Much Ado about Nothing.
By Editor
THE following comment accompanies a rather amusing picture in the Sword and Trowel: This seems a very silly business, stopping the plow and wasting the time of a man and a boy and four horses to catch a mouse. The reader smiles at the picture, but we have often felt ready to cry when we have seen the thing done in real life. A number of Christian gentlemen on a committee, with business to do for the Lord which concerns thousands of souls, will wrangle over a point of order, or a matter of detail of the most minute importance, delaying great movements upon a subject not worth so much as one poor mouse. A whole denomination of Christians will debate and dispute over merely personal differences which only in the smallest degree affect the grand enterprise in which Heaven and earth are concerned. A body of Christians will split into pieces over a petty quarrel, a personal feud, or an infinitesimal point of opinion, while all around them the masses are perishing for want of the gospel. Thus a miserable little mouse, which no cat would even hunt after, takes them off from their Lord's work. Good men will spend months of time and heaps of money in inventing and publishing mere speculations, while the great field of the world lies unploughed; and the hemlock of vice is running to seed all over it. In other matters, a little common sense is allowed to rule; but in the weightiest matters, foolishness is sadly conspicuous. Oh that love to God and a concern for the salvation of men would lead good men to use their brains, and leave little things alone while eternal matters ask their attention! Reader, let us kill a mouse when it nibbles our bread; but let us not spend our lives over it. Let us give our chief attention to the chief things—the glory of God, the winning of souls for Jesus, and our own growth in grace. There are fools enough in the world, and there can be no need that Christian men should swell the number.