Full text of "Song stories of the sawdust trail"

See other formats

FROM THE LIBRARY OF
LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON. D.

BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO
THE LIBRARY OF
PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

SONG STORIES OF THE
SAWDUST TRAIL

By
HOMER
RODEHEAVER

The Famous Trombone
Soloist and Popular Lead-
er of the 4 4 Billy" Sunday
Tabernacle Choir.

With an Indorsement and

Foreword by
REV. WILLIAM A. SUNDAY

If the dark shadows gather as you go along,
Do not grieve for their coming, sing a cheery song!
There is joy for the taking: it will soon be light, —
Every cloud wears a rainbow, if your heart keeps right.

It is literally true that certain of the great gospel songs not only
have sung their way around the world, but have sung their way into
every class of society and every type of men and women, from the mil-
lionaire to the derelict.

Never more humanly interesting material was published than these
dramatic Song Stories, which, while based on the absolute truth, are
as engrossing as a piece of good fiction. Words and music of the
famous songs of the Billy Sunday Tabernacle which inspired the reform -
i ations, etc., from which the stories are drawn, are reproduced. Mr.
Kodeheaver, in his capacity as choir leader in the Sunday meetings, is
in his own way as effective and wields almost as much influence as Mr.
Sunday himself, who would be the first to concede it.

Digitized

by the Internet Archive

in 2013

http://archive.org/details/songstsawOOrode

SONG STORIES OF THE
SAWDUST TRAIL

SONG STORIES O
SAWDUST TRAI

22 1932

HOMER RODEHEAVER

WITH A FOREWORD BY THE

REV. WILLIAM A. SUNDAY

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1917

FOREWORD

It is a pleasure to endorse the songs of
Homer Rodeheaver. They have reclaimed, and
redeemed, and remade the lives of thousands of
men and women. The effort to tell in human
story form the experiences of new birth that have
resulted from these songs in " The Song Stories
of the Saw Dust Trail " should do a tremendous
service for the Kingdom.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAOB

I Brighten the Corner Where You Are . 1

II "My Father Watches Over Me" ... 27

III "I Walk with the King" 48

IV De Brewer's Big Hosses 61
V Molly and the Baby ~ • . .90

VI He Will not Let Me Fall 110

VII Sweeter as the Years Go By . . . . 128

VIII His Love is Far Better than Gold . .145

IX My Mother's Prayers Have Followed Me 163

X "Are You Counting the Cost?" . . .183

XI "If Your Heart Keeps Right" . . . 204

(Words and music of these famous songs accompany
each chapter.)

SONG STORIES OF THE
SAWDUST TRAIL

Brighten the Corner Where Ton Are.

, 1. Do not wait un - tfl some deed of great-new yon may do, Do not

2. Jut a -bore are cloud -ed skies that you may help to clear, Let not

3. Here for all your tal - ent you may sure - ly find a need, Here re-

IJ k

[rf g 9 * 1 : • ' ' ft' —
wait to ahed your light a - far, To the man -y do-tie
nar-row self your way de - bar; Tho' in - to one heart
fleet the bright and Morning Star; E • yea from your hum-1

jit# g <> |f g=rgf 0 £ if f f f

I er -

i - loner
)le hand

f I

er near yon
nay fall yonr
the bread of

C±±f

now be true, Bright-en the cor-ner where you are.

song of cheer, Bright-en the cor ner where you are. Bright-en tha cor-ner

Mfe may feed,Bright-en the cor-ner where you are.

S £4

1 T1 — nr— TT-tT-tr-

where you are! Bright-en the cor-ner where you are! Some one far from

Shine for Jesus where you are!

J J -J . - - -

SONG STORIES

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER WHERE YOU ARE

Do not wait until some deed of greatness you may do,
Do not wait to shed your light afar,

To the many duties ever near you now be true
Brighten the corner where you are.

Somewhere in France, an American boy, en-
listed in the Foreign Legion, is teaching a new
slogan, and perhaps with it is showing the way
to a new vision. That slogan is the chorus of
the song, "Brighten the Corner where You
Are."

It is becoming the catchword of the trenches,
the correspondent of the New York World at
the French Front says, in telling the story.
Among the dying and the starving soldiers of
the battlefields to whom life is seen through
the shadows of death, the slogan of cheer and
hope and comfort is singing its message.

All the more thrilling a message, when you

consider the simple, homely song that was its
1

2 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

inspiration — the song of a humble heart. All
the more thrilling, when you know that that
song has literally sung its way around the
world, touching high and low, inspiring deeds
of heroism on the battle field, as well as deeds
of patient goodness in the most obscure cor-
ners.

It was a woman who wrote it, and she never,
in her wildest dreams, imagined that it would
become the lever by which hundreds of thou-
sands of lives would be moved. It came to her
out of the fullness of a heart, in which the love
of God blazed, and of what she considered to be
the dim little corner of life in which she found
herself confined.

She had had many ambitions. She had
wanted to be a writer. She had had dreams of
doing good in the world in a large, wonderful
way. Hers was a consecrated heart and mind,
eager for the Lord's service. Later, as her
soul developed, she wished to carry the Gospel
of Christ to foreign lands, or to help in uplift-
ing the poor and forlorn in the dark places of
our great cities.

Despite her longings, and her steady appli-
cation of her talents and her prayers that a
way might open to her, she was relentlessly re-
fused what she most desired.

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 3

Her husband was a railway mail clerk, and
was often absent from home, but the time
which might otherwise have been occupied in
her literary work was taken up by the care of
her small boy, and her father who was an in-
valid.

It seemed as though she must put her ambi-
tions for the development of her talents out of
her life — as though it were impossible ever for
her to reach into a broader sphere.

No one knows except the person who yearns
to write great and beautiful thoughts, which
may some day electrify the world, what a
heart-ache and soul-wrench it is to have to
abandon those ambitions.

It almost broke down her cheery spirit.
Not because she could not find comfort in
knowing that she was doing all that she could,
but because her spirit ceaselessly fretted for
the doing of larger things. It seemed to her
that what she actually did was so very, very
little.

One day, however, a mother of the neighbor-
hood— poor and hard worked, too — told her
that the hours which she passed, in her quiet
home, were the bright spots in her life. That
set her to thinking.

Up to that time she had interested herself,

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

of course, in others, but she had done it con-
scientiously, not enthusiastically. She won-
dered if any spark from the hours spent with
her would illuminate other lives in the after
years.

She set herself to becoming an inspiration to
those about her. She tried to throw the light
of her own vision upon them. She remem-
bered that she might sow in their hearts the
seeds of the love of God. It was an outlet, a
little outlet, for the zeal which was in her.

She set herself, resolutely, to do all that she
possibly could in the little corner of the world,
where, it seemed, God chose to keep her.

Nothing in her life was, apparently, changed
by her new feeling. Nothing but herself.
Within her, now, she began to feel a well of
happiness. She lost the sense of being shut
away from the world. She forgot that the
domestic duties with which she was ceaselessly
occupied were little, trivial things. She saw
that certain tasks were given her to do, and
that the iron barriers, which hemmed her in
from what she had wanted to do, were also the
restraining bonds which outlined the sphere of
her work and life.

Some of her awakened spiritual life began
to pour into her brain. Occasionally she

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 5

wrote little verses. And one day, she wrote a
song. It expressed exactly what she had
come to feel, and understand about her own
life.

Do not wait until some deed of greatness you may do,

Do not wait to shed your light afar,
To the many duties ever near you now be true,

Brighten the corner where you are.

Just above are clouded skies that you may help to clear,

Let not narrow self your way debar
Though into one heart alone may fall your song of cheer,

Brighten the corner where you are.

Here for all your talent you may surely find a need,
Here reflect the bright and morning star,

Even from your humble hand the bread of life may feed,
Brighten the corner where you are.

Brighten the corner where you are,

Brighten the corner where you are,
Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar;

Brighten the corner where you are.

The history of the song from that date is a
matter of gospel history.

