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wrecked brother in its path and removes him without ceremony and covers him with scorn and contempt. Christ reverses this iron law.

Formerly when a war vessel discovered a derelict, the latter was immediately destroyed by dynamite. The government has now entered upon a new policy. Whenever it is possible, the abandoned vessel is towed into the nearest port. Recently two abandoned schooners were brought in, the value of the vessels and their cargo being estimated at more than sixty thousand dollars.

When Jesus finds a human derelict He does not lestroy him. He cleanses him and rehabilitates him, and makes him valuable in the kingdom. (Text.)

(551)

Christian treatment of the Indian not only has improved his character, but has saved him from threatened extinction.

The idea is prevalent that the red man is doomed to disappear from the earth at no distant day. But the census tables give no such indication. The first official count was taken about seventy years ago, and gave the number as 253,461. In 1880 the figures had risen to 256,127, in 1900 to 272,073, and now (1909), by actual count, the reservations are found to contain 284,000.

(552)

A bundle of wood is placed in our kitchen stove to kindle the fire. It is consumed. Its ashes represent what the tree took from the soil. Its carbon goes up the chimney, restoring to the air what some tree took from the air. Nothing was lost. The earth received again what it originally gave. To the air was restored its original contribution of carbonic acid gas, which the leaf manufactured into wood. And so God has made a universe of perennial youth, where nothing is lost nor can be lost.—

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CONSERVATION OF INFLUENCE

Dr. F. F. Shannon, commenting on the early death of a talented man, says:

"Such a man dead at 40?" you ask. "Why, to what purpose is this waste?" Well, a man can make a match, but it takes God to make a sun. We know the match must go out, the sun never does, tho his shining face is often hidden from our eye. And so the sun of this man's genius—of any man's genius—can never go out. The flame is burning yet—in a few hearts still in the flesh, and in countless glorified spirits before the throne. There is not enough wind, loosed or unloosed, in the vast caverns of the universe to blow out that flame, nor enough blackness in the untenanted halls of space to swallow up its light! Do you tell me that the God who is so strict in the economy of His universe as to refuse a throb of energy to be lost, or an atom to be wiped out of existence, or a few pieces of bread to perish in the desert, will allow that genius, which is the breath of His own being, to be wasted without contributing wealth to the world, to the universe, to God Himself!

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CONSERVATION OF REMAINDERS

A man was in possession of a great farm. The abundant crops finally failed, and other calamities came, and at last the wife of the great land-owner lost her reason. Nearly all had been lost, and the farmer was left with only a few feet of ground as his possession. I had not the courage to visit this man in his destitution. After a lapse of time, however, I went to his humble abode, and was amazed to see the little garden in the highest state of cultivation. And I exclaimed: "Why, how is this? How did you have the heart to do this, after you had lost all?"

"Why, what would you have had me do?" was the reply. "This is all I had, and I tried to make the best of it."

So it is for us to strengthen that which is left in the Church and in ourselves as individuals.—

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CONSERVATISM, FALSE

There stands the false conservative, anchored to the past. Whatever is, for him, is right and good. He is constitutionally opposed to change. Wagon-wheels make a rut an inch deep across the prairie, but when this man is thirty he is in a rut up to his eyebrows. When he dies, at seventy, you can truly say, that his image is truth lying at the bottom of a well. He loves his father's house because it is old; he loves old tools; old laws; old creeds. He stands at his gate, like an angry soldier, waving his hands and shouting warnings to all who approach. He has one injunction for every boy starting out to make his fortune: "Watch your anchor, my son; don't cast off your moorings"; as if any Columbus, who spent all his time throwing out anchors, could ever have crossed the sea! As if any world voyage