Not a Correct Measurement.
By Lyman Abbott
You cannot measure your work by its present fruitfulness or fruitlessness. You cannot measure God's will by present obstacles. You cannot conclude that you have chosen the wrong path because it is apparently hedged up before you. You cannot justly conclude that you are to stop because you cannot see how to go forward. The ashes of Huss were scattered over all Europe by the hands of Luther. The exile of Moses for forty years in the wilderness prepares him to be leader of Israel for forty succeeding years through that same wilderness. Joseph finds the road to the palace lies through the pit and the dungeon. Paul enters Europe with a bleeding back and through a Greek dungeon. God, who selects a parcel of Galilean fishermen and a Galilean tax-gatherer to be his apostles, selects a Jewish working-woman and a Greek jailer to be the first converts in his European church, and inspires the first of all the magnificent choral praise which has gone up from choir and cathedral to ascend from the underground dungeon of a Greek jail. The first European song of Christian praise is a song in the night.—Lyman Abbott.