How grand it is, amid the selfishness of the world, to find such generous deeds! The Moravian missionaries were told that they could not enter the lazarettos where the lepers were dying unless they stayed there. ‘‘Then,” they said, “We will go and stay there.” They went in to nurse the sick and perished.
Yon have read the life of pure-hearted Elizabeth Fry, toiling among the degraded. But the full biographies of the world’s martyrs will never be written. The firemen in our cities who have rescued people from blazing buildings; the sailors who have helped the passengers off the wreck, themselves perishing; the nurses who have waited upon the sick in yellow fever and cholera hospitals, and sunk down to death from exhaustion; the Christian men who, on the battlefield, have administered to the fallen amid rattling canister and bursting shell; the Christian women who have gone down through haunts of shame on errands of mercy, defened by no human arm, but looked after by that God who, with his lightnings, would have struck to hell any who dared to do them harm! —TALMAGE.
Selfishness is sin. Self-indulgence is criminal. A soul filled with self has no room for God; and like the inn of Bethlehem, given to lodge meaner guests, a heart full of pride has no chamber, within which Christ may be born. “in us the hope of glory.” How rare a virtue is self-sacrifice! What can be more sad than to see the value a woman sets on trinkets, the pride with which she shows and wears her jewels, while Jesus has no preciousness in her eyes? What fools people are! They set more value on some glittering bits of glass or stone than oh a crown of glory!—they care more in this dying body for the perishable casket than for the immortal jewel which it holds. —GUTHRIE.
