564 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Nov. 



of the rich, and to a less extent among those who j 

 are not rich. ' 



Many parents who have been reared in the hard \ 

 school of poverty, and have come out of it sturdy, ' 

 self-reliant, and strong-, say one to another, " I don't 

 want my children to have as hard a time as 1 had." 

 So, ofttimes, they make their own life harder that 

 their children's may be easier. Many young men, 

 perhaps from sheer affection, refuse to marry until . 

 they can place their wives above all necessity for : 

 labor; and many young women— from self-love, 

 however —who will not marry until they find a man 

 who not only loves them, but can keep them in ease 

 and luxury. Indeed, the whole system of the train- 

 ingof women in the upper classes, in the past, and j 

 among some nations and classes of society now, [ 

 seems to have had this idea at the root of it — that 

 woman was to be care free, to live easy, to look 

 pretty, to be good-natured, and not to trouble her- 

 self about any thing else. That was her sphere. 



I can not speak too strongly of the foolishness of 

 this system. It runs counter to all the teachings of 

 Scripture and nature and experience. These ever 

 teach that the best results ia character can only 

 come through some form of trial and discipline. It 

 is absolutely impossible that creatures such as we ; 

 are should be allowed to have every thing pleasant; 

 to do just as we wish, and have every thing our own | 

 way. That can be only for those who are perfect in I 

 wisdom and in love. The perfectly wise will always j 

 know what is best: the perfectly loving one will al- i 

 ways eft oosc it; and such, and only such, will it be ; 

 safe to trust fully. i 



We need only to look at the results of such a sys- | 

 tem, to convince ourselves of its follj". See the 

 great army of spoiled children, who, " left to them- i 

 selves, have brought their mothers to shame;" the j 

 dissipated, licentious, worthless sons of rich men, 

 who themselves have worked and schemed to make { 

 money for their children, but have ruined them by | 

 it; the idle, trifling young women; the wasters, the j 

 poverty-stricken; the vicious slaves of bad habits j 

 engendered in the days of plenty,— all these show 

 the folly of a life of ease and gratification. ; 



Depend upon it, God's plan is the best one, al- j 

 tvays; and that is, not to furnish men with every | 

 thing in such quantity and shape as to need no j 

 thought or toil on their part, but rather so that 

 every thing good they have shall be the result of 

 their own earnest, careful labor. * * * # 



I have heard people speak of the "gospel of 

 work," and I thought the phrase a most fit and beau- 

 tiful one. In work, there is salvation; a salvation 

 absolutely essential, without which no amount of 

 what is called religion were of much worth, or could 

 be long sustained. That is to say, no good princi- 

 ples or beliefs can save one without he do good 

 acts too; or, in other words, good action is as much 

 divine, as pleasing to God, as speech or belief. Or- 

 thodoxy is not more essential than orthopraxy. One 

 is not necessarily more pleasing to God, when, 

 filled with religious fervor, he is shouting and sing- 

 ing at a camp-meeting, than when, quietly plodding 

 along between the handles of his plow, he follows 

 his team over the field. The old monks had a saj-. 

 ing, that, "to labor is to pray;" and Carlyle 

 says, " If work be not worship, then the more 

 pity for worship, for it (work) is the divinest thing 

 yet discovered under God's sky." Most surely,work^ 

 efifort, something to do or bear, is good, not only for 

 the results accomplished outside of ourselves, but 



also for what It works in us. For that, the trial is 

 something to be rejoiced over. 



I should not wish to leave the idea, that trial and 

 discipline are good for their own sakes. That can 

 not be true. I can't like pain because pain itself, 

 abstractly considered, is a good thing; nor poverty, 

 because it is pleasant to be poor; nor the conscious 

 ness of ignorance or M'eakness, because it is good to 

 be thus; nor sickness nor death because thcfj are 

 blessings. All these things are but mediate and rel- 

 ative goods, not of any value or delightsomeness in 

 themselves alone, but valuable as " working out in 

 us the peaceable fruits of righteousness." They are 

 the means to something better; the labor which we 

 sell for gold, the stepping-stones to something high- 

 er and nobler in character and experience, that 

 could not have been otherwise jgaincd. A whipping- 

 is an evil, decidedly; but if aboy will not be thought- 

 ful and obedient and good without, and can be made 

 so with it, then the whipping is a good, most truly. 

 That boy can afford to kiss the rod, even though it 

 makes his back smart and ache, and makes the 

 groans and tears come fast and free. It works out 

 in him the peaceable fruits of righteousness. If 

 they could have dome without the whipping, that 

 were better; but as they did not, then it was good to 

 have it. 



I met, not many months ago, a young man just re- 

 leased from the State prison of Wisconsin. In tell- 

 ing me of his experience as a convict, he said he 

 blessed the day he was ever sent there, for he 

 thought it had proved his salvation. The confine- 

 ment, the work, the discipline, the shame, the op- 

 portunity to think, all brought him to his senses as 

 perhaps nothing else could. Though at first his cell 

 had seemed a perfect hell, it had rather been but a 

 purifying purgatory that cleansed him for heaven. 



And now (for space will not allow diffuseness) let 

 me briefly indicate some of the benefits that come 

 through trials. And first, I mention, as does the 

 apostle,— 



PATIENCE. 



"My brethren," says James, "count it all joy 

 when you fall into divers temptations, knowing 

 that the trying of your faith worketh patience." 



Says the apostle Paul, who certainly ought to 

 know from a most tnorough experience of his own, 

 " We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribu- 

 lation worketh patience." 



Now, I know no virtue, save the one all-compre- 

 hending virtue of love, that so crowns and orna- 

 ments a character as this one of patience. The abil- 

 ity to toil persistently, to endure cneerfully, to con- 

 trol the speech, to manage the senses, all this, and 

 more, is true of the patipnt man. Patience is quiet, 

 yet brave and bold. The patient man may say, as he 

 looks trials in the face, "I am not afraid of what 

 you may do to me. I have been through such ex- 

 periences before, and, by the grace of Go d, I stood 

 and can agciin." 



The good of trial, then, is, that It devclopes just 

 this virtue. It must needs do it. The trials of 

 home and family life, of school life, of business life, 

 of church life, all surely exercise and draw out and 

 make strong the grace of patience. 



Another benefit from trials is their usefulness in 

 the development of faculty, skill, resource, power, 

 etc. There is great disadvantage in a too liberal na- 

 ture. The most progressive and powerful nations 

 and races are not those where the sun and the earth 