The fact of its being sung on the battle lines
of Europe is only one instance of how it has
covered the globe. Here is another:

At one of our meetings a visitor introduced

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

himself to us as a missionary who was home
from Siam, where he had been on business for
the Missionary board of his denomination.

"You have just sung a song," he said,
"which I last heard under most astonishing cir-
cumstances. I had gone into the interior of
Siam to visit one of the most remote of our
stations.

"The local missionary there and his wife had
labored faithfully, and, although they were en-
tirely surrounded by a heathen race, they had
succeeded in making friends among them so
that they had developed a promising class of
children, who were learning English and who
were being taught the ways of civilization and
the knowledge of the true God.

"A reception was planned for the second
day of my arrival, with recitations by some of
the older children, songs, and a Bible service.
The first number on the program was a song.
I expected, of course, to hear one of the old
historic hymns.

"Imagine my surprise, then — with prac-
tically a jungle at our backs and the tropical
sun pouring down upon us — thousands of
miles, it seemed, from the world of today —
imagine my surprise, when those little native
children began to sing, 'Brighten the corner

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 7

where you are.' I had last heard it in the
Billy Sunday Tabernacle a year before."

"I am not surprised," I replied, "although
Siam is the farthest point from which I have
heard of the song. We would hardly credit
the unusual stories connected with it, but I
think the best of all is the story of how it was
written in the first place."

Then I told him the story that I have set
down here of the song itself.

"You will see," I said, "that the author her-
self, is an inspiring example of the message,
which her song teaches. Brightening her own
little corner, she has succeeded in touching
literally the whole world. She has brought a
deeper message to more people than if she had
succeeded in her early dreams of ambition.
For that message is really singing itself around
the globe."

One of the stories of her song has to do with
a man so far away from its author that, under
any other conditions, it is almost impossible
that their lives should have had any contact.

He is the head of a national business. He
is a big man in the world of finance, not only
in this country, but in others. Until a year
ago he was just a splendid thinking machine.
People were afraid of him. His employers,

8 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

even men high in his confidence, found it diffi-
cult to talk to him. Those in subordinate po-
sitions trembled when he looked their way, for
he never did so unless he had found a flaw in
their work.

He was the kind of a man who has been de-
scribed in fiction but whom you do not often
see — a man of iron and steel. So far as hav-
ing emotion, or an unselfish interest in hu-
manity, he might as well have been a clever
piece of high-tempered mechanism.

One of his business associates, said once, that
he was so unfeeling, so impersonal, so unyield-
ing that he seemed inhuman.

One night, in his wonderful car, he hap-
pened to be driving past the Billy Sunday
Tabernacle. There, by the grace of God, as
he declares, one of his tires was punctured.
While the chauffeur was repairing the break,
he sat in his car, observing the thousands who
were crowding into the building.

He felt no curiosity, he said. He had, for
so long, trained his mind to focus itself only
on such matters as related to his own business
affairs, that there were many occurrences even
in his home city, to which he never gave a
thought.

The puncture was a bad one and he grew a

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

little bored. The thousands and thousands
who kept pouring into the tabernacle riveted
his attention, despite his struggle, not to be in-
terested. He began to wonder what the build-
ing was, and what was going on inside. Then
his chauffeur reported that he would have to
put on an emergency tire.

The chauffeur finished his work, and looked
inside the car for his employer, but he was
not there.

A boy, who was standing near, told him that
the other had gone into the tabernacle. The
chauffeur was so surprised that he nearly
fainted, for he had never known his employer
to attend any meeting but a Board meeting of
financiers.

Among those who "hit the trail" that night
was the man of iron and steel. He sat down
in his turn to wait for us to write down his
name, his address, and his church preferences,
as we always do, and to one of the workers
who approached him for that purpose he gave
something of . his remarkable story.

Some converts seem dazed by the experi-
ence, through which they have just gone, and
some are so happy that they cannot help cry-
ing, but the man of iron and steel was simply
more efficient, more composed, and more keen

10 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

than Ui>ual. He had already analyzed his own
change of heart, and wanted to tell about it.

"I don't suppose a man like you can realize
how I could have become so cold and indiffer-
ent to everyone, and everything in the world
as I have become," he said. "I began my busi-
ness life when I was a very young man. All
I thought about was money. I saw that many
men failed to get money because they stopped
for other things, and I determined that I would
so train my mind that it would not recognize
the existence of anything else but money. I
succeeded. I taught myself to look on those
around me as so many shadows out of which I
could extract what I wanted.

"I have not married, and so family life did
not have an opportunity to soften me. I don't
think I ever loved a person in my life, cer-
tainly not since I was a man. I have never
given a thought to friendship in my life, I
never read books that dealt with sentiment, I
never read anything in the newspapers but
the financial reports, I care nothing for music
or the arts.

"When I came here tonight I did not even
know what was going on. I had to wait out-
side while my chauffeur put on a new tire and
I was bored.

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 11

"I listened, tonight, for the first time, to men
talking about the things I have always refused
to consider — God and Humanity. Then
there came that song, 'Brighten the Corner'
and in its simple melody and message I heard
something that finished my decision. I'm go-
ing to begin the job of brightening my corner
on business lines!"

The degree and extent to which he kept his
word is common talk in his home city and state.
He is a man now to whom his associates go for
help when they are in tight places. He has
given royally to every humanitarian cause
which has come to his notice. He is a power,
now, in that church, of which he was a merely
nominal member for so many years. And in
his office, among his associates and his em-
ployees, he is the friend, the adviser, the sym-
pathetic, ever-ready listener, who is all but
adored by those who know him.

Here is another story from another extreme
of society:

A bright-faced, energetic woman gave her
experience after the afternoon meeting one
day.

She is the forewoman in a factory, which
manufactures clothing. Many girls and
women are under her supervision.

12 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

"I used to be proud of getting the most work
out of my floor of any superintendent in the
place/' she said. "I was known as a 'driver.*
Of course those who worked under me did not
like me, but that, I thought, couldn't be helped.

"Then I came to the Sunday Tabernacle,
one night, and heard a song called 'Brighten
the Corner where You Are.' I didn't think
so much about its message at first, but I liked
its melody, and I found myself humming it
when I went home.

"I am a hard working woman, supporting
myself and a younger sister, and a member of
a church, to which I give what I can spare. It
had never occurred to me that I could do more,
but as I heard that song sung again and again
(for after that I came almost every night to
the meetings) I began to ask myself, what was
my corner.

"And I answered myself that it was my
home, my church, and the place where I
worked. And right there was where I began
to see something I had never seen before. I
didn't know a thing about the people who
worked under me, except their names, and how
much I got out of them, when we were run-
ning over time.

"The first thing I did was to get one of your

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER IS

workers to hold a noonday meeting on my
floor. Now we have a fraternity organization,
of which I am President, which aims to help
the members when they are sick or in trouble,
to hold religious meetings, once a week, at
some member's house, and to see that no one is
lonely or without human sympathy. I hon-
estly thought, when I began it, that my effi-
ciency and the output of my floor would be
diminished. I thought that as soon as I
stopped being a driver, a woman who was
known to be stern and unrelenting, that I
would have difficulty with my work.

"But just the contrary is the case. Only
last week, the influence of our organization was
powerful enough to stop a strike which cer-
tain unprincipled persons had tried to start.
And as for the quantity of our work, I never
have to complain, any more than I did before.
We are all trying to brighten our corners, and
we know that that means good, hard work,
done with all our hearts."

Some of the stories about this song have a
real heart throb.

A woman, who attended our services, in one
city, attracted us by the wonderful expression
of happiness on her face, and by the great
sweetness of her eyes, so that we were glad to

14 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

have her approach us, toward the end of our
stay there, and to hear her story.

She told us that, more than a year before,
she had been in a distant city, where they were
holding a campaign then, and had attended
frequently.

But she had not been vitally touched. She
was so unhappy, and so depressed that the
word of God did not seem to have any mean-
ing for her. She was reticent as to the cause,
but let us understand that differences had
arisen between her husband and herself, which
had resulted in a practical separation between
them, although they still continued to occupy
their home.

