty linen," but I have never read of anyone's making a profit out of the water in the wash-tub.
Really, however, this cleansing gentleman is in strict harmony with the teachings of religion and the experiences of life. It is possible to gain much from every fall into foulness and sin and every rise again into repentance and purity. The experience is full of shame and sorrow and suffering, and it leaves heavy penalties behind it; but much is to be learned from it. We are sadder men, but we may be wiser men also. It is best—infinitely best—to keep our linen clean; but if it is dirty and must be washed, there are some side products that should not be neglected.