p. 10 | Signs of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 1. (1/7/1897)

HOW THE PASTOR FOUND HIS ILLUSTRATION.

By S. E. Hyatt

The bleak autumn wind was moaning and sobbing among the elms that surrounded Pastor Perkins’ house in the little country village of Amish. ’Twas Saturday evening, and the sun was slowly sinking behind a bank of dark cloud. And through the chilling air, now and then, slowly fell a snowflake—the first white-winged heralds of winter.

The pastor’s good wife was busy preparing supper, singing while at her labor, as Priscilla, the Puritan maiden, sang psalms while at her spinning. The pastor was in his quaint study, adding a few finishing touches to his sermon for Sunday morning’s service. Looking up from his desk, he peered out of the window thoughtfully, trying to resurrect from his mental graves some forgotten illustration, with which to embellish his sermon, and touch the hearts of his hearers. But just then, coming over the hill, he saw the head of a man appear in sight. Partly unconsciously while he thought, and partly from curiosity to know who it might be (for it was a stranger), he gazed at the approaching figure. Nearer and still nearer he came, trudging along the road, now passing between the willows, now coming up the hill on which the pastor’s house stood.

Arousing from his thoughtful stupor, the pastor arose and walked to the window. The man was now sufficiently near for the pastor to see that he was carrying a small bundle. The stranger’s form was bent with age; his clothes ragged and dirty; his face showed signs of disappointment, sorrow, and care.

The good pastor had by this time become quite deeply interested in this queer stranger. He stepped to his study door, and in a kindly tone called: “Mary, come in here a moment.” But while he listened for the answering footsteps of his wife, he heard a rap at the front door. Walking to the end of the hallway, he opened the door, and there stood the man that had already excited his curiosity.

In a tone of entreaty and words that showed lack of education, the tired-looking stranger said: “Please, mister, will ye gimme somethin’ to eat?”

The pastor was a true Christian, and his heart was ever filled with sympathy for the outcast and needy, so with a smile and words of welcome, he invited the tramp into his house. After giving him a chair by the fire, which glowed brightly and cheerfully in the large, old-fashioned stove, the pastor began to converse with his unpolished visitor, first upon the weather, and then in regard to his homeless, wandering life. The tramp, seemingly surprised that anyone should have such an interest in him, his face lighting up with an expression of home-like comfort, and placing his feet on the hearth of the stove, began:—

“Mister, I had a home once, jest as nice as this here one of yours. I was workin’ in a fact’ry down here in St. Louis; and my home wa’n’t paid fer, quite all; an’ I had a small mortgage on’t. Then I got throwed out of work, my wife got sick an’ died.”—At this the poor ragged stranger’s eyes filled with tears, his voice trembled, his throat choked up, and for a few moments he could not speak. Calming himself at length, he continued:

“Then I got discouraged an’ went to drinkin’.”

“Did you have any children?” interrupted the pastor, who had been deeply touched by this pathetic story.

“Yes sir, we—we”—and again his eyes filled with tears, and he could not speak. At this the good pastor said:—

“Your life has indeed been one of sorrow, but the Lord says: ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.’”

The tramp sat in silence, and looked thoughtfully at the shadows as they danced and shimmered on the wall. Presently he asked: “Are you a preacher?” to which the affirmative answer was given. Again the stranger spoke: “But I’ve been so wicked, I haven’t been comforted.”

The pastor now saw marked signs of penitence, and so thought it a favorable time to urge upon him the importance of being a Christian.

“Did you ever pray?” asked the pastor.

“No; I don’t know how to pray,” was the reply.

“Then,” said the pastor, “I will teach you how.”

They knelt. The pastor prayed, and then he said the Lord’s prayer, repeated by the tramp.

After arising, the stranger said: “Did ye say in that are prayer, ‘Our Father which art in heaven’?”

“Yes,” replied good Pastor Perkins.

“Your Father and mine?”

“Yes.”

“Then me and you are brothers, ain’t we?”

“We are.”

“Then will you please give your brother some supper and a place to stay all night?”

