p. 121 | HOMELY ILLUSTRATIONS by Rusticus

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 26, 1892

HOMELY ILLUSTRATIONS.

By Rusticus

OUR Saviour was all the time turning the attention of his hearers to familiar things and drawing spiritual lessons from them. We all can do this if we keep our eyes open and our hearts in sympathy with the truth. I find two illustrations in my scrapbook which I think will be new to my readers and may interest and edify them.

A tyro in farm work attempted to mow a patch of mustard. He swung the scythe with all his might, keeping its blade at right angles to the tall, strong plants. He worked hard and accomplished little. An experienced farmer said to him, "Let me show you how." He took the scythe, held it loosely in his hands, and swung it with an upward movement, so that it cut the plants, not at right angles, but with a long slope. The work was easy and rapid. The largest stalks, that it was hard to cut at all in the way that tyro tried, fell fast, and, as it seemed, almost with a touch, before the scythe when the old farmer swung it. "You see," he said, "the sloping cut is the easiest, and the straighter you whack at them the harder it is to bring them." As I listened to that lesson in mowing, I thought there are other things in this world besides mustard plants for which the sloping cut is the best. Many a young minister goes to work like that tyro. He swings his scythe with all his might at the sin and sinners around him. He thinks that his "cuts direct" must bring them down. But he finds, to his surprise and chagrin, that his sturdy blows produce but little effect. He learns after a while that the sloping cut is best. Our Saviour met the caviler and the skeptic in this way. What a sloping cut was that when he asked the Pharisees about John the Baptist! and that again when he said to those who brought a guilty woman to him, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!" In dealing with this wicked world we need a great deal of sanctified common sense, of zeal that is according to knowledge. It is foolish to hammer on cold iron when we have the means of heating it. It is bad generalship to attack an enemy in front when you can outflank him.

I was crossing a rapid stream in a ferry-boat some years ago. I noticed that as soon as we left the shore the ferryman headed his boat, not for the opposite landing, but for a point nearly a mile above it, and that he kept it headed so all the way across. I said to him, "Why don't you steer for the place that you want to go to?" "If I did," he replied, "we should land far below it. The current is working against us all the time, and, unless we work up the stream as well as across, we shall not get straight over. In other words, we have to steer diagonally in order to go straight." And is it not so with all of us in our efforts to be just with our fellow-men—to give to each his due? We make these efforts while we are afloat on a swift and strong current. Depravity, with its abnormal development of selfishness, is pressing against us all the while. The moment that we look at another, and try to feel and act rightly toward him, this current seizes our spirits, perverts our judgment, excites our prejudices and passions, and almost unconsciously drifts us into injustice when we are trying to be just. How shall we resist this tendency of our fallen nature? We are to aim at more than justice. We are to "love our enemies, to do good to them that hate us." This is the gospel plan for overcoming the downward drift of depravity, and for enabling us, in spite of that drift, to "do justly."—Rusticus, in the Occident.