Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

the hope of returning to Providence. From 1814 to 1818 he resided at Stratford, Vermont, and had charge of the manufacturing department of the Vermont Copperas Company. In the latter year he was appointed manufacturing agent of the Franconia Iron Company, and for ten years gave himself to this work. In 1828 he returned to Boston. Seven years later, in his eighty-first year, he fell and was made a cripple for the rest of his life. He died, May 8, 1847, at the advanced age of ninety-one years and six months, retaining to the last an unbroken and unclouded intellect. In accordance with his expressed wish, his remains were brought to Providence, and when the graveyard of the First Congregational Society, of which he had been an influential member, was removed, they, with the dust of the loved ones who had many years before been taken from him, were transferred to Swan Point Cemetery. He was married three times, viz. in 1780, to Abigail Rhoades, of Providence, who died in 1789, preceded to the grave by three of her children; in 1795, to Mehitable Russell, of the same place, who lived only a few years, her only child dying before her; in 1820, to Cynthia Kendall, who with her three children is still living. One of the number, Rev. Grindall Reynolds, is pastor of the First Congregational Church and Society in Concord, Mass.

Mr. Reynolds cherished to the close of life a tender attachment to his native State, and to the city where his youth and mature years were spent. It afforded him great pleasure to converse upon the occurrences of former days, and to recall the names and persons of those with whom he had then been familiar. The occasional visits of a relative residing here were made by him a conversational jubilee. In person he was

tall, well formed, and of commanding presence; in manners, grave and courteous; in friendship, reliable; in counsel, trustworthy. He was a man of strong native powers, improved by extensive reading and much reflection. He had a respectable knowledge of the French and Latin languages, acquired after he was fifty years of age. He had a fixed religious faith, founded upon the Bible, and has left behind him an honored name for unbending truth and rectitude.

Οτι

THE PLAGUE OF THE HEART.

OCTOBER 4, 1868.

Give me any plague but the plague of the heart.
ECCLESIASTICUS XXV. 13.

UR troubles in this world may with propriety be divided into two classes; first, the burdens

second, the burdens First, there are bur

which God gives us to bear; and which we give ourselves to bear. dens which God gives us to bear. Without undertaking to decide how far the griefs and disappointments of life grow out of a general providence regulating the great features of human discipline, and to what degree they are the result of a special providence fitting the private experience to the personal need, without entering into that question at all, this we can confidently assert, that a very considerable share of man's burdens have their origin in causes largely, if not entirely, beyond his control. They are the result of the constitution of things. They are caused by the frail and perishable nature of the human body. They exist because mortal minds are finite, and the best spiritual perceptions limited. Or they spring out of the relations of friendship and society in which we are placed. Here are a few illustrations.

A man is in business and prosperous; he conducts his affairs honestly and prudently; and has a fair share of foresight and enterprise. But commercial interests gen

erally get into an unhealthy condition. There is a crisis in the mercantile world. And this merchant with many others fails and loses all the results of years of hard and honest labor. We call this God's burden. Not that we mean to assert that God directly imposed it, or that there is no human element in the causes which are behind it. But simply that no ordinary prudence, that is, no prudence that we have a right to demand, would have enabled the man to avoid bearing it.

A farmer plants his fields with the best seed which he can procure, and at the right season. He is no sluggard either. He rises early and tills faithfully the soil. All through the sultry summer even to the harvest he is at his post and active. But a drought parches the soil and makes the crop scanty and unremunerative; or some army worm destroys it just when the hopes of the husbandman are brightest. These troubles are outside our control. They are not to be averted by any probable sagacity and toil.

One instance more. A person is afflicted with a painful and chronic sickness, so that you are wellnigh sure he will be an invalid all his days. You look back over the past conduct of such a one. He has been a man of good habits, temperate and industrious. He has taken at least the usual care of his health. Perhaps his original constitution was at fault; perhaps he was subjected. to some unforeseen or unavoidable exposure; perhaps such were the conditions of his lot that he was obliged to work too hard, too constantly. At any rate, looking fairly at his trouble, you cannot say that he brought it upon himself. It really was the result of causes beyond his control.

The number of these illustrations might be indefinitely increased. For no one considering candidly human life

can doubt that there is in it an element of burden, of grief, of bereavement, which had its origin back of the individual well-doing or evil-doing. This we call God's burden. Not, we repeat, that we affirm that any special evil is directly and immediately laid upon man by God. But that as much as this is certainly true: that life is full of troubles, which have their roots back of the private purpose and act in that general order of things whose first source is God.

There are then troubles which we may in a very proper sense call God's burdens. There are other troubles which we may with equal propriety entitle man's burdens, the burdens which he needlessly puts on his own shoulders, the evils which would never afflict him if he conducted his life according to the plain dictates of wisdom and an enlightened conscience; inconveniences and griefs, in short, which are the direct results of an unwise or wicked indulgence of one's passions and appetites. The seat of these burdens is in a person's own heart. They are, not the plague of circumstance, not the plague of God's Providence, but the plague of the heart, more to be shunned and feared than any other loss or suffering. It is very easy, too, to find examples of this kind of burden bearing.

I know people who started life with at least average opportunities. They had strong health, good intellects, and a respectable education. They embarked in profitable business, and formed pleasant connections in life. But for years they have been growing more poor and miserable,shabby in person, bloated and tremulous in body, confused and incapable in mind, coarse and sensual of heart. The home shares the general wretchedness. The house is dilapidated, the table scantily spread,

« AnteriorContinuar »