Just then the benignant face of Mrs. Perkins was seen at the sitting-room door, and announced that supper was ready.

After supper came further conversation, principally upon the first steps in Christian experience. Then came prayers, at which the penitent made his first attempt alone.

The next morning, when the pastor’s uninvited guest left, he bade his host a touching farewell. He who came there without Christ, went away a Christian.

That day the pastor’s sermon was from the words, “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” And as he told the story of the poor tramp, many were the moist eyes and tender hearts in his audience. He had found his illustration.

S. E. HYATT.

Waverly, Iowa.

THE POTATO.

HOW MANY people are there who think they could not get along without that homely edible tuber, the potato. And yet among civilized races the potato is quite a recent food. “In 1596,” says the Thrice a Week World, “the first potato was planted in England, in Holborn, about the time that Sir Walter Raleigh was planting the first Irish potato at Youghal, near Cork. For two centuries the potato continued as a botanical curiosity. When first eaten it was a delicacy, sometimes roasted and steeped in sack, or baked with marrow and spices, or preserved and candied. When Parmentier developed the plant in France, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette wore the flowers as ornaments. Frederick the Great had to force the Pomeranian farmers to plant potatoes by the fear of his soldiers. It was the famine of 1771-2 in Germany that demonstrated the value of the ‘tubers.’ The fact is that it has been only within the past century that the potato has risen in its prominence as an esculent, even in Ireland, the land of the ‘murphies.’”

PUNISHMENT

Sometime ago, says a writer in the Lutheran, as I was coming up the street, I meet a young married friend, holding her little boy by the hand. The child had evidently had a fall, for the pretty suit he wore was covered with splashes of mud.

“Just look at Willie’s new coat,” she said, in an aggrieved voice. “It is perfectly ruined; and I have had such trouble to get it made. Is it not too bad?”

While I was expressing my sympathy, the little fellow looked up into my face with a woeful expression on his own.

“And mama is going to whip me just as soon as we get home,” he cried.

“I certainly am,” she said in the same indignant tone. “I have told him at least fifty times to take hold of my hand, and he never will do it, and this is the consequence.”

“It seems to me,” I answered somewhat dryly, “that if you have condoned the sin of disobedience for forty-nine times, it is for the sin of falling down that the child is to be punished; for if the accident had not happened, I imagine that the fiftieth act of disobedience would also have passed without comment.”

Her cheeks flushed for a moment, then her honest hazel eyes met mine steadily.

“Your reproof is a just one,” she said, “and I shall not forget it.”

I would like other young mothers, also, to

carefully consider this question of punishment, for it is a most important one. While grave moral faults are often passed over carelessly, a child is frequently very severely dealt with for the tearing of a dress, or the breaking of an ornament, or any other fault that involves trouble or expense, even tho the mischief may have been unintentionally done.

Shocking as the statement may sound, is it not true that when the angry mother relieves her annoyance by punishing the object of it, she is really revenging herself upon it for the trouble it has occasioned?

Certainly it is very provoking to have beautiful things broken, and work that has been the result of much patient labor destroyed through heedlessness and carelessness; yet sometime ago, when I heard a child who had torn a handsome dress answer sagely to another who had told her that “her mother would whip her for tearing it.” “No, my mother never whips for clothes,” I felt sure that she was in wise as well as loving hands.

THE BETTER LAND.

By A. R. Wilcox

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” Rev. 7:17.

In that land of the blest, By the River of Peace, Is the Haven of Rest, Where life's turmoils cease;

Where the loved reunite, With all tears wiped away, And the Lord is the light Of one ne'er-ending day.

We will dwell evermore, Ne'er to fade or to die, On that evergreen shore, In the sweet by and by.

Athens, Vt.　　　　　　　　　A. R. WILCOX.

BE YOU A LADY?

As a young lady walked hurriedly down State Street on a bleak November day, her attention was attracted to a deformed boy coming towards her, carrying several bundles. He was thinly clad, twisted his limbs most strangely as he walked, and looked before him with a vacant stare. Just before the cripple reached the brisk pedestrian he stumbled, thus dropping one bundle, which broke and emptied a string of sausages on the sidewalk.

