Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/625



When the first experiments upon the tulips and wild asters were undertaken, some said that it was a sin, because if God had wanted tulips to be double and have different colors, God would have made them that way. But scientists in Holland, and Burbank in California, and a thousand others, are standing over the grains and whispering, "Ye must be born again." The scientist has touched the wild aster, and it has become the chrysanthemum. He has touched the black tulip, and it has become a flower of many hues and quadruple size. He has whispered to the little field-daisy, and it has become the Shasta daisy, that waves in the fields like a bunch of women's hats. He has touched the wild sloe, and it has become a luscious plum. He has touched a bitter orange, and, lo! it has lost its seed, doubled its sweetness and quadrupled its size. And to-day the whole world is on tiptoe of expectancy.

There is no new fruit or flower that is not possible, for the horizons have been pulled down. A great, wide vista of possibility opens up. The berries, the vegetables, the fruits, the grains, must all be born again. Now all this is only a revelation of what is possible for the soul.—

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REGISTER OF LIFE

"An apparatus called a 'pulse register' has been devised by a Viennese physician, Dr. Gartner. It is intended," says The Medical Times, "to watch and register the action of the heart and pulse while the patient is under the influence of chloroform, ether, or cocain. The apparatus consists of a watch-like box, to be attached to the patient's forearm. The box has a graduated dial and hands, working according to pulse and blood-pressure vibrations, which are registered by an elastic spring in the most precise manner imaginable. The physician in attendance, or operator, is all the time kept informed of the exact degree of the unconscious person's pulse and heart action. The controller, furthermore, shows the action of pulses which the physician's fingers can not feel nor find."

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REGRET

Mrs. Marion M. Hutson writes a lesson as to appreciating the troubles of friends while they live:

Somewhere in the future, soon or late, My weary feet will reach the outer gate, Where rest begins, and earth's long highway ends, And then, perhaps, through misty eyes my friends Will see how rough the path has been, and say, "Would we had tried to smooth the rugged way." Oh, friends and loved ones! do not wait, but give A little help and comfort while I live.

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See.

Regular Inspection—See.

REGULARITY, ECCLESIASTICAL

Butler, the famous author of Butler's "Analogy," himself, with all his high gifts, supplies, in his own person, an expressive proof of the spiritual blindness and death which lay on the churches of Wesley's day. He forbade Whitefield and the Wesleys to preach in his diocese, tho all around his cathedral city lay the most degraded and hopeless class in England—the coal-miners of Kingswood, as untouched by any of the forces of Christianity as if they had been savages in Central Africa. That the best, the wisest, the most powerful, the most earnestly convinced of the bishops of that day should take this attitude toward Wesley and his work shows what was the general temper of the clergy of that time. Butler's conscience was not disquieted by the lapse into mere heathenism of a whole class within sound of the bells of his cathedral; but he grows piously indignant at the spectacle of an ecclesiastical irregularity.—, "Wesley and His Century."

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Regulation, Timepiece—See.

REJECTION OF CHRIST

George Frederick Watts, the great symbolical artist of "Love and Death," "Hope," "Time, Death, and Judgment," and other famous pictures, painted "The Ruler." Speaking of the picture afterward he said, "Now I am doing a man's back—little else but his back, to explain 'he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.' Fancy a man turning his back on Christ rather than give away his goods! They say his back looks sorry; I don't know. It is what I meant his back to express." (Text.)

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