"But I was a broken hearted woman," she
told us. "I had no real interest in life. To-
ward my husband I was cold and reserved. I
spoke to him only when courtesy forced me to
do so, but our home was as silent and dull as
though no one lived in it.

"I felt that I was the injured person, and
my pride kept me from considering that there
might be another phase to the matter.

"After I returned home from your services,
I kept thinking of the messages I had heard,
and especially of the songs, among which there
was one which rang in my ears, day and night.

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 15

It was the song, which everyone likes so much,
'Brighten the corner where you are.'

"I had really got so far, as to think of sep-
arating from my husband, in fact, as well as
in spirit. I blamed him for our unhappiness,
and I grew more and more sullen toward him.

"One night I woke and lay for hours, unable
to sleep, and all at once I seemed to see that
sentence in letters of fire across the blackness :

" Let not narrow self your way debar."

I sat up in bed and cried out, and saw my
faults, in one flash. I remembered a great
many things that I had allowed myself to for-
get.

"I remembered many times when I had re-
fused to meet my husband half way. I knew
that for a long time I had been allowing my-
self to be sullen and angry, and that I had kept
the thought of God and what He wanted of
me away from my life.

"I hadn't brightened any of my corner. I
was bad tempered to my friends and servants.
There wasn't a helpful thing in the world that
I had had any thought for.

"I began, right away, to try to change. I
was afraid, I think, to hope that my husband
and I would be happy again, but I determined

16 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

that he should have a different sort of home,
anyway, so that day I tried to be companion-
able at dinner, and afterward I went into the
music room and played for him.

"He didn't say anything, but sat and lis-
tened to me. Then I began with my friends.
I returned their visits, and I began taking an
interest in the lives of my servants. My hus-
band did not say anything for weeks, and, al-
though I suffered terribly at the thought that
he would never care for me again, I kept on.

"Then one evening, while I was trying to
keep up a cheery conversation, and he sat si-
lent, and reserved, he suddenly asked me if it
could be possible that I was trying to win him
back to happiness. Before I knew it, we were
crying in each other's arms. Since then we
have been trying to show our gratitude for our
happiness by brightening every life that we
touch."

So then I told her, too, of how the song came
to be written, and of some of the things it had
inspired persons to do and to be.

In one of the cities that we visited, the
woman who did our laundry work fell under
the influence of the song.

She was a good, hard-working, Irish woman,
with four children to support. Her husband

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 17

had deserted her years before, and by her own
efforts she had succeeded in rearing them, and
in sending them to school.

A better hearted, more earnest woman it
would have been hard to find, but in spite of
this she was of a morose, gloomy disposition.
It was difficult for anyone really to blame her
who knew the circumstances of her life, but it
undoubtedly made her little home most un-
happy, and forbidding. The older girl and
boy caused the mother a great deal of anxiety
by their tendency to stay out late at night, not
really doing any harm, but seeking for that
gayety and amusement which their youth de-
manded. The younger children were fretful
and hard to discipline. She complained to
me several times, saying that it seemed hard
that a woman who worked as she did to bring
up a family, single-handed, and to put them in
the way of an education and a respectable life,
should have such ungrateful children.

Not understanding, at the time, her fault in
the matter, we suggested that she should bring
the two older children to the meetings. It
might attract them, we told her. Many chil-
dren had been won to God by the campaigns.

She shook her head and said, plaintively,
that for years she had never been able to go

18 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

anywhere at night or on Sunday. All of her
waking hours must be spent in her washing and
ironing if she did not want to lose her home.
But she promised to have the children go.

The next time she brought the washing she
reported that the children were attending the
meetings every night. She was pleased, but
no doubt as soon as we went away, they would
drift into bad habits, again. She was not at
all hopeful.

We tried to encourage her, but she refused
to believe that they might be permanently
helped.

After that we did not see her until we were
just leaving. She brought the clothes home,
as it happened, when we were not there.

On her last visit, however, we stared at her
the moment she came into the room. She was
changed in some way, and we could not make
out, at first just what it was. Then it flashed
on us. She had always been such a sad, worn,
melancholy looking creature, and now she was
smiling so that her worn features seemed al-
most radiant.

"You look happy, this morning," some one
said. "Have your children improved their
ways?"

She shook her head, and said, with the touch

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 19

of a brogue which made her speech quaint, that
it was not the children who had improved, but
herself. Here is the substance of what she
told us:

She had been a sick woman with a young
baby when her husband left her, after years
in which she had done her best to make him
happy, and to win him to a sober and decent
life. It had embittered her to find that all her
efforts had been useless. She felt that God
had not helped her, that He had, in fact, been
most unfair to her.

At first, she had had to appeal to the Char-
ity Society to help her, and that had hurt her
sturdy pride so much that she felt she could
"never hold up her head again." Then, as
she grew stronger, she had found work, but
work of the hardest kind, to do.

Years and years went on, without any news
of her missing husband, and without her being
able to do more than barely keep the roof over
the heads of herself and children and food in
their mouths.

She had forgotten in her physical struggle,
that children need more than material things,
that their young hearts need happiness — that
they cannot take a mother's love for granted,
but must have some expression of it.

20 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

And so the older children, finding their home
so unhappy and cold, had begun to take to
the streets for their play-ground. It was at
this point that she had coaxed them into going
to one of our meetings.

Contrary to her dismal expectations, the
youngsters were immediately interested. But
still she went about her duties with her face
long, and her usual frown, although the chil-
dren were beginning to make the house ring
with a strange music in songs they had heard
in the Tabernacle. One song seemed to be
their favorite.

It was "Brighten the Corner Where You
Are."

The washerwoman said it was as though
somebody had given her a sudden slap when
she began to take in the meaning of the words,
as they were sung by her own children, whom
she had almost driven to the streets by her
sourness of manner and character.

The fault in their home life had not been
due to the children but to herself.

She taught herself to laugh. "And God,
Himself, only knows how hard that was!" she
said with her Irish brogue and her wonderful
Irish smiles.

She had bought some games for the chil-

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 21

dren. She allowed them to race and romp
around the house. She encouraged them to
bring in their playmates. Once in a while
she spared a little time and money to make
them some molasses taffy, and to allow them an
hour in the kitchen for a candy ' 'pull.' 1

"Sure, it's brightenin' th' corner I am!" she
said, as she finished her story.

Once, as one of my friends was getting my
collars from a Chinese laundry a few blocks
from the tabernacle, he heard a queer, fal-
setto voice singing words which sounded
vaguely familiar.

"Blighten the colna wel you al!" was what
reached his ears.

The proprietor, a very bright, well educated
Chinese, called the singer from the tubs, and
in his odd, clipped speech, he began to tell him
another story of the results of that marvelous
little song.

He was a "Chlistian" now, he said. He had
hit the "tlail," as he called it. He did not
know, very well, how to sing "Melican"
fashion, but he loved that "Blighten the Colna"
song.

Chang, today, has established one of the
most unique Christian enterprises in the coun-
try. He has formed a little school over a

22 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

stable where he holds meetings for the mem-
bers of his own race. He has interested sev-
eral women of the neighborhood in his work,
who teach English classes twice a week. One
of them is a vocal instructor, who is laboring
with the difficulties of training the Chinese
throat into a normal pitch, instead of the high
falsetto, natural to the race.

She writes that Chang is really inspired.
He has even brought to conversion several
American customers of the laundry, where he
is still employed. He has succeeded in Chris-
tianizing his employer, one of the most inscrut-
able and suave of Chinamen, all the harder to
touch because of his many-sided mental de-
velopment, for he is an accomplished Confu-
cian scholar, and can argue on any religion, or
about any form of philosophy.

Chang loves to sing, and it is the grief of
his life that he has never succeeded in acquir-
ing that gift. Also, it has been impossible, so
far, for him to master English. He still
"Blightens" his corners and otherwise allows
the letter "r" to elude him, but in earnestness,
the purity of his life, and the intentness of his
missionary spirit he overcomes these obstacles.

