| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 1 |
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To many people life is all a dreary common place. Some see nothing beautiful in nature. They will walk through the loveliest gardens and see nothing to admire. They will move among people and never observe in them any glimpses of immortality and revealings of the divine nature. They will go through all the years and never see God in anything. It would give us a radian world in nature if our eyes were opened to see the splendour that is in every tree, plant, and flower.
An artist was painting a picture which he hoped might be honoured at the Academy. It was a woman struggling up a street on a wild, stormy night, carrying her baby in her arms. Doors were shut in her face. Nowhere was there warmth, sympathy, or love for her. The artist called the picture “Homeless.” As he was painting it imagination filled his soul with divine pity. “Why do I not go to lost people themselves, to try to save them, instead of merely painting pictures of them?” he began to ask. The common bush burned with fire. Under the impulse of the new feeling he gave himself to Christ and to the Christian ministry. He went to Africa as a missionary, devoting his life to the saving of the lowest lost. If we had eyes touched by divine anointing, we should see in every outcast, in every most depraved life, the gleaming of every possible glory.
Many of the best people in the world are lowly and obscure. They have no shining qualities, no brilliant gifts. Yet if we could see them as they really are we would find the thorn bush burning with fire. They are full of God. Christ lives in them. There is a story of a Christian Italian who works with pick and shovel, walking two miles every morning to his task. He lives on the plainest food. Yet he is the happiest man in all his neighbourhood. He has a secret which keeps him happy in all his toil and pinching. Away in Italy he has a wife and two children, and he is working and saving to bring them to America, where he is building a home for them. His thorn bush of hardness and poverty is aflame with the fire of love.
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