Under the iron law of conflict in the “survival of the fittest,”
the world finds a shipwrecked brother in its path and removes
him without ceremony and covers him with scorn and contempt.
Christ reverses this iron law.
Formerly when a war vessel discovered a derelict, the latter
was immediately destroyed by dynamite. The government has
now entered upon a new policy. Whenever it is possible, the
abandoned vessel is towed into the nearest port. Recently two
abandoned schooners were brought in, the value of the vessels
and their cargo being estimated at more than sixty thousand
dollars.
When Jesus finds a human derelict He does not destroy him. He
cleanses him and rehabilitates him, and makes him valuable in
the kingdom. (Text.)
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* * * * *
Christian treatment of the Indian not only has improved his character,
but has saved him from threatened extinction.
The idea is prevalent that the red man is doomed to disappear
from the earth at no distant day. But the census tables give
no such indication. The first official count was taken about
seventy years ago, and gave the number as 253,461. In 1880
the figures had risen to 256,127, in 1900 to 272,073, and now
(1909), by actual count, the reservations are found to contain
284,000.
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* * * * *
A bundle of wood is placed in our kitchen stove to kindle the
fire. It is consumed. Its ashes represent what the tree took
from the soil. Its carbon goes up the chimney, restoring to
the air what some tree took from the air. Nothing was lost.
The earth received again what it originally gave. To the air
was restored its original contribution of carbonic acid gas,
which the leaf manufactured into wood. And so God has made a
universe of perennial youth, where nothing is lost nor can be
lost.--E. M. MCGUFFEY.
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