It is only recently that his American associ-
ates learned that his first effort at brightening

BRIGHTEN THE CORNER 23

his corner was to conquer his own habit of tak-
ing opium. What he must have suffered in
his solitary task of self-reformation, no one
can imagine, unless they know something of
the fearful toll which that drug exacts from
those who seek to release themselves from its
blight.

Usually, the services of a doctor and nurses
and special treatment are necessary, as well
as the most earnest efforts of the subject, him-
self. Yet Chang accomplished it alone.

And sometimes, in his meetings over the
stable, he tells of his experience. He says
that when he was so racked and torn by his
fight that he thought he would surely die, he
tried to sing, and he sang over and over the
song which had first made him realize the
beginning of his upward way was to remove
the darkness which had for so long shrouded
his soul.

This is a far, far cry from the author of
the little song — in her quiet home, following
her domestic duties, and thinking that the
scope of her influence must always be confined
within four walls, isn't it?

God's message knows no limits of space, or
society, or race, or creed.

And it was God's message which she has

24 BRIGHTEN THE CORNER

sung to the world in her humbly offered song.

Just above are clouded skies you may help to clear

Let not narrow self your way debar
Though into one heart alone may fall your song of cheer,

Brighten the corner where you are.

My Father Watches Over Me.

I«t. W. C. M.rtta.

T — r

1. I trust in God wber - ev-er 1 may be, Up • on the land or

2. He makes the rose an ob-ject of His care, He guides the ea - gle

3. I trust in God, for, in the li-onJe den, On bat- tie-field, or

4. The val-ley may" be dark, the shadows deep, But 0, the Shep-berd

on the roll- ing sea, For.come what may, From dav to day, Myheav'nly
thro' the pathless air, Andsure-lyHe . re-mem-bers me— My heav'nly
in the pris-on pen, Thro' praise or blame, Thro' flood or flame, Myheav'nly
guards His lonely sheep; And thro' the gloom He'll lead me home, My heav'nly

Cbobus.

Fa-ther watches o - vcr me. I trust in God,— 1 know He cares for

^ ^ ^ ^ -»-• -0- J- .

me On mountain b'eak or on the storm-y

He cares for me, On mount-tin bleak or on the

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"
My Fattier Watches Over Me.

"my father watches oyer me"

I trust in God, wherever I may be,
Upon the land or on the rolling sea:
For come what may, from day to day,
My heavenly Father watches over me.

How far down can a man go — and still be
reclaimed?

How near can he get to the bottom — and
come up again?

This is the story of a man, who was first the
victim of environment, and then a victim of
circumstances, and last, and most fatal, a vic-
tim of himself.

And yet Robert Steele came back again.
Behind him was a prison record. He had
sunk hopelessly into the grip of alcohol. He
had no education, or moral soundness on which
to build. His inspiration was gone — his faith
in himself was lost.

And yet a song snatched him up from the
mire — and remade his life.

28 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

There are those who would call the reclaim-
ing of such a man a miracle. I call it the
spirit of God singing into his life.

To understand his history, and the final
crisis that marked the turning of the way,
when it seemed the darkest, let us take a bird's
eye view of his life.

Robert Steele didn't start as a bad boy.
Few so-called bad men ever do. So the story
doesn't begin in the gutter. The gutter is the
end — never the beginning.

As a matter of fact, Robert Steele didn't
enter life with any particular handicap.

He was the only child of decent parents.
His father was a hard working men, who made
a good salary, and his mother a thrifty woman,
who tried to keep the home atmosphere bright
and cheery, and her son clean, and "out of
mischief," but all her energies were bent for
the bodily comfort of her son and her husband.
Their spiritual welfare never entered into her
mind.

About the only time little Bob ever heard
anything about God was when he got into mis-
chief, and his mother told him that if he didn't
mend his ways, God would surely punish him.
The child came to look upon this something
his mother called "God" with anything but

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 29

love. Fear and rebellion rose in his little heart
against him. Fear of the punishment he would
mete out, and rebellion that somebody he had
never seen had the power and the right to mete
out that punishment to him.

His father was the brightest spot in young
Bob's life. When he came home from work
there was always a stick of candy "for the boy"
somewhere in his pockets, and nights, after
supper, there was always a place on his knee,
while he read the evening paper.

And, when Bob was tired, and fretful, Dad
would take his big gold watch from his pocket,
and hold it to his ear for his entertainment.

On Sundays and Holidays, his father took
him to parks and on boats — to places where
there were crowds of people, pushing and shov-
ing each other, and sweltering in the heat of
summer days, and enjoying themselves or
thinking they did, and Bob's father would put
him on a horse on a merry-go-round, that
whirled so quickly he couldn't see the people
standing around. Bob never forgot those
things.

Bob's mother was raising a fine boy — so all
the neighbors said — but Bob's father gave him
a good time, and boylike, Bob loved a good
time.

30 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

Things might have gone on so until Bob
grew up and became a man, and possessed a
little Bob of his own — if a group of men hadn't
brought his father home one day. They said
he had fallen under a car and been injured.
They put him to bed, and he never got up
again.

His mother pushed a table over close to his
bed, and there were a lot of queer-looking little
bottles, with colored stuff in them, on the table,
and Dad's big gold watch lay open beside
them.

Bob used to climb on the bed, and sit with
his father for hours, but his father didn't talk
much, and Bob would watch the little second
hand of the watch go round.

One day his father was looking at him.

"You like that watch, don't you, son?" he
asked.

"Bet I do, Dad," was the response, "when
I'm a big man I'm going to have one like it."

His father sighed, and laid his head on his
pillow.

"You're going to have that one, now, Bob,"
he said, "it's yours — take good care of it."

Bob was delighted. He wanted to thank
his father with a hug and a kiss, and he turned
to him, but something in the calm, pale face

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 31

arrested him — he climbed down from the bed,
and ran out into the kitchen to his mother.

"Daddy's all white," he told her, "and I'm
afraid."

His mother dashed into the sick room — she
looked at her husband, and then, with a cry
of grief, she threw herself on her knees beside
the bed, and sobbed. The boy knelt down be-
side her, and sobbed, too, because he thought
it was the right thing to do. Bye and bye she
took him in her arms, and cried over him, and
then more things happened.

People came and went, and they nearly all
cried too, and there was a funeral and lots of
flowers, for most everybody liked Bob's father;
they said "he was a good fellow."

After that, there was no more "dad." His
mother wore dull black dresses, and she didn't
hum as she went about her work, and later
on, he was sent to school, and he "got in with
the other kids," and began to forget about his
father, but not altogether — the memory of
dad's kindness to him never left him — no one
had ever been so good to him. His "mother
was all right — but not the way dad had been."

Then a strange thing happened — he came
home one day, and his mother introduced him
to a man, who she said was going to be his new

32 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME!

papa, and the man patted him on the shoulder,
and said he was a fine little lad, and he hoped
they would get on together.

Bob stared at the man, and at his mother —
and finally left the room. It might be a fine
thing to have a new "dad," one who would be
as good to him as that other "dad," who would
never come home again — but, somehow, a lump
arose in the boy's throat at the thought.

And Bob's mother married again, and — but
let Bob tell his own story, as he told it to us,
in the simple, direct earnestness of a man, who
is keeping nothing back, and who is trying to
make you understand him and his life, just as
he lived it.

The man's sincerity can't be doubted.
Whether you believe in his story or not, he
believes it thoroughly, himself. There is no
doubt of that.

"From the first my step -father and I didn't
take to each other. Of course, I was only a
kid about ten years old. I was going to the
public school in our district, and, up to that
time, I was doing fair enough, but that new
father of mine somehow put a kink into me
all round.

"Nothing I did for him seemed to be right,
and, after a while, I didn't want to do any-

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 33

thing. Mother began to change too, and to
scold and nag me more than she had ever done
before.

"I began to play 'hooky' from school, and
'shooting craps' with boys, nearly twice as old
as I was. My step-father caught me at it one
day, and gave me a thrashing. It was the
first one I had ever had, and I didn't like it.
I think if he had talked to me in the right way
even then things might have been changed. I
was just a sullen, soured kid, and no one
seemed to think it worth while to try to under-
stand me.

