King's Business - 1917-08

THE KING’S * BUSINESS

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His Greatest Discovery It is related that Sir James Y. Simpson, who discovered the application of chloro­ form in surgery, was once being greatly praised in a company of friends for his services to science, when he said that he had been privileged to .make a greater discovery than that of the use of chloro­ form in operations. “What is that?” was the eager inquiry. “This,” he replied, “the greatest discovery I ever made was that I was a great sinner and Christ a great Saviour.” A man can make no greater dis­ covery than these two. Keep Your Temper ' A traveler tells how he noticed a sign painted conspicuously beside the line of an Eastern railroad. It read: “Shut down the ashpan.” He asked the meaning of it, and was told that it was for the engine driver. “We are coming to a long wooden bridge, and the company does not want any hot coals from the locomotive dropped on it. They might very easily set the bridge on fire.” • That is a parable for us. Passing through a world where there is a tendency to let the animal temper loose easily, to flare up in evil tempers and do evil things, how careful we ought to be in what we say and do. Remember the words: “Shut your ashpan.” Lasting Impressions When Daguerre was working at his sun pictures his great difficulty was to fix them. The light came and imprinted the image, but when the tablet was drawn from the camera the image had vanished. He discovered the chemical power which turned the evencscent into the durable. There is a divine agency at hand which can fix the truth upon the heart of man, and that is God’s Holy Spirit.

Patient Waiting The Indian juggler is said to contrive to make a flower grow from a seed to maturity before the eyes of the spectators in a few moments. There is a lesson in this for the evangelist and pastor, who must not exercise undue haste in promoting the work of God. Mushroom growth is not usually very stable. “The husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early'and latter rain” (James 5:7) ; so should we. The Unity df the Bible The Bible comprises sixty-six books bound together, written by independent writers, separated by 1600 years,- written in different countries and by men of different callings. Yet, when bound together, these sixty-six books furnish cross references to each other’s ideas, and produce a book of complete harmony that gives you the conception of sixty-six performers in some great oratorio, meeting haphazard in the auditorium one afternoon,' never having seen or heard of each other, never having seen each other’s scores, not even knowing the title of the complete piece, each playing his part for the first time, and yet succeed­ ing in producing perfect harmony. You will at once say that there must have been some­ where a master-mind and master-hand— a composer as well as conductor—in order to produce such harmony from sixty-six different performers. Church Going and Church Joining To a great many people nowadays it costs nothing to come into the church and it costs nothing to go ou t/ They give up nothing when they come in, and they leave nothing behiftd when they go out.

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