The richly-dressed ladies (?) near by held back their silken skirts and whispered quite audibly, “How horrid!” while several who passed by, amused by the boy’s looks and blank dismay, gave vent to their feelings in a half-suppressed laugh, and then went on, without taking any further interest.

All this increased the boy’s embarrassment. He stopped to pick up the sausages only to let fall another parcel, when in despair he stood and looked at his lost spoils. In an instant the bright-faced stranger stepped to the boy’s side, and in a tone of thorough kindness said:—

“Let me hold those other bundles while you pick up what you have lost.”

In dumb astonishment the cripple handed all he held to the young Samaritan, and devoted himself to securing his cherished sausages. When those were again strongly tied in the coarse, torn wrapper, her skilful hands replaced the parcels on his scrawny arms, as she bestowed on him a smile of encouragement, and said:—

“I hope you haven’t far to go.”

The poor fellow seemed scarcely to hear the girl’s pleasant words; but looking at her with the same vacant stare, he said:—

“Be you a lady?”

“I hope so; I try to be,” was the surprised response.

“I was kind a hoping you wasn’t.”

“Why?” asked the listener, with her curiosity quite aroused.

“’Cause I’ve seen as called themselves ladies, but they never spoke kind and pleasant to me, ’cepting to grand uns. I guess there’s two kinds—them as thinks they’s ladies and isn’t, and them as what tries to be and is.”—Anon.

A DEFENSE OF PATCHES.

By Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher

What Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher Has to Say.

“A GIRL who can put on a square patch may not be as accomplished as one who can make a green worsted dog on a yellow ground, but she is of far more value in the community.”

In olden times it is possible that too much stress was laid on the importance of training girls to mend and darn so exquisitely that it would be difficult to discover that there had been any necessity for the labor, but if there was an error in teaching and exacting such perfect work it was a fault “that leaned to virtue’s side,” and far more praiseworthy than the wretched work to be found on the raiment of some—of many—of the girls of the present day. The laundresses in some of our girls’ seminaries could and sometimes do make strange revelations of the neglect and careless repairs of the garments that come to them for cleansing.

If a stitch is broken and allowed to run down until so large a hole is made that the stocking can not be worn until it is repaired, and is then, instead of being neatly mended, drawn into an ugly bunch, or if a rent in a dress is pulled together with thread so coarse as to deface and injure the cloth, who is to blame, the mother or the daughter? When the young lady was a winsome little girl was she ever taught to watch for the beginnings of evil in her wardrobe, to darn or mend every hole or rent as soon as discovered, and shown how to do it neatly?

Ah! no. With many the music, dancing, the French or German, must not be neglected for so common a thing as mending a stocking or sewing up a rent in a dress.

When the mothers of these young ladies were girls of ten or twelve they would have been ashamed to be proved such useless members of the home circle. Then, why should they now dwarf and defraud their own children? “Hard times” may come to all, and the practical knowledge which may be needed is quite as important for our daughters as for our sons. Give your children every accomplishment—and of the highest order—that can be secured, but take not the smallest fraction from the far more practical instructions that in mature age may save them from great mortification, suffering and perhaps ruin.

There are none so prosperous that they may not be placed in positions where they would gladly exchange the rarest accomplishments for the executive ability which in their youth they so lightly esteemed. In such cases parents must see that their daughters will suffer more than their sons if the practical part of their education has been neglected.

If a young lady has what in these days is the rare skill of compelling her needle to assist her, with scant materials by some simple and appropriate trimming, until she makes an old, dilapidated garment look “amaist as weel as noo,” she will have cause to bless the mother all the days of her life who led her from her youth in the way she should go. Whatever changes and vicissitudes in her mature age may come upon her, she will have little to fear compared with those, who, in prosperous days, were only the fanciful ornaments of their homes. These, when confronted by adversity, are, through their ignorance, only oppressive burdens upon those who are compelled to provide for their support.

