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POLISH

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 26, 1877

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 50, No. 5.

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POLISH

By Frank Starr

IMPORTANT lessons are sometimes learned from the common pursuits of life. Some years ago, a gentleman talked to me of the advantages to be gained by attending the Battle Creek College, advising me to try it. He referred to a young man who had been benefited by so doing, and said he, “it has put a little polish on him.”
I was one of the class that consider polish a non-essential. I thought that if ever I had any higher vocation than using farming implements, I could remain, as did John the Baptist of old, “in the deserts” till that time should come. So I said to myself, “Polish! I want to acquire what polish I get by actual contact with life’s realities; that will be polish enough.”
Not long after this, as I was going to work, my thoughts were on the conversation alluded to. I had with me a new plowshare. As every farmer knows, a rough plowshare, just from the mold, does not work very well, and this one scoured uncommonly hard. The soil stuck to it very tenaciously. I was continually stopping to clean it. I progressed slowly; the team worked hard, yet I could but poorly do the work. I wished my plowshare had been polished before I began to use it, much regretting that it left the foundry with its roughness unremoved.
Thus passed the entire afternoon. When night came, my plowshare was nearly scoured. But, to look back on the ill-accomplished work—to see the half-turned furrows! What poor policy to wait for actual use to do the work of polishing! Then I compared the afternoon’s experience with my views on the subject of polish. What if, at the close life’s labors, I should look back on a work half done, made doubly hard for lack of polish?
We need polishing. Read Ps. 144:12. And what is equal to a good school for removing roughness and disagreeable oddities, and making one agreeable, adapted to the various elements of society, even though we may be subjected to strict discipline?
FRANK STARR.