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An Old Story

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 12, 1872

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 40, No. 22.

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An Old Story.

Many years ago a celebrated Italian artist was walking along the streets of his native city, perplexed and desponding in consequence of some irritating circumstance or misfortune, when he beheld a little boy of such surprising and surpassing beauty that he forgot his own trouble and gloom in looking upon the almost angel face before him.
“That face I must have,” said the artist, “for my studio. Will you come to my room and sit for a picture, my little man?”
The little boy was glad to go and see the pictures, and pencils, and curious things in the artist’s room; and he was still more pleased when he saw what seemed to be another boy looking just like himself smiling from the artist’s canvass.
The artist took a great deal of pleasure in looking at that sweet, innocent face. When he was troubled, or irritated, or perplexed, he lifted his eyes to that lovely image on the wall, and its beautiful, hopeful features and expression, calmed his heart and made him happy again. Many a visitor to his studio wished to purchase that lovely face; but, though poor, and often in want of money to buy food and clothes, he would not sell his good angel, as he called this portrait.
So the years went on. Oftentimes as he looked up to the face on the glowing canvas, he wondered what had become of that boy.
“How I should like to see how he looks now! I wonder if I should know him? Is he a good man and true, or wicked and abandoned? Or has he died and gone to a better land?”
One day the artist was strolling down one of the fine walks of the city, when he beheld a young man, whose face and mien were so vicious, so depraved, so almost fiend-like, that he voluntarily stopped and gazed at him.
“What a spectacle! I should like to paint that figure, and hang it in my studio opposite the angel boy,” said the artist to himself.
The young man asked the painter for money, for he was a beggar as well as a thief.
“Come to my room and let me paint your portrait, and I will give you all you ask,” said the artist.
The young man followed the painter, and sat for a sketch. When it was finished, and he had received a few coins for his trouble, he turned to go; but his eye rested upon the picture of the boy; he looked at it, turned pale, and then burst into tears.
“What troubles you, man?” said the artist.
It was long before the young man could speak; he sobbed aloud, and seemed pierced with agony. At last he pointed up to the picture on the wall, and, in broken tones which seemed to come from a broken heart, said:
“Twenty years ago you asked me to come up here and sit for a picture, and that angel-face is the portrait. Behold me now, a ruined man; so bloated, so hideous, that women and children turn away their faces from me; so fiend-like that you wanted my picture to show how ugly a man could look. Ah! I see now what vice and crime have done for me.”
The artist was amazed. He could scarcely believe his own eyes and ears. “How did this happen?” he asked.
The young man then told him his sad and dreadful history, how, being an only son and very beautiful, his parents petted and spoiled him; how he went with bad boys and learned all their bad habits and vices, and came to love them; how, having plenty of money, he was enticed to wicked places till all was lost, and then, unable to work and ashamed to beg, he began to steal, was caught and imprisoned with the worst criminals, came out still more depraved to commit worse crimes than before, how every bad deed he performed seemed to drive him to commit a worse one, till it seemed to him that he could not stop till brought to the gallows.
It was a fearful tale, and brought tears into the artist’s eyes. He besought the young man to stop, offered to help him, and tried his best to save him. But alas! it was too late. Disease, contracted by dissipation, soon prostrated the young man, and he died before he could reform. The painter hung his portrait opposite that of the beautiful boy; and when visitors asked him why he allowed such a hideous looking face to be there, he told them the story, saying as he closed, “Between the angel and the demon, there is only twenty years of vice.”
The lesson of this tale is in the tale itself. You who read it can tell what it is. Think of it often, and heed it always.