—Thrice a Week World.

TOO REFINED AND TOO LATE.

She kissed the old man, says an exchange; she showered upon him kisses and tears. She told all the people how good he was. I thought if she had only given two of those kisses per quarter for the last ten years how the tender-hearted old gentleman would have smiled through his tears. But now he took it all very coolly. He was dead. He was old and poor, she was young and rich. She had ten rooms, but no room for father. Yet he had made room for her when he had only two. The “old man” was not educated. She was, at his expense. He had fed and clothed her for twenty years at home and at college, until she had risen into more “refined and cultured society,” and married among them. The old people’s dress and dialect were too coarse. She kissed him and buried him in a beautiful coffin. “Dear father!” is to have a costly marble monument. A warm kiss while living is better than cold marble when dead.

INTERMARRIAGE OF BLOOD RELATIONS.

With regard to deaf-mutism, says the Medical Press, statistics show, for the most part, that the closer the degree of relationship between the parents, the more numerous are the deaf-mute children born. For example, one marriage between an aunt and nephew produced three deaf-mutes. Four marriages between uncle and niece produced eleven deaf-mutes; twenty-six marriages between first cousins produced thirty-eight deaf-mutes; sixteen marriages between second cousins produced twenty-eight deaf-mutes; forty-seven marriages between blood relatives produced seventy-two deaf-mutes. These are important facts, which leave no measure of doubt as to the influence of the intermarriage of blood relations in causing deaf-mutism. But just in the same way as consanguineous marriages should be avoided, so also should the intermarriage of persons tainted with hereditary disease be discouraged.

LIVE FISH OF GREAT AGE.

“The age of fish is almost unlimited,” observed an official of the fish commission, in reply to a question. “Professor Baird devoted a great deal of time to the question as to the length of life of fish, and he found that the ordinary carp, if not interfered with, would live 500 years. In his writing on the subject he stated that there are now living in the Royal Aquarium in Russia several carp that are known to be over 300 years old; that he had ascertained in a number of cases that whales live to be over 200 years old. A gentleman in Baltimore has had an ordinary goldfish for sixty-three years, and his father informed him that he had purchased it forty years before it came into his possession.”—Washington Star.

The Conflict in Each Human Soul

By Eben E. Rexford

We little dream of the conflict Fought in each human soul, And earth knows not of her heroes Upon God's honor roll. —Eben E. Rexford.

GOD’S WORK AND GOD’S REST.

By Jennie E. Owen

“This is the work of God, that ye believe.” “We which have believed do enter into rest.” John 6:29; Heb. 4:3.

LORD, fit me for thy work I pray By giving me thy rest each day: For in thy rest I shall be blest, And thus I may a blessing be To all to whom thou sendest me. —Jennie E. Owen.

GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION IN TURKEY.

A correspondent who has been a missionary in Palestine for the past nine years, and has had many years of experience in other parts of the Turkish dominion, sends us some striking pictures of the situation in that much-troubled land. Being the results of personal observation and experience, these presentations are the more reliable:—

Turkey Difficult to Govern.

There is no land in this world more difficult of government than Turkey. Why so? Because of its varied inimical, divided inhabitants, belonging to antagonistic races, speaking different languages, and holding to irreconcilable creeds. The wonder is that the Turk has succeeded in keeping the divergent parts under his dominion so long. Thus much in exoneration of Turkish misrule.

The great bane of Turkey is the sectarian spirit and mutual hatred of Papists, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, Maronites, Jews, and the dominant Moslems, and these last are also divided into sects and races, bearing no love to each other. It is a house divided against itself, and it can not stand together much longer; it must go to pieces—unless the “Christian nations” permit the extermination of one section of the mongrel population after another with the iron rod of despotism.

Could the several so-called Christian sects be brought into accord and concord, and to act harmoniously for the general good, and to coöperate with the Jews in common objects for the welfare of all, the discordant elements might subsist longer compactly. But the Christian sects, particularly the Greeks, hate the Jews intensely, and it can not be expected that the Jews would love them, or care to promote their separate interests; and it is pretty much the same amongst themselves.