"Then, to make matters worse, another child
was born to my mother, and she made me
think more than ever that she had forgotten
all about me.

"One day my mother gave me a sharp scold-
ing about something, and said she would speak
to my father. I flew up, and told her he
wasn't my father, and the neighbors said he
had married her because of the money my own
father had left from his wages and insurance.

"Of course, I had no right to say it, and,
when her husband heard it, there was a lively
scene, and from that time things were almost
unbearable.

"About a month later I saw that my step-

34 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

father had appropriated dad's watch, the one
he had left for me with his last words.

"I told him it was my watch, that he had
no right to it — and I was black and blue all
over when he was finished with me. That
night, I slipped into his room when he was
asleep, and took the watch — it was mine, didn't
my own dad give it to me? I stole a ride on
a freight train to the next town. I didn't care
what happened to me. If my dad had only
lived !

"My mother's husband didn't make much
complaint about my leaving, or taking the
watch. He knew well enough where I was,
because he saw me when he was driving
through the town one afternoon. But he
seemed more interested in a corner saloon than
he did in me, and he never stopped.

"When I was about sixteen, I drifted into
Cleveland. I had become a strong, husky
young fellow, and I got a job at the docks,
hauling freight onto a lake boat, bound for
Buffalo. I began to make pretty good money.
The work was hard, but I had muscles like
an ox. Strange to say, I wasn't a spend-thrift.
There seemed to be a streak of economy in
me, even as a boy, and I even began to dream
about owning my own boat some day.

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 35

"On Sundays, when I was all dressed up
in a good suit, with dad's watch in my pocket,
I wasn't such a bad looking chap. But all
I was thinking of was saving my money. It
became a kind of a mania with me. I worked
on the docks about four years, and had laid
by a tidy bank roll.

"One day Captain Hussy, who ran one of
the biggest boats to Buffalo, said, 'Bob, if you
want a berth on my boat, come on, it's waiting
for you.'

"The captain was a fine fellow, kind of —
reminded me of my own dad. I had charge
of the cargoes, checked 'em up, and all that.
I'd been on that boat for something over a
year, and was beginning to do quite a bit of
reading when I wasn't busy.

"The captain told me what books to read,
and all that, and I was getting along famously
when — other things began to happen.

"We had a consignment of some pretty fine
silks from a Cleveland concern to a Buffalo
wholesale house. There were eight cases. I
checked them off as they took them on the
boat, and I took particular good care of them,
too.

"When we got into Buffalo there were only

36 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

seven cases of the silk. No one could account
for the other one.

"The purser came to me, and said: 'How
many cases were there when we started ? '

" 'Eight. I checked them off.'

" 'And only seven arrived,' he said, in a
nasty way.

"That purser never liked me much at any
time. There was a kick about that missing
case, but I couldn't account for it, and no one
else could.

"That night, I was sitting in my room in
a hotel not far from the Buffalo docks, where
I always stayed when we were in that
city, and was counting over the money I had
with me. It was nearly three hundred dol-
lars.

"I didn't have my door locked, and suddenly
the purser walked in — Croyden was his name.
He grinned, as he saw the money.

" 'Got a nice wad,' he said.

" 'Yes,' I admitted, 'I save my money.'

"He laughed. 'Funny about that case of
silk,' he said. 'Yes,' I replied, thinking no
more of it, 'but I suppose we'll find it. It
can't be stolen.'

"'You ought to know!' he said, and went
out, with a queer looking grin on his face.

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 37

"Next morning on the dock, he came straight
up to me.

"'No more nonsense, Steele! What did
you do with that case of silk V

" 'What do you mean?'

" 'Don't play innocent — where did you sell
it? I saw you counting the money you got
for it, last night!'

" 'Do you mean to say I'm a thief?'

" 'Looks that way! I've been talking to the
captain !'

"And then I saw red all over. I didn't
know what I was doing. I picked up a shovel,
and hit him over the head. He went down
without a word.

"A crowd gathered, and, before I knew it,
I was hustled into a patrol wagon. There was
a trial — and I was sent up for five years for
murderous assault. Funny, isn't it, what a
difference a day can make in a man's life?

Nearly all my savings went to pay my law-
yer, and he had the nerve to tell me I was
lucky I didn't get a longer sentence.

"Captain Hussy told me he was sorry, but
that I should have had patience and self con-
trol.

"They sent me to Auburn, and, take it from
me, that place at that time wasn't any hotel

38 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

lobby, or public reading room. I gave them
as little trouble as I could, not because I
wanted to be good, or reform — I couldn't see
where I needed reforming, but because I knew
the better my record the sooner I would be
out. They let me go in about three years and
a half.

"Captain Hussy was dead. The purser
was the new boss of the ship — and one of the
old hands told me they had found the missing
case of silk. It seems that it had been mixed
up with some other consignment — but that
didn't do me any good now.

"There weren't many jobs for me after that.
I couldn't understand it at all.

"One day I said to one of my old pals:
6 Why is it everybody is shy of me? Aren't
they satisfied yet I am not a thief? Isn't it
bad enough to be sent away for three years for
something I didn't do?'

"My old pal shook his head, and said : 'Bob,
you weren't sent away for stealing silk. You
were convicted for half killing a man.'

"And that's the way it stood. They told
me I was lucky I wasn't a murderer — if it
hadn't been for the cleverness of the ambulance
doctor, who attended Croyden, he would never
have pulled through.

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 39

"I began thinking things over, and I saw
there was no use to stay around there. I
drifted south, and crossed the State line into
Pennsylvania. I don't know how it happened,
but I fell in with a couple of 'con men,' who
were running an all round gambling game.

"We made money — it was a swindle, but I
didn't care — I wanted to get back some of the
money I had used to pay that lawyer for get-
ting me five years instead of ten.

"One day I told one of the men of my
troubles, and he laughed, and said, 'Don't
worry — we all get it in the neck. Take a
drink, and forget it.

"If a drink could make me forget, I was
willing to take it — to take two — as many as
were necessary. I took that drink. It was
a whiskey straight. I didn't like the stuff, and
I took another, I don't know why. Pretty
soon the craving for it got hold of me. I was
drunk half the time.

"My pals began to warn me. They couldn't
use a drunkard even in their work, but I
laughed at them and told them I had started
to drink at their advice.

"I guess I was hitting it up pretty hard,
but I didn't care. I was trying to forget.
One day my pals looked serious.

40 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

" 'Bob,' said the one, who always did the
talking, 'we're sorry, but we have decided to
quit this partnership. We're going to pay
you your share, straight and honest, and quit.
We can't stand for a drunkard !'

"It sounded funny to me. I had thought
any one was good enough for a swindling
game. But I guess drunkards aren't wanted
anywhere — not even in a gang of hold-up men.

"Well, we quit— they gave me an honest
share of the profits. I thought I would go
South, and try the game on my own hook.

"I drifted into Tennessee, and wandered
down to a pretty little town, right back of
the Blue Ridge Mountains. I met a young
fellow there, and we got to be chummy. After
a while, he told me he was running a still,
turning out the finest whiskey in the country,
but he needed money to operate. We ended
up by going into partnership.

"His name was Art, and he had a sister,
Jennie — the prettiest little woman I thought
I had ever seen.

"I had never thought much of women be-
fore, but she — she was different in some way.
Before I knew what I was doing I was buy-
ing her candy and ribbons, and the next thing
I was asking her to marry me. I know I

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 41

shouldn't have done it, but the queer part of
it was that she took me.

' 'She didn't know anything about me, that
is the truth. And she didn't know what her
brother was doing, either; she thought he was
in business in the city. I didn't tell her, and
we were so happy for a time that I even cut
out the booze. And then when the baby came
— happy? There isn't any name for it!

"And then things happened again. One
day the revenue officers raided our still, and
Art got a bullet in his lungs. I escaped, but
I didn't have the heart to tell Jennie that her
brother had been killed, and she guessed all
kinds of things when he didn't come home,
and had the life worried out of me.

