NOT USELESS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 10, 1881

NOT USELESS.

THERE died lately in a western State a blind brush-maker, whose story is worth telling, for the truth it illustrates and the practical lesson it conveys.

At the age of eighteen John B—— was a bright, ambitious, hopeful student in an Ohio college. His parents being poor, he worked on the farm in summer to pay for his winter's schooling. He was an earnest follower of Christ, and it was his intention to become a missionary, and he hoped to go into the field in Africa, his attention having been drawn to that field of Christian labor.

A violent attack of fever destroyed his health, and left him with a disease of the eyes, which in a year's time left him stone-blind.

Whatever the boy suffered in this destruction of all his earthly hopes, he kept to himself. He was outwardly the same cheerful, light-hearted fellow.

As soon as he had gained strength, he began to learn brush-making, and supported himself by that trade. A year after he was established at it, he began to gather into his little shop on Sundays the boys whom he found on the river wharves, to teach and to talk to them.

This work he continued for thirty years, until the time of his death.

He had a peculiar aptitude for interesting lads, and the experience of his own life gave a force and pungency to his appeals which they would have lacked coming from happier men.

But he was in the habit of regarding his life's work as utterly destroyed by his misfortune.

"God," he would say, "perhaps will allow me to be of some use hereafter. I can not see that I have done anything here."

When he died, a letter came from one of the most influential and wisest statesmen of our country; a man whose strength has urged many a reform which has helped to elevate and civilize the nation.

"Whatever I am," he said, "and whatever I have done, I owe, under God, to John B——. It was he who took me out of the slough and made a man of me."

Let no boy who reads this be discouraged by any circumstance, however hard. If God forbids you to plant an oak, plant an herb. It is He who will give the increase, and only the future can tell how great the harvest will be.

"Do thou thy work: it shall succeed In thine or in another's day, And if denied the victor's meed, Thou shall not miss the toiler's pay."