A Great Scandal.

What is the spectacle the Christian sects present in Jerusalem and Palestine? Through the intervention of France, Russia, and other nations, they, or most of them, have certain rights or privileges in such places as the churches of the Holy Sepulcher and of the Nativity; but it requires armed Turkish soldiers, with fixed bayonets, to prevent their coming to blows, or bloodshed, as frequently happens notwithstanding the presence of the soldiers, even close by the altars, while performing their distinct religious rites. How scandalous! What a disgrace! What must Jews and Moslems think of such representations of Christianity?

The highest proof of discipleship, said the adorable Master, was “to have love one to another.” It is the new commandment enforcing the old one. But one seeks in vain for it in this land. I frequently see priests and monks of the different sects pass each other in the streets, singly or in groups, without exchanging any kind of salute. More frequently they turn their faces from each other, or exchange fierce looks. Nor, alas! is Christian love as predominant among the Protestant sects here as one would wish to see. How, then, can the Turk, with his intolerant Koran tenets, be expected to be more amiable and forbearing, when the Christians under his rule set him such a sad and lamentable example?

Korea and Japan Open to the Gospel

KOREA is now more fully opened to the Gospel than in former years, and Japan has evidently been prepared by the Lord for the word of truth.—Baptist News.

OUR WORK AND WORKERS.

Five candidates were baptized in the Oakland church on the 20th inst.

DURING the past year, sixty-one members have been added to the church in San Francisco, largely the result of personal labor on the part of the lay members.

ELDER N. C. McCLURE reports a good interest in Eureka, Cal., where he has been laboring for some weeks, assisted by Brother F. M. Burg. Since the camp-meeting at that place, the brethren have refitted their church building and canvassed the city with literature.

DR. J. E. CALDWELL, who has been about two years in the Tonga Islands as a medical missionary, is now translating some of our literature into the native (Maori) language. He says that “a literature to put into the hands of the people is now the first urgent need of the work in this group of islands.” He also says that the medical work has given them a standing in the community which they could not have enjoyed had they attempted evangelical work alone. For some time the doctor had been in charge of a government hospital, but he expected to have a private establishment ready for operation by the first of the year. More than 3,300 treatments were given by the doctor and his helpers in the month of July alone.

A SWEDISH minister has recently come out from the Baptist denomination, giving up a regular salary to identify himself with the Seventh-day Adventist people. He now seeks a more extended knowledge of the Bible by attending the Bible school at South Lancaster, Mass.

THE church at South Lancaster, Mass., are taking 1,000 copies of the SIGNS for missionary work. When we consider that this church is largely composed of students, whose occupation is a constant outlay rather than a source of income, this report ought to set many others to thinking.

OF the work in Germany, Elder J. N. Loughborough reports a church of over one hundred members in Berlin. These hold meetings in two places in the city on the Sabbath. During the brief stay of Elders Loughborough and Conradi seventeen were received into the church. Of these eleven were baptized in a small lake in the suburbs of Berlin.

ELDER O. A. OLSEN says, in the Review of December 29: “We are receiving very encouraging reports from the special season of prayer. It has proved to be a season of refreshing indeed; and the best of it is that the good work begun continues with increasing interest. We have reached the time when the message is to rise and go with power. The only thing that will stand in the way will be our own negligence.”

ELDER G. W. REASER reports the baptism of two persons at Fresno, Cal., and Elder B. L. Howe reports the admission of five members to the church at Sacramento, the result of labor by Elder Osborne at Rocklin. Elder Reaser also notes the faithful attendance at meetings of an aged couple in Kern County. They have charge of a little company, and, tho past the age of three score and ten, they ride fifteen miles every Sabbath, regardless of weather, in order to keep the work moving.