"I took to drink again, and it was the finish.
Jennie stood it for a time, then she packed up
and left. I didn't blame her — she couldn't
live with me.

"She left me a note, saying where I could
find her when I made up my mind to give up
rum, but I laughed at it.

"I stuck the note into my pocket, and forgot
about it. Before long I hocked my father's
watch for booze, the watch I had kept through
everything — until then. I took to trampin',
pickin' up a bit here and there. It wasn't long

42 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME

before I was like the rest of the hoboes — noth-
ing but a piece of driftwood.

"One day I found myself in a town in Jer-
sey. Half drunk-hungry — I always managed
to get hold of a drink some way — I was feeling
so worn out and sick with it all that I had
about made up my mind that the river was
the only place for me. I took out Jennie's
note, and read it again — well, I'd never add to
her troubles again !

"It was raining, and cold — and that didn't
help any. I wandered around, trying to de-
cide to take the plunge.

"Down the street, a few blocks away from
where I stood huddled in the doorway of a
barber shop, I saw a crowd gathering. I won-
dered, in a kind of a foolish way, what the
attraction was, and finally decided to investi-
gate.

"Going to the mission," somebody on the
edge of the crowd told me.

"I looked up the street, and saw a low build-
ing like a shed, with the crowds swarming into
it. It meant shelter from the rain, and cold,
so I followed, in my turn. I found a seat near
the back, and sat down. They were singing
some song that had a pretty catch and swing
to it.

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 43

"Then I began to make out the words' —

For, come what may, from day to day,
My heavenly father watches o'er me.

"I sat up straight in my seat. For the first
time in years I thought of old dad. Somehow,
I was glad he couldn't see me now. I put my
hand in my vest pocket to touch his watch,
and then I remembered as it all came over me
in a rush, and I cursed myself. I wanted to
cry out, but I didn't. I sat like a stone as I
heard the rest of the song! —

I trust in God — I know he cares for me.
On mountain bleak, or on the stormy sea;
The billows roll, he keeps my soul,
My heav'nly Father watches over me.

"To save my life, I couldn't keep the tears
from rolling down my cheeks. There was a
queer lump in my throat that kept growing.
Before I had time to steal a look around me
to see if any one was watching, a man started
to preach on the platform.

"He was talking about God — 'our Heav'nly
Father' — he said.

"I had always had the idea that God was
standing over me with a whip, ready to strike
the moment you made a false step, but this man

44 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

said that that was all v/rong, that God is our
friend — ready to help us, and only waiting for
us to ask him.

"My thoughts began to drift back to the
days when I was a boy. Yes, that was true
of Dad, too. He was always ready to help
me. The queer lump in my throat was com-
ing back, and then they started the song again :

I trust in God — I know he cares for me.
On mountain bleak, or on the stormy sea;
The billows roll, He keeps my soul,
My heav'nly Father watches over me.

"The man on the platform was speaking
again, but I didn't hear him. I was stumbling
down the aisle toward him. My head was
spinning, and I was staggering, but I kept on
until I caught his hand, and then I dropped
on my knees.

"My body was crying out for something
beyond me, about me that I was trying to get
hold of. I know now it was the hand of God,
and that it was reaching down to me. I tried
to speak, but I choked. And then, suddenly,
a great strange quietness came over me. The
choking in my throat stopped. My eyes
cleared. And somehow I knew that some-
thing had come into my life, that had never

"MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME" 45

been there before. I couldn't explain it — but
I knew it was there. All I could understand
was that I had found a new Father, and that
he had been looking for me for years.

"And I knew, too, that I could never go
back to the old life again. I was weak, and
dizzy, and trembling, but that much was clear
to me. It was as though some one had drawn
a sharp line before me, and I had stepped
across it. I could never step back.

"It happened just like that. Maybe you
have your own way to explain it. But it's
enough for me just to say that God did it.

"As for Jennie, when I got straightened up,
I went back to her, and told her the whole
story, from start to finish. If I had wanted
a proof that she loved me, I had it when she
put her arms around me, and started to cry.
I bought her one of those new style plush
coats with a big fur collar on it the other day,
and she's as happy as can be. Little Jennie
is taking piano lessons, and the first song she
learned to play was 'My Heav'nly Father
Watches Over Me.'

"I wish you could hear her mother sing it!
She always had a dandy voice, anyway, but
I never heard her sing like that before.

"My mother is living with us, too. When

46 "MY FATHER WATCHES OVER ME"

I got on my feet, I went back to the old home
town, and found that my step-father had used
every cent of my money at the saloon, and
that their child had died.

"And, maybe, you think she wasn't glad to
come with me, too!"

The speaker paused in his narrative, and a
faint, boyish grin of pride spread over his
face, as he reached into his vest pocket, and
drew out a watch.

"Handsome, isn't it? It used to belong to
mv father. He gave it to me when I was a
boy!"

The valley may be dark, the shadows deep,
But O, the Shepherd guards his lonely sheep;
And through the gloom, he'll lead me home,
My heavenly Father watches over me.

I Walk With the Ring.

ftOOCWCAVtR.

L In sor - row I wan-dered, my spir - it op-prest, But now I am

2. For years in the fet-ters of sin I was bound, The world could not

3. 0 soul near de - spair in the low-lands of strife, Look up and let

hap - py— se - cure - ly I rest; From morn - ing till ere - nine glad
help me— no com -fort I found; But now like the birds and the
Je - sus come in - to your life; The joy of sal • va - tion to

P P t, b U if »

car - ols I sing, And this is the rea-son— I walk with the King,
sunbeams of Spring, I'm free and re - joic - ing— I walk with the King,
you He would bring— Come in - to the sun - light and walk with the King.

I walk with the King, hal -le- lu - j ah! I walk with the King, praise Hia name!

N j h.

p ft" ' r g"

No long-er I roam, my soul fac-es home, I wa

Ik and I tal

k wi

. -4

th.the King.

/ 1 u

Ill

"i WALK WITH THE KING"

In sorrow I wandered, my spirit opprest,
But now I am happy — securely I rest;
From morning till evening glad carols I sing,
And this is the reason — I walk with the King.

Xo one can ever tell just how a song is going
to affect another person. Yet certain songs
are sure to become favorites among all classes
of people. One of the most popular of all
the solos I have sung in our campaigns is "I
Walk With the King," with its swinging, mar-
tial tune.

There is something about it which seems to
stir almost every heart, and uplifts those as
wide apart in social life as it is possible for
men and women to be. Some who have been
rare exponents of classical music have been
attracted by the sturdy, marching measure of
the song. Like all those hymns, coming
straight from consecrated hearts, I Walk
With the King means many different things
to the different persons who hear it.

"I WALK WITH THE KING" 49

I suppose that no race in the world is more
deeply religious or more naturally musical
than colored people. I remember one night,
while we were in Philadelphia, that I started
a real riot of enthusiasm among a big church-
ful of colored folks, by singing about The
King.

You know how delightful some of the old
plantation songs are. As I spent some of my
early years down South, I knew a number of
the old plantation melodies, and we all enjoyed
ourselves hugely. Then, to give variety, I
sang our song, "I Walk With the King."

They listened with the most intense interest,
showing their pleasure and happiness by the
fervent exclamations which are peculiar to
them.

"Yes, mah Lawd!"

"Hallelujah — I's walkin' wid 'im!"

"Bless de Lawd — Sunlight — Jesus, sun-
light!"

All this was in a sort of subdued murmur,
but as I finished the chorus of the last verse,
a wonderful looking old "mammy," whose
growing excitement I had noticed, even though
she sat far back, suddenly sprang to her feet,
whipped off her old bonnet and came charging
down the aisle.

50 "I WALK WITH THE KING'

"Hallelujah!" she shouted at the top of her
voice, "Glory! I walks wid im — I walks wid
'im, too, brudder!"

Xow the ejaculations broke out into a run-
ning fire, and for a few minutes we had a genu-
ine, old fashioned sort of a time, just like
the Plantation revivals, when everybody was
"happy."

