Article January 22, 1916 Issue

Channels of Love

VIRGINIA ROSS

In one of our hymns the opening line reads, "Make channels for the streams of love" (Hymnal, p. 89); and the blessings following this counsel came to one weary of the conflict of life, her heart filled with bitterness and, alas! hatred and resentment. She was constantly thinking of her wrongs, which amounted to persecution, her blighted hopes and ambitions, which were never to be realized here, and she did not care if there was any other place. In fact she did not expect any happiness, for "hope deferred maketh the heart sick," and her heart was certainly sick.

Mentally alert, she was eager for work which required mental activity, but her strength was not equal to the demand, and no wonder that she was weary. She craved the health that was needed to bring to her the success which she felt could be hers, and hopelessly she painted beautiful word-pictures that were read and cherished by many, spending hours at her work regardless of the pain, not knowing that the seeds of hatred, jealousy, and malice had brought forth a crop of failure and misery from which she was suffering.

Time and again she had won recognition in her chosen work only to lose it because of weeks and months of bodily suffering and mental fatigue. During these seasons of idleness she sought comfort in music, not knowing that it was the harmony of right thinking which she really needed, for her discordant thoughts had brought such inharmony into her life that music alone could not heal. Unconsciously her longing for literature, music, and art was really for the beautiful, the good, and the true. She painted from nature and drew sketches, but the cruel hand of false belief held her in its iron grasp, and her crop of error grew until she gave up her work to search for health, not knowing that while she was saying, "Lo here!" and "Lo there!" the reign of harmony was at hand, that it was within her own consciousness.

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