THE Adelaide, South Australia, Register, in its report of the Seventh-day camp-meeting near that city, gives the following epitome of an address by Mrs. E. G. White, on the subject of “True Education”:— “The first and most important mission field for all parents was the circle of their own families. Children were by training fitted either for the service of Christ or of Satan. The great defect of almost all modern systems of education was the worldly tendency of the teaching. The fashions, fancies, and maxims of this world were allowed too large an influence. Selfishness and ambition spoiled many promising characters. Children were not brought near enough to God and God’s best handiwork—nature. It was almost impossible to properly educate a child in a large city. Children ought, as far as possible, instead of being crowded into cities and city schools, to be taken out into the country for their education. Their mental and physical training ought always to be subordinated to spiritual culture. Children were not born to be the playthings of time and the idols of fond parents. They were born for eternity. If parents did not properly educate their children they were training tools for Satan and marshaling forces against the God and Giver of their own life. Children themselves ought to co-operate with the parents; indeed, it had often happened that children had pointed their own parents to the kingdom of God.”

A CORRESPONDENT, not of our people, writes from Los Angeles: “I visited the Advent Mission here last night, and it was crowded, and the preaching was very fine. They are not too fast in warning the people against the danger that is so near and ready to swallow up our nation. It is surely a time for fasting and prayer and mourning.” And all this is true.

SOCIAL CONDITION IN COLOMBIA.

REV. M. E. CALDWELL writes from Colombia that the people are practically without the Gospel, without God, and without hope either for this life or the world to come. He says:—

“We never find any one here who has any clear conception of salvation through faith in Christ, unless he has first come in contact with some Christian teacher. The Gospel is not preached by the priests to their people.

“These poor people either expect to save themselves or to be saved by the priests. With the devout people of the Romish Church here, the priest, however immoral he may be, stands in the place of Christ to his people, and is lord of their conscience and the hope of their eternal salvation.

“The fruits of Romanism in this country are simply terrible. According to the little Spanish paper (conservative), El Heraldo, of Bogota, the births which occurred during one month in Bogota were as follows:—


Boys, legitimate children	-	-	-	-	52
Girls, legitimate children	-	-	-	-	57
Boys, illegitimate children	-	-	-	-	42
Girls, illegitimate children	-	-	-	-	41

“In the country and smaller towns the case is far worse. Undoubtedly far more than one-half, perhaps three-fourths, of all the native population in Colombia are of illegitimate birth.”—Missionary Review.

THE CHINESE.

Thrifty and patient and cunning as Jews, says Mr. L. Hearn, the Chinese can accommodate themselves to any climate and to any environment. They can live in Java or in Siberia, in Borneo or in Tibet. Unlike the modern Jews, however, they are more to be feared in industry than in commerce, for there is scarcely any form of manual skilled labor at which they are not capable of killing white competition.

Their history in Australia has proved this fact. But in commerce also they are able to hold their own against the cleverest merchants of other races. They are adepts at combination, excellent financiers, shrewd and daring speculators. Tho not yet rivals of Europeans in that class of production dependent upon the application of modern science to manufacture, they have given proof of ability to master that science whenever the study can profit them. They are learning thoroughly the commercial conditions of every country which they visit; and tho the history of their emigration began within recent times, they are already to be found in almost every part of the world.

LET US FOLLOW “HIM.”

A FRIEND, Geo. F. Stedman, Harrison, Me., writes us: “Permit me space in the SIGNS OF THE TIMES to thank the one who has sent me the paper in bundles, and also the one who sends them [or has them sent] from the office. Altho I do not agree with you on the Sabbath question, I do not feel like forbidding your casting out devils in the Saviour’s name, because you follow not with us in all points for now we see through a glass darkly, yet the time is soon coming when we shall see face to face. Yours in the hope of immortality.” Good brother let us both follow the Master.

“ORIGIN, PROGRESS, AND PRINCIPLES OF SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS.”

By Editor

(Not Ready.)

This pamphlet, which was first advertised as No. 145 of the Bible Students' Library, has been delayed, owing to our inability to secure suitable illustrations, and we can not promise definitely when it will be issued. All the orders we have received for it are booked, and will be filled as soon as it is published. “Will a Man Rob God?” by Elder R. A. Underwood, is now listed as No. 145 of the above-named library, and our standing orders are filled.