Xo one can imagine what a happiness it is
to me to think that my voice has been permitted
to do work for the Master. One of the ways
in which this has been done — and which I little
anticipated — is in the reproduction of some of
our songs on the Victrola.

Xaturally, I did not expect to hear so much
about that form of my work, as I do when I
sing directly for an audience in person, but I
was surprised to discover that so many took
the trouble to sit down and write me about my
records.

One lady, in Massachusetts, told one of our
workers that for comfort she liked to listen to
the record, "Sweeter As the Years Go By."
And when things in her daily life seemed diffi-
cult, she put on the record "Brighten the Cor-
ner Where You Are." But for the fine cour-
age needed for special times of trial she always
wanted to hear, "I Walk With the King."

"I WALK WITH THE KING" 51

Besides this comfort out of the records, she
used them for work for Christ. You know
there is a certain type of respectable self-satis^
fied people who are last always, to hear a call
to conversion. It seemed that this lady knew
of a number of friends of this type, and when
they were visiting her she would casually in-
vite them to hear her phonograph. She said
that one man who had not been inside a church
for years, could not keep the tears from his
eyes as he listened to the words of "I Walk
With the King" and soon afterward he told
her that he was singing that song "all the time,
now."

A lady stopped one of our workers one
evening to say that she wanted to tell of an
interesting incident connected with one of our
songs.

It seemed that her home was in an adjoining
suburb. As we had just begun our campaign
in the city, only a few of the residents as yet
knew our songs. And so she had been sur-
prised, the evening before, to hear a little local
band which practiced in a hall over the post
office, and which usually seemed to confine it-
self to ragtime, practicing "I Walk With the
King."

Supposing that some one in the band had

52 "I WALK WITH THE KING"

been to our meetings, and knowing the band-
master, she went up into the hall to ask. He
shook his head and said that he did not know
what the song was. One of the young men
had heard it whistled, that afternoon, and he
was so struck with its melody that he had tried
to play it on his instrument when they met,
that evening, for practice. And the others,
listening to it, were caught by its fascination,
and tried to reproduce it, too.

The lady then went on to say she had at once
sung the words for them, and they had ex-
pressed the intention of attending our serv-
ices in a body, which they did, shortly after-
ward.

Several members of the band came down to
take Mr. Sunday's hand at the close of the
service, and the leader told the worker, who
approached him, that he, for one, was deter-
mined to give all of his musical talents to God,
from that time on.

Children love this particular song. I have
so often noticed that they sing it with peculiar
and exceptional vim and power. Its note of
hope and happiness, and its thought of sun-
light suit the springing glories of their minds,
and the purity of their young hearts.

Boys of the ages of twelve to sixteen — those

"I WALK WITH THE KING" 53

most difficult ages ! — like it. I remember that
one of our workers told me one night that she
had been so interested in a young lad, not more
than fourteen, who came to take Mr. Sunday's
hand.

With boyish enthusiasm, he was eager to
talk about this intense experience of salvation
which had come to him. He said that nothing
in his life had so moved him as the song, "I
Walk With the King." He had always gone
to church, but "somehow or other, that song
just made me think," as he expressed it. It
was hard for him, with the inarticulateness of
childhood, to find words for the emotions that
so filled him, but his eyes shone, his lips quiv-
ered, and all his slim young body seemed to
thrill with the eager joy of having found
Christ.

As I said in the beginning, you never can
tell how a song is going to touch the other
person. The way in which men and women,
of all grades and degrees of life and educa-
tion, found the song of the King applicable
to their own needs goes to show that God sees
no difference in us. We are all His children,
with human hearts, waiting for the miracle of
the great awakening.

The song, which stampeded a church full of

54 "I WALK WITH THE KING'

colored folks, was also the favorite of a dear
friend of mine in Paterson, New Jersey. I
came to know her through the story of the
great cross which she had to bear. She had
suffered a paralytic stroke, and for a long
time had been unable to leave her chair, day or
night.

What made this pathetic story, as it was
told to me, seem all the more sad, was the
splendid life which the afflicted woman had led
in that city. She had been a teacher in the
public schools, famous for her scholarship, and
mastery of the difficult art of teaching, but
even more famous for her ability to mold
young hearts into the right way of living, and
for her lasting influence in her pupils. It was
said that long after her children left her, even
when they grew up and became adult members
of the community, many of them continued
their habit of going to her for inspiration, help
and advice.

I was greatly touched and said that I would
see her at once.

The quiet room into which I was taken, and
the patient figure in the wheel chair, coupled
with the thought that she, who had had her
finger on the pulse of the youth of that big
city for so long, only now in her own closing

"I WALK WITH THE KING" 55

years to be stricken so cruelly, saddened me
so that at first I could hardly speak.

But the clearness of her mind and the sweet-
ness of her nature were so wonderful, and so
apparent, that soon I could feel only delight
in the inspiration of her patience.

Even though, in her old age, she, who had
done so much for others, should be helpless
to do for herself, she still felt that God's prom-
ises had not failed her, and her eyes were not
full, either, as she said it.

She felt, she said, that she had been allowed
to finish her work. It was hard, sometimes,
not to walk in the sun, as she had liked to do,
all her life, but the sunlight of the earth was
but a reflection from that brighter sun which
would never cease to shine.

I told her that while there are some things
which we find hard to understand, we can al-
ways go back to God's promise, and know that
for every dark day, and for every heartache,
and every tear, and privation, there will be
His blessing. And when the veil is rent and
we see His face, we will be glad we have suf-
fered for Him on this earth.

I do not think that I shall ever forget the
inspiration which that hour of communion
meant to me. And then she asked if I would

56 "I WALK WITH THE KING"

sing for her, and I asked her what should it
be?

"Please sing, 'I Walk With the King," she
said.

I was surprised.

"Where did you hear that song?" I inquired.

"I think you hardly realize how your songs
have penetrated all the strata of the city," she
said. "I have heard all sorts of people whis-
tling their melodies as they pass my window.
And when friends come to call, sometimes, they
hum the tunes, also. Of all the songs that
I have heard in that way, the one I like best is
'I Walk With the King.' Friends have tried
to sing it for me, but I want to hear you! I
want to hear you sing it, just as you do when
you are singing for so many thousands," and
with a beautiful smile she added, "I like that
part about coming into the sunlight."

This is the verse she liked, and which I sang
for her more than once:

Oh, soul near despair in the lowland of strife
Look up and let Jesus come into your life.
The joy of salvation to you He would bring,
Come straight into the sunlight and walk with the King.

I walk with the King, hallelujah.

I walk with the King, praise His name.

"I WALK WITH THE KING" 57

No longer I roam, my soul faces home,
I walk and I talk with the King.

About a year after this I was down at Ocean
Grove and was told that the dear, afflicted soul
was there. She had been failing so rapidly
that she did not recognize any one, not even
her dearest friends, who were so anxiously hov-
ering around her.

So it was that I had no anticipation of a
word with her, but in loving reverence, I
wanted to bid the saint Godspeed on her way
to the Kingdom.

It was a very silent, hushed room into which
I went. I sat down beside her and took her
hand in mine, and although I had no idea that
one word of what I said would reach her, I
tried to talk a little, saying what I would have
liked to have said could she hear me.

And then a wonderful thing happened.
Her set face, staring ahead as if she looked
away at something which we could not see,
suddenly seemed to light up. And, scarcely
moving her lips, she murmured: —

"Into the sunlight. Into the sunlight."

A strange thing, was it not, that my voice,
which she had heard only once, should stir into
life the vibrations of her memory, and with it,

"I WALK WITH THE KING'

that part of the song which she had so loved?

A few days later she passed out into that
great, never-f ailing sunlight, for which she had
yearned so long and so patiently.

c b k J 6s N i- m

N^long-er I roam, my soul f

ic-es home, I wa

ik and I ta

th.t
-

he King.

