Showing Pity | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 15, 1878

Showing Pity.

The Christian character is not made up of a few great acts, during one's life-time, but it is interwoven throughout from beginning to end with unnumbered little deeds of kindness. The man who conquers a nation, or discovers a planet, may have a world-wide fame, and yet be destitute of the smallest Christian virtue. That poor old widow, living in yonder cottage, scarcely known five miles from home, may have a name written with angel fingers in the Lamb's book of Life. Though poor herself, yet all her life long she has been full of sympathy, pitiful to the poor, and abounding in deeds of kindness. It is not the tall oak on yonder hill, with wide-spreading branches, that makes the hill beautiful and useful to the farmer; but unnumbered thousands of little blades of grass, giving food to his cattle and pasturage to his flocks. It is not one great, mighty Amazon, running through the center of the earth, that waters it and makes it fruitful; but ten thousand times ten thousand little springs, and rills, and brooks, gushing up on the hill-sides and in the valleys, that causes the flowers to bloom, and the meadows and orchards to flourish. It is not one great, eloquent sermon, or one great donation, or one great act of self-denial, that makes up the sum of Christian life; it is the love of Christ in the heart, showing itself in unnumbered loving words, and acts of tenderness and benevolence toward the poor and suffering ones of humanity.