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“Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine;” “that thy profiting may appear to all.”

LESSON IV.—SUNDAY, JANUARY 24, 1897.

THE LAME MAN HEALED.

NOTE.—This lesson section includes the whole of the third chapter and the first thirty-one verses of the fourth. Read the whole of chapter 3. The special thoughts in this lesson are the power of God manifest in healing, wrought by the Spirit through the apostles, and the same power to all in saving from sin through faith. The time of this lesson was not long after Pentecost. The place was the entrance to the court of the women, at the “Beautiful Gate.”

Lesson Scripture, Acts 3:1-16, R. V.

1 “Now Peter and John were going up into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour. 2 And a certain man that was lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the door of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple; 3 who seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, asked to receive an alms. 4 And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him, with John, said, Look on us. 5 And he gave heed unto them, expecting to receive something from them. 6 But Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but what I have, that give I thee. 7 In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk. And he took him by the right hand, and raised him up: and immediately his feet and his ankle bones received strength. 8 And leaping up, he stood, and began to walk; and he entered with them into the temple, walking, 9 and leaping, and praising God. 10 And all the people saw him walking and praising God; and they took knowledge of him, that it was he which sat for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at that which had happened unto him. 11 “And as he held Peter and John, all the people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon's, greatly wondering. 12 And when Peter saw it, he answered unto the people, Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this man? or why fasten ye your eyes on us, as though by our own power or godliness we had made him to walk? 13 The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Servant Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied before the face of Pilate, when he had determined to release him. 14 But ye denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life; 15 whom God raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses. 16 And by faith in his name hath his name made this man strong, whom ye behold and know; yea, the faith which is through him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all.”

Golden Text: “And by faith in His name hath His name made this man strong.” Verse 16.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

(1) At what time were Peter and John found going into the temple? Verse 1. (2) Whom did they find, at the entrance of the temple? Verse 2. Note 1. (3) When he saw the apostles, what did he do? (4) How did Peter fix his attention? Verse 4. (5) What did this lead the man to expect? Verse 5. (6) What did Peter say? Verse 5. (7) How did Peter help his faith? and what was the result? Verse 7. (8) What did the man do? Verse 8. (9) Who were witnesses to this? Verse 9. Note 2. (10) Of what did they take knowledge? and how were they affected? Verse 10. (11) As the man held the apostles, what did the people do? Verse 11. (12) How did Peter turn the attention of the people from the apostles? Verse 12. (13) To whom did he ascribe all this power? Verse 13. Note 4. (14) What did he say the Jews had done? Verses 13, 14, 15. (15) But what did he say that God had done? Verse 15. (16) And how was the work wrought? and how complete was it? Verse 16. Note 5.

NOTES.

1. THE first scene is Peter and John going to public worship in the temple at 3 P.M. The second is meeting the lame man in the temple court, lame from birth, over forty years old, helpless. Beautiful Gate.—There were ten gates to the temple. The one referred to “was probably the massive doors of Corinthian brass, described by Josephus, leading from the court of the Gentiles to the court of the women.” The folds of this gate, says Hackett, “were seventy-five feet high, and sixty broad, and were covered with plates of gold and silver.”

2. The people saw.—When the power of God is truly manifest, we do not need to blaze it abroad to others to come and see us. They themselves will note the change if it is genuine. They knew that this was a genuine transformation.

3. THE apostles showed true humility; bold to speak God's message and to do his bidding, but ascribing all the glory and praise to God. What a proof this was to the people that Jesus was the Christ. It was Christ's name, Christ's character of righteousness, that the grave could not hold (Acts 2:24), and that made the man whole.

4. It was a real work that faith wrought. The man was given new life, new strength. So with the believing sinner. If he truly believes, he obtains new life, new power. The righteousness of Jesus by faith is as real as was the power given to this man. In fact the life, the righteousness, the healing, are the only real things, because they are of God. This is what God wishes us to grasp.

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