need look for no poetry here. And still I believe there is poetry here, but it is the poetry that lies in the solid prose of life, the plain facts in which these lives rested. I say these children of the woods helped solve the pressing problems in religion to-day by simply attending to their business, by doing the next thing in a cheerful, kindly fashion, by facing their tasks in unconscious courage. They made themselves rich in their poverty. They sang their lonesomeness away, and they never knew that this was religion; indeed, so akin they were to the saint and the sage that they did not know they were poor or lonesome. Their life was hid with Christ in God, and they did not know it. Perhaps most of such living must partake largely of this unconsciousness. They solved the problem of religion by being that which they could not explain and by doing that which perhaps they never tried to justify. Thus they won for themselves the respect of their scattered neighbors, and in due time the right to honorable graves. You and I will not believe that these children of the woods lived their lives in vain. They help us to measure all life by its loyalty and not by its achievements. The story is a backwoods commentary on the great text of Browning: "Not on the vulgar mass Called 'work' must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; A dinner of herbs to a tramping horseman was a passing hospitality, the value of which ought to be measured not only by what it was given him to leave behind but by that which he carried away with him. May that incident in the tramp project rays of kindliness and thoughtfulness across the distances of time and space without intervention, touching lives into helpfulness so that that dinner of herbs becomes an abiding impulse, quickening hearts, an imperishable food for thought that will renew flagging spirits, refresh starving souls. May the cracked notes of the impromptu choir that sang to the accompaniment of the wheezy little organ awaken a refrain of peace that will soothe the distracted and tempestuous life of the city. Surely the stalled ox in steaming gravies served in hatred and with selfishness has failed to yield the benediction of the spirit which this dinner of herbs, sauced in kindliness and served in love, brings to us. May this gleam of light from the backwoods of Wisconsin dispel a darkness that often settles upon the avenues, and may the heart of the little woodsman and his child wife become dynamos of the spirit from which shall stream a dart of heaven's electric light. “How far that little candle throws its beams, So shines a good deed in a naughty world." |