His father dead, Henry W. Grady, a boy fourteen years of age, took up
the battle of life. It would require a long chapter to record the names
of orphans who have come to the top. When God takes away the head of the
household He very often gives to some lad in that household a special
qualification. Christ remembers how that His own father died early,
leaving Him to support Himself and His mother and His brothers in the
carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, and He is in sympathy with all boys and
all young men in the struggle. You say: “Oh, if my father had only lived
I would have had a better education and I would have had a more
promising start, and there are some wrinkles on my brow that would not
have been there.” But I have noticed that God makes a special way for
orphans. You would not have been half the man you are if you had not
been obliged from your early days to fight your own battles. What other
boys got out of Yale and Harvard you got in the university of hard
knocks. Go among successful merchants, lawyers, physicians and men of
all occupations and professions, and there are many of them who will
tell you: “At ten, or twelve, or fifteen years of age, I started for
myself; father was sick, or father was dead.” But somehow they got
through and got up. I account for it by the fact that there is a special
dispensation of God for orphans. All hail, the fatherless and
motherless! The Lord Almighty will see you through. Early obstacles for
Mr. Grady were only the means for development of his intellect and
heart. And lo! when at thirty-nine years of age he put down his pen and
closed his lips for the perpetual silence, he had done a work which many
a man who lives on to sixty and seventy and eighty years never
accomplishes. There is a great deal of senseless praise of longevity, as
though it were a wonderful achievement to live a good while. Ah, my
friends, it is not how long we live, but how well we live and how
usefully we live. A man who lives to eighty years and accomplishes
nothing for God or humanity might better have never lived at all.
Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and what did it
amount to? In all those more than nine centuries he did not accomplish
anything which seemed worth record. Paul lived only a little more than
sixty, but how many Methuselahs would it take to make one Paul? Who
would not rather have Paul’s sixty years than Methuselah’s nine hundred
and sixty-nine? Robert McCheyne died at thirty years of age and John
Summerfield at twenty-seven years of age, but neither earth nor heaven
will ever hear the end of their usefulness. Longevity! Why, an elephant
can beat you at that, for it lives a hundred and fifty and two hundred
years. Gray hairs are the blossoms of the tree of life if found in the
way of righteousness, but the frosts of the second death if found in the
way of sin.