Article March 22, 1913 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from W. Charter Piggott, Ernest Linwood Staples

[Advance.]

We have been entirely correct in our interpretation of the principle underlying the words of Jesus, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." But we have been sadly wrong in our application. We have assumed that it meant principally that we ought to be good to tramps. This is a mere fraction of its meaning. The principle is easier to apply at a distance, but it is more important that it be applied close at hand.

If you pass your neighbor, who is trying hard to save his business from wreck, and is bearing his burden alone, and you do not say a "Good morning" that makes him feel the warmth of your companionship in his struggle, you place yourself for that day on the left hand of Jesus. If you shout angrily at the telephone girl, or address her in tone or language other than a gentleman should use to a lady sitting across the table from him, you have doomed yourself, for that hour, to outer darkness. If your office boy needed a reproof, but you gave him a berating such as you would not have thought of giving him had he been as tall and as strong as you, you belong, for that day, among the goats. If you scolded at breakfast because the coffee was bad, and if your wife's breakfast was spoiled by your bad temper, then one of the Lord's children was hungry, and you took away not only the food but the appetite. If you have kept the end seat in church, and compelled people to climb over your knees, and you sat there resenting the fact that they rubbed the blacking off your boots or trod on your corns, your sufferings were only a part of that weeping and gnashing of teeth which the Lord promised to people who do such things. If you played a practical joke upon a sensitive man, and left him, trying to smile, but with his soul bleeding from a cruel wound behind the armor of that smile, you departed from Christ into the great gulf where live the inconsiderate and the wanton. If you have so lived, for a single day, that any living man, knowing you to be a Christian, thinks less of religion on your account, provided always that you have given him just cause for his feeling, you have arrayed yourself with those who wound and imprision and starve the Christ. If you have acted in an unbrotherly manner toward any child of God, in your own home or elsewhere, you have instituted a day of judgment, and have pleaded guilty to inflicting humiliation and wrong upon your Saviour.

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