FOR AN UN FO RG ETTA B LE CH A L L EN G E , TH E ED ITORS STRON G LY RECOMMEND EV ER Y C H R IS T IA N TO READ TH IS S T IR R IN G A R T IC L E . READ ING T IM E IS O N L Y TEN M IN U TES
Wfytn ttie Beacon Calkeb AS FEATURED OVER "THE BIBLE INSTITUTE HOUR"
four boys, and every one of them could go, too. They’re worth six hun dred dollars a year to their fathers and only forty cents to the Lord.” In the next pew Mr. Allen and his family sat. Mr. Allen put on a dollar for the family, and the old deacon moved away saying, “The price of one of your dinners down town, half of that pair of gloves you wear, almost as much as you spent for ice cream last week, a box of candy,” were the deacon’s comments as the coins fell from the hands of the judge and fam ily. Then father John Robb put in a bill rolled up, Mrs. Robb put in an other, Johnny Robb a little envelope bulging with pennies, and Maggie helped the baby to put in another little bag; and the old deacon said: “ God bless them!” You may be sure we were all lis tening by this time, though we didn’t dare turn ’round; and there were lots of us mighty glad the deacon wasn’t taking up the collection in our aisle. John McClay’s pew came. “Worth a dollar a year to the Lord and two thousand a year to himself,” said the deacon. “ Seventy-five dollars for a bicycle and twenty-five cents for the Lord doesn’t match, Tommy Mc- Clay.” “Ah, Miss Eden, it looks queer for a hand with a fifty-dollar ring to drop five cents in the plate.” “ A new house for yourself and an old quarter for the Lord, Alex Bo- vey?” “ You take in washing and can give five dollars to the Lord! God bless you, Mrs. Dean. What? Minnie has some, too, and wee Robbie?” “ F i f t y , seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety. Ah, your dinner will cost more than you have given, Mr. Steele.” “A bright, new dollar bill, and spread out, too. Mr. Perkins, I am a f r a i d ninety-five c e n t s wa s f o r show.” “ A check from Mr. Hay. It will be a good one, too, for he gives a tenth to the Lord.” “Two dollars from you, Harry At kins, is a small gift to the Lord that healed your dear wife.” “Ah, Miss Kitty Hughes, that fifty cents never cost you a thought; and
would feel if we had no Jesus to go to for forgiveness of our sins, for help in our trials, for strength against temp tation, comfort in sorrow, for guid ance in perplexity; no Jesus to tell us how to live here, and especially no Jesus to tell us about the love of God and where our loved ones are when the darkness of death shuts down upon them. This was what made life so dark for the heathen, and in our gifts we were to remember the Lord’s command to us and the heathen’s need for us to go. Then he prayed a bit; the choir didn’t sing any that day, but the organ played a soft voluntary while the collection was being taken. Old Deacon Bright got up to pass the plate on his side. The old deacon was as fine a man as you could meet in a day’s journey, as good a neighbor and as honest a man as ever lived — nice two-hundred-acre farm and a fine family, all members of the church. Jim, the oldest, ran the farm, Jack, the second boy, was just ready to go to college, and Mary had her diploma as a teacher and was studying to be a nurse in a Toronto hospital. The mother too was just as nice a woman as you could find anywhere. The old deacon had been getting considerably deaf of late years, and he sat alone in the front pew. I guess he got to kind of dreaming over the sermon, for as he rose to get the collection plate he began to talk to himself, and to do it out loud. But, bless you, he couldn’t hear himself, for you have to shout to make him understand anything. So, as I said, he took the plate and began to talk. As near as I remember, this is what he said: “ So that ‘Go ye’ means me and everyone of us, and this is the Lord’s plate, and what we put in is our substitute and shows how much we love Him and how much we’d have been worth to Him, seeing we don’t go ourselves.” Then he got to the back seat and passed the plate. Now, our back seats are always full of young men; and as they put their money on the plate, the old man went on: “ Twenty-five cents from Sam Jones. My boy, you’d have been worth more than that to the Lord. Ten cents from David Brown, five cents from Tom Stone, and nothing from Steve Jackson. Forty cents for
We were not expecting anything unusual that day, but we got it just the same. It was a warm Sunday in June, and the annual foreign mission ary sermon was to be preached and the collection taken. That didn’t ex cite us any, for we had slept, I may say, through both sermon and col lection many a time before. It wasn’t the sermon either, for that didn’t seem so different from usual, but somehow it just happened to come home to the deacon. So far as I re member, the preacher took for his text that verse about “ Go ye into all the world,” only he dwelt considerably upon the “ Go ye.” He said it didn’t say anything about taking up a col lection, but it did say to go, and the Lord would never be satisfied until we went. Our collections, anyway, he told us, didn’t amount to much and al ways reminded him of the story he had heard of a little boy. It seems the little fellow was saving some of the best meat on his plate for his dog. The mother noticed it and told him to eat that himself, and after dinner he could take what was left on his plate and give it to the dog. So after dinner he picked up the bits of fat, bone, and gristle that were left and took them out to the dog. Some one heard him say sadly: “ I meant to bring you an offering, Fido, but I’ve only a collec tion.” Well, it did kind of hit home, for most of us hadn’t been giving much of a collection, only just enough to look respectable when the plate was passed. But the preacher went on until he showed us that the command, “ Go ye,” meant just what it said; that we had to go. He told us that everybody had to go. Now, I had always thought that there was some special kind of call that comes to one here and an other there when they felt that they had to be a missionary. But he said that was not in the Bible, that everybody was commanded to go unless they had a call to stay at home. And even if they had a call to stay at home, they were bound to do their best to find a substitute to go for them, and to help everybody to go that could. Then he just asked us how we
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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