Men and churches often wait for outside help to draw them along. They
need the lesson taught in this anecdote:
When an engineer in Bolivia brought over the Cordilleras the
first locomotive ever seen in these latitudes, the native
Indians came up from the Amazon basin to see this sight, and sat
on their haunches discussing what this strange monster could be.
They said: “It is made to go; let’s make it go”; and so they
lassoed the buffers, and about thirty of them began to pull, and
drew the locomotive a few yards. They exclaimed, “Ay-ay-ay-ay
Tatai Tatito.” “The great and little father hath enabled us to
do something wonderful!”
The next day the engineer got up steam and hitched a couple
of cattle trucks to the locomotive and, when the Indians came
again, put them into the trucks and locked them in. Then he
stood on the fire-plate of the locomotive and opened the
regulator, and let the steam into the cylinder, and it began to
move the piston, and the piston the crank, and the crank the
wheel, and the wheel the locomotive; and the locomotive carried
the Indians along ten miles an hour! What did they not say to
their “great and little father!” But they learned this great
lesson--that locomotives are not made to be moved along by
outside human power, but by means of a power within, and so to
carry human beings along.
(2421)
=Practicable and Impracticable=--See PREDICTION, FALSE.