p. 131 | BALKING by Jos. Clarke

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 15, 1860

BALKING.

By Jos. Clarke

The horse is a noble animal and ministers both to the pride and necessities of man. All he can do (and more if possible), will he do for his master. But like almost everything else on this fallen earth, the horse has his vices; and occasionally we find one that has the miserable habit of stopping just where he pleases, and there he stands, or rather plants himself like some stubborn oak, perhaps at the foot of some steep hill, or half way up, or in some slough, or in some deep ford, swift running and cold, or when great haste is required. He stops perhaps at the stable door; you leave him in despair and away you run on foot, while the horse for which you paid your eight gold eagles, pets his balky temper at the spot he himself chose (not you), and there he will stand until the sharper to whom you have now sold your nag for eight dimes, arrives and by some magical art makes the animal perfectly tractable until he has traded him for some good worker, when back the animal apostatizes to his balky habits again under his less skillful owner. There is no radical, perfect cure for this miserable habit. Do what you will your horse may relapse at any time into this fatal habit.

'Tis a miserable trick; better kick or bite or run away; better rear or shy or be unruly, or blind or deaf or lame or clumsy; nothing spoils a horse like balking; it is his ruin. I don't care if the horse is swift as the wind, and strong as iron, and perfect otherwise, if he occasionally balks I don't want him; he is not worth the taxes you pay upon him; you will not take him as a gift.

So there are some who get into the church, and get also into some trouble perhaps; some trial as they call it, and as it becomes onerous they remember the old adage, 'the last feather breaks the camel's back,' and blasphemously applying the said maxim, they stop short and forgetting the burden of 'the patience of the saints,' they in sulky mood withdraw from their brethren, and think to cultivate the Christian graces alone, in solitary dignity, and in sorrowful, significant silence, they think to perhaps terrify their poor brethren or something else which they cannot define.

Worst of all, this balky spirit is contagious. When it once enters, it seems as if some balky evil spirit enters too, and soon as one balky brother is either cured or transferred, another is attacked with the same disorder and few, very few ever are perfectly cured. Alas for the patient!

Sometimes we find it in children and then is the time to root it out. Parents watch closely against this vice ere it is rooted in the heart. Brother or sister are you plagued with this miserable, sulky, God-provoking malady? Do overcome it. Indeed it is fatal to your happiness; fatal especially to your usefulness; and remember that the higher your station, the more baneful the habit, the more extensive the evil influence of religious balking.

A steady, straight forward course of right doing is the right way. Forward, 'forward march,' never halt except for rest or at the master's call. Forward brethren! As Bro. Taber has said, let every day count one in our march.

Jos. CLARKE.