30 



Gl«aiiines in Be« Culture 



Lord Jesus Christ, I hope you will read the 

 above plaintive letter again and again, and 

 then I hope you will go out "into the by- 

 ways and hedges" and see if there are not 

 some near you that you have overlooked, as 

 our good friend describes. You who belong 

 to the Y. M. C. A., look around and see if 

 these things are true in your locality. 

 Remember who it was that said, "Inasmuch 

 as ye have done it unto the least of one of 

 these my brethren, ye have done it unto 

 me." 



Now I want to suggest gently to our good 

 brother who writes the letter that possibly 

 there is at least just a little tendency to un- 

 charitableness on his part. Are you not, 

 my good friend, a little too modest and over- 

 sensitive? Are you sure you are doing your 

 part? and is it not possible you are a trifle 

 hard to get acquainted with? I want to 

 quote right here something from the Sun- 

 day School Times that has done me a lot of 

 good: 



THE DEFEAT OF INJUSTICE. 



No one can ever afford to think about any injus- 

 tice he receives. It is disaster and destruction to 

 do so. It is like deliberately lifting a glass of poison 

 to our lips and swallowing it. Injustice inflicted 

 upon us never harms us until we dwell on it. 

 \\'hile we ignore it, and do right, it is powerless 

 against us. When we begin to turn it over in our 

 mind, it starts its murderous work upon us. It 

 soon exaggerates itself, blinds us. rankles, inflames, 

 embitters. It breeds self-pity, which quickly re- 

 duces us tf) a condition of worse than helpless use- 

 lessness. .lesus paid no attention to the awful in- 

 justices of his lot. We can not afford to do other 

 than he did, with our lesser injustices. If love is 

 our master-passion, thinking nf) evil and bearing 

 all things, we shall live emancipated from the mis- 

 ery of dressing our own wounds. .Such wounds 

 heal quickly when we are lovingly busied with the 

 needs of others. 



The above sounds a little extreme, I ad- 

 mit; but I am sure it is God's message, nev- 

 ertheless. In troubles of this kind we need 

 to exhort strongly the parties on both sides 

 to wake u]) and be ready to go a little more 

 than halfway. The editorial above* does 

 not very clearly define the difference be- 

 tween personal wrong and a wrong against 

 community; but the distinction is implied. 

 I know what it is to dwell on some indignity 

 or abuse until I am kept awake nights; and 

 I know it is true that, if dwelt on, such 

 things grow and enlarge, and finally spoil 

 one's peace of mind. My father for several 

 years was unhappy because a line fence en- 

 croached on his land. The surveyors told 

 him the fence was over on his territory with- 

 out question, but advised, as it had been 

 there so many years, to let it rest to save 

 quarrels and possibly a lawsuit with a 

 neighbor; but because the surveyor who 

 gave this advice belonged to our church, 

 father had his own name taken from the 

 church-roll, and could talk about and think 

 about nothing else. Mother and the older 

 children, the pastor of the church, and the 

 deacons jjlead with him; but he persisted, 

 and quoted, "right is right, and wrongs no 



* Have we any other periodical whose editorials 

 occupy such a high moral stand as the Sunday 

 School Times? And is not the above sentiment 

 characteristic of this same clean home Christian 

 sheet? 



man," until one Sunday I persuaded him 

 to go with me to a mission Sunday-school I 

 was conducting in one of the worst points 

 in our neighborhood. A lot of nicely dress- 

 ed little girls and boys recited texts from 

 the platform, and the zeal and enthusiasm 

 of the whole school were truly inspiring. 

 On the way home I asked him if such a 

 work was not far more important than the 

 value of a little strip of land of less than an 

 acre. He assented, and gave me his prom- 

 ise to drop for ever the line-fence quarrel, 

 and kept his word, went back to his church, 

 and died at peace wuth God and with all his 

 fellow-men. 



HOW TO SUCCEED IN JOURNALI.SM, ETC. 



I wonder how many of the editors of the 

 fifty or sixty poultry-journals that come to 

 our office by way of exchange read my writ- 

 ings. Well, I hope they will read this, even 

 if they do not read what I say about poultry. 

 While there are many good things to be said 

 about the poultry-journals, there is one great 

 and grievous fault with most of them, and 

 a matter that can be easily remedied. It 

 wants a little push and gumption, getting 

 up early in the morning, or something of 

 that sort. It is this: These journals are al- 

 lowed to go out to the reading public with- 

 out being inspected and corrected. I refer 

 particularly to the typography. For in- 

 stance, the printer or compositor will pull 

 out a line to make some needed change, and 

 then he puts it back without getting it in 

 the proper place. Sometimes it will be at 

 the bottom of the column, and sometimes 

 it will not be found anywhere. He evident- 

 ly forgot to put it back. The result is that 

 the reader, when deeply interested in some 

 article, finds a line gone so as to make the 

 whole thing nonsense. I often spend a good 

 deal of time in going down the column to find 

 the missing line somewhere, where it makes 

 another jumble. Now, this is a stupid trick 

 of the one who puts the lines into page form 

 to be sure; but he is not altogether to blame. 

 Every journal or periodical of any kind that 

 hopes to succeed should have somebody who 

 is conversant with the subject-matter to read 

 over carefully every bit of matter before it 

 goes to press. This person or expert, which 

 he ought to be, should be trained to note 

 every letter upside down, bad punctuation, 

 bad spelling, or any thing of that sort, so 

 that, when the periodical meets the eye of 

 the one who pays his money for it, it will 

 be clean, and clear tip to date. Our high- 

 priced periodicals of wide circulation have 

 two or more proof-readers in order to be sure 

 that no blunders are allowed to pass. 



Now, some of you may think this is a 

 small matter; but that is another " typo- 

 graphical error." Leaving out a line as I 

 have mentioned, bad spelling, and bad 

 punctuation, stamp a periodical at once as 

 second-class or not strictly reliable; and if 

 the matter is not mended the journal soon 

 fails for lack of patronage. When Glean- 

 ings was first started, nearly forty years 



