Giving Broken Things to God.
WISE heads are sometimes found on young shoulders. Infant lips sometimes utter sharp truths and biting sarcasms. A child's eyes see farther and a child's mind understands more than older heads imagine. Clothing for the Freedmen! We want to send two or three barrels of clothing for the poor blacks at the South. Who will give to God's poor! "He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord." Such was the call from the pulpit. Of course, the matter was talked over in the family. Clothes-presses were ransacked. Second-hand garments with, perhaps, here and there a rent in them, were gathered together, and a respectable bundle was sent to the "barrel." Little eyes looked on with interest. Little thoughts were busy. Why did we send so many second-hand things to God's poor? Why didn't we lend some of our best things to the Lord? Not long after a valuable chair was badly broken. What shall we do with that chair? was the natural question. "I dess," said little three-year old, "I dess we shall have to div it to Dod." What a commentary upon poor human nature! How prone we are to give broken things to God! How the old Jews set us the example! How they would persist in bringing the maimed, and the halt, and the blind, for sacrifice, when God demanded the spotless and the unblemished. In one of our secular papers, not long since, we saw the statement that the deacons of a certain church out West usually spent a large part of Monday mending the broken scrip which was put into the contribution box on Sunday. No doubt the statement was exaggerated. But we question if there was ever a church treasurer who did not have considerable of such work to do. And sometimes the scrip aforesaid is not only broken, but not even worth mending. It is counterfeit. Giving broken things to God! What multitudes of impenitent sinners are doing it or purposing to do it! "Give me thine heart," says God. Give it now. Give it in youth. Give it in manhood. Give your best days, your best strength, your best services, your best powers of mind and body to God. But no; not now is the response. Wait—wait till old age comes—till sinful indulgences no longer exhilarate. Wait til death stares me in the face. Then I'll give myself to God; then, when I am broken, and helpless, and useless. Oh, for shame!143 Dear reader, don't give broken things to God—that is, with one exception. There is one broken thing which God calls for and never will refuse. It is a broken heart.—Give him that, but let all your other offerings be sound and wholesome.—New York Observer.