HIS NATIVE TONGUE

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 16, 1880

HIS NATIVE TONGUE.

The other day I was visiting a mission-school where most of the scholars were Germans. A plain man at my side was invited to address them. He rose, and in stammering, broken English, began to talk. No impression was made. The boys shuffled with their feet, and the girls fidgeted, and the unhappy speaker went painfully on with his address. I was so full of sympathy with his embarrassment that I had not the least idea what it was about, nor had the children.

"Talk to them in German," said the superintendent.

What a change! The stammering tongue was loosed. The man's words came quick, terse, magnetic, leaping from his lips, and the school became at once attentive. They answered his questions—their faces responded—there was no more weariness.

He was speaking in his native tongue.

Friends, when we talk of the love of Jesus to sinners, are we speaking in our own or a strange language? Oh! if we love him, we shall know how to speak, and the words will come swift, as the words come when we talk in the tongue in which we were born.—Sunday-School Times.