Patience by Jos. Clarke

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 4, 1875

Patience.

By Jos. Clarke

For want of patience many a good man has fallen from his high estate of usefulness and become powerless for good. We “need not only to be patient, but to have the quality of patience,” some one has truly said. Little things disturb us very often as much or more than great ones; indeed, you sometimes see men who fret over little provocations bear great misfortunes most heroically.

Now if you have failed in patience, you must not sit down and give up, but arouse and betake yourself more vigorously than ever to the work. Begin with little things at home. Do not get provoked at the awkwardness of your horse, or be tried over the frailty of your child, or the hypocrisy of an eye-servant. Do not get vexed at the absence of tools from your shop, by reason of lending them a week or a month ago. Do not get tried because the children have left the gate open and the cows are in the garden; or because the neighbor's boys have stolen your early pears; or because the wind has blown down the fence, or unroofed the cow-shed.

You must be not only patient, but happy, when the grasshopper eats your corn, or when the beetle tops your potato field, or the frost kills your fruit buds. Your happiness must have a root in Heaven. Nothing can then blight it, except it be sin, which severs the root and blights the plant of true contentment.

Jos. CLARKE.