WORKING AND WINNING

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 17, 1874

WORKING AND WINNING.

“It is of no use for me to try to get an education,” complains many a youth who meets a few difficulties in his way. So he yields to discouragement, and settles down to a much lower plane in life than he need if he had only possessed a stronger resolution. It is the duty of every one to make the most of the powers God has given him; but a spirit of slothfulness is very common, and is like a fetter of iron bound to the hands. We must work if we would win any good in this life. Hon. Ezra Cornell gives this advice to poor students: “I will assure the boys that if they will perform a fourth as much labor as I did at their ages, or as I do now at sixty years of age, they will find no difficulty in paying their expenses while prosecuting their studies.”

You need more of the spirit that actuated young William Goodell some sixty or seventy years ago, when he set out on foot to travel sixty miles to an academy where help was given to poor students struggling to get an education.

There was no vacancy for him that term, but he was encouraged to come again the next quarter. His disappointment was great, but it did not turn him aside from his purpose to fit himself for a minister. He felt that God would help him through.

Again he started on his toilsome journey; this time he had a little trunk strapped on his back, containing all his worldly possessions. It was not very heavy, but would grow burdensome as the miles were passed. He took the middle of the street, and sometimes the boys ran after him, and shouted, asking him “if he had a monkey in his trunk,” but he did not stop to quarrel with them.

He had a hard time to find a boarding place, and get started, but he looked to God for help every hour, and he never disappoints those who put their trust in him. He worked his way through college and theological seminary, and graduated without incurring a single debt.

He was long a missionary in Turkey, and was able to perform a great work for the Master in that land. He translated the whole Bible into the Turkish language, and was sought out by distinguished men from all the courts of Europe, when they visited Constantinople. He labored there forty years, and came back when old age pressed upon him, to sleep with his kindred.

If he had yielded to the many discouragements in his way, and concluded not to strive for an education, what a great work for Jesus would have been left undone!—Child’s World.