TOUCHING THOUGHTS

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 21, 1871

TOUCHING THOUGHTS

whether anybody likes to hear it or not. Whenever half the people in the church become willing to take upon themselves a tithe of the privation and sacrifice which they now think they may rightly require of many ministers, there will be a great accession of strength to the church, and her missionary work will be vastly extended.

TOUCHING THOUGHTS.

Who can read these most solemn and touching thoughts and not have his soul moved? Tears would come when I read them. May the Lord impress the reader's mind for good.

SWEEPING FLOOD.—The flood is sweeping onward. Into it have fallen the days and months, until the year is nearly gone. Friends, also, may have gone, and property, and youth, and hope. How life's edge is crumbling! How wistfully we look after it as it goes; but it passeth away. It is remarkable that immutability should be the result of this mutability; but it is so. The past, with all its experience, is gone; but its impress is left ineffaceably upon us. How silently the snow-flakes fell upon our brow! Who felt the plow-share as it made its furrow on our cheek? It was a feathery touch, but, oft repeated, the expression of age is left. What can make us young again? Woe may have bowed us down so that we shall never again stand erect, or prosperity may have inflated us so that our simplicity cannot be restored.

Time has gone, but traces remain; the years have left their lessons. Though we have been unconscious of it as we are of the revolving of the earth on which we stand, we have been moving. At no two consecutive moments have we had the same character. Worse or better, nearer Heaven or nearer hell, onward ever, and toward a fixed or changeless character. The past is gone, but the effect upon us is an inalienable inheritance; our being must be annihilated before it can be utterly effaced. If being evil, we hereafter become good, or being good, shall fall back into sin, our former estate will have its bearing upon our future. The stream flows on, and may betake itself to a new channel; but the plants it has nourished still grow and bear their fruit. So the passing begets the permanent, and time determines our eternity. It is well to live thoughtfully.

D. M. CANRIGHT.