* p E

They said that her face was extraordinarily
beautiful when life had departed from it. I
am sure that in those hours when she lay with
her senses closed to the world, she had a vision
of what God had in store for her — of the love
and joy toward which her eager soul strained.
Probably the last earthly vibration which her
soul caught was that which my voice brought
to her — and which awoke in her the echo of her
beloved song.

O soul near despair in the lowlands of strife,
Look up and let Jesus come into your life;
The joy of salvation to you he would bring,
Come into the sunlight and walk with the King.

De Brewer's Bi$ Mosses.

1. Oh, da Brew-er's big boss - ea, eon - in' down da road,

2. Ob, de lick - er men's act - In' Ska day own dia placa,

3. Oh, I'll har-nesa dem boas - es to da tamp-'ranca cart.

Tot - in' ail a -round ole La-ci-fer's load; Day step ao sift,
Liv • in' on de sweat ob da po' man's face, Day's fat and saa-
Hit em' wid a gad to gib 'em a start, I'd teach 'am how

an' dey step so free, But dem big hoss-ea can't run o - ver mat
sy as dey can be, But dem big hoas-es can't run o - ver mat
for to haw and gee, For dem big hoas-ee can't run o - ver ma!

Chcthcs.

De Brewer's Big Mosses.

Oh; no! boys, oh, no! De turnpike's free wher-eb-ber I go] Vse a tem-per-ance

-7-1 — vi — v-

in-gine,don't you see, And de Brew-er's big boss-es can't run 0 - ver me!

(Same as above) for male voices.
Chobus.

Oh, no! boys,oh, no! Bo turnpike's free wher-eb-ber I go; I'se a temperance

Ob, no! boys,no,no,no

In-gine, don't yon see, And de Brew-er's big hoss-es can't ran 0 • ver me!

N 1

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

Oh, de Brewer's big hosses, comin' down de road,
Totin' all around ole Lucifer's load;
Dey step so high an' dey step so free,
But dem big hosses can't run over me!

"De Brewer's Big Hosses" is one of the
simplest and homeliest of the songs in our pro-
gram— and yet it has always been one of the
most popular and most appealing.

I have often speculated as to the reason, and
I have come to the conclusion that one of the
principal causes for its success is its challenge
to the democratic spirit of the American peo-
ple.

We are inherently a nation of fighters.
There is no slogan that will rally a crowd of
real Americans as swiftly as that of right
against might.

Our fight against the saloon is a response to
such a slogan — the right of the weak, sorely
tempted victim, struggling in the grip of al-
cohol, against the might of the organized
liquor traffic.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

The great temperance campaigns funda-
mentally are an appeal to American Democ-
racy, an appeal to arms against the spread of
a power that is more dangerous to human lib-
erty than any autocracy.

But this is not a temperance lecture. It is
the story of a song — a song, which some peo-
ple say has done more to check the evil of the
saloons in this country than many of the most
impassioned addresses of our temperance ora-
tors.

A variety of interesting and dramatic stories
are linked in my mind with the singing of "De
Brewer's Big Hosses."

Perhaps the most unusual series of events,
associated with the song, however, are those
incidents connected with, and following the
Billy Sunday campaign in Scranton, Penn-
sylvania.

Almost from the opening meeting, the song
seemed to strike a responsive chord in the audi-
ence. It began to be called for again and
again.

When I stepped to the edge of the platform,
and called the list of special delegations, fol-
lowing our usual custom, and asked for their
favorite song selection, I could be sure that
some voice would call out in answer, "De

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

Brewer's Big Hosses," and that the request
would always be followed by applause.

Scranton is one of the great coal-mining
centers of the country, and it is essentially an
industrial town.

There is no class of people in all of our ex-
perience among whom it is more inspiring to
work than the American working men.

We are always sure of courteous, thought-
ful attention, and when the response to the
message comes we know that it is always sin-
cere and honest, and straight from the hearts
of those who give it.

Therefore, when we began to feel instinct-
ively that our campaign was gaining headway
and public favor in Scranton, we were more
than usually gratified.

We knew that if we could get results those
results would be permanent. And we were
right.

If we could help win the Scranton miners
and workingmen for Christ, we knew that our
work would go on multiplying, long after our
campaign had passed into history.

Therefore, when I felt the response to the
song, "De Brewer's Big Hosses," and began
to hear it sung and whistled on all sides, I knew
that we were beginning to get down to the

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

great, throbbing heart of the factories and the
mines.

And no truer, or more genuine heart ever
beat for the cause of God than that of the
man in overalls — when his Christ is really
brought home to him.

As the campaign progressed the popularity
of the song steadily increased.

It was being hummed and whistled in the
mines and factories. It was being sung in the
offices and stores. The words were printed in
the newspapers, and even in advertising pla-
cards and announcements.

It was the big song of the moment as far
as Scranton was concerned.

I doubt if a stranger could have remained in
the city twenty-four hours without hearing it
somewhere, even if he never went near the
Billy Sunday Tabernacle.

The song had captured the city, and it kept
on singing its message and its inspiration closer
and closer into the heart of the community.

Various stories were brought to us of the
results that had followed its singing.

One afternoon a large brewery wagon, filled
to its capacity, was caught in the mud of a
slushy street.

The driver whipped and cursed his team in

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

vain. The horses tugged and pulled and
strained, but the heavy wheels were so firmly
imbedded in the slush that it seemed almost im-
possible to move them.

While the driver was exhausting his vocabu-
lary of profanity, a group of children, home-
ward bound from school, paused on the side-
walk to watch the spectacle.

In their eyes only the amusing side of the
situation was apparent.

Suddenly one of the more roguish of the
party struck up the words of the chorus : —

Cbobcs.

Oh; do! boys, ch, no! De turnpike's free wher-ebber I go; Pae a tem-per-ancs

in-gine,don't you tee, And de Brew-er'6 big hosa-es can't run o -Ter me!

66 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

The rest of the children, catching the spirit
of the song, and the dilemma of the brewers'
driver, joined in with a will.

The perspiring man at the horses' heads
turned with an oath:

"Stop that!" he snarled, brandishing his
fists.

But his anger only incited the children to
redoubled efforts, and again they sang the
chorus.

Leaving his horses tugging at the mud-en-
crusted wheels, the driver made a dash toward
the sidewalk, and caught two of the youngsters
by their collars.

"I'll teach you to sing that song when I'm
around!" he muttered, and in spite of their
protests, he led them off to the local probation
officer, to whom he told his angry narrative.

The court officer heard him with a barely
concealed smile, and when he had finished, said,
"Surely, you can hardly expect me to punish
children for singing at you!

"It seems to me that the fault is with you.
If you would get out of the brewery business,
such a song wouldn't bother you in the least.
I would advise you to go after the business —
not the children!"

And the alleged culprits were dismissed,

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

while the driver was left to get his load out
of the mud as best he could.

The incident made something of a public
topic in the city, and the song became more
popular than ever.

"De Brewer's Big Hosses Can't Run Over
Me!" became almost a public by-word.

Shortly afterward another delivery wagon
of the breweries was stuck fast in a street car
track.

The motorman jangled his bell in vain, and
before he could stop his car, hit the wagon, and
knocked it from the track.

While the sweating driver flogged his horses,
the motorman suddenly lifted his voice in the
familiar chorus:

Oh, no, boys, oh, no !

De turnpike's free where-ebber I go!

I'se a temperance ingine, don't you see!

And de brewers' big hosses can't run over me !

The words were taken up by the passengers,
and sung with gusto while the driver of the
brewers wagon, with his face, brick-red, from
the embarrassment of the situation, shook his
fist in vain.

As the street car jingled past him, the
words of the chorus floated back to him defi-

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

antly, and he realized that he had made him-
self a spectacle of public derision.

At last the temper of the thriving, bustling
city was being awakened against the evil in
its midst — the evil of the saloon that had flour-
ished too long, unchecked.

As our work neared the closing days of the
campaign, a monster civic parade was arranged
in Mr. Sunday's honor.

We had been told that it would be made a
public event, and, knowing the way Scranton
did things, we expected something out of the
ordinary, but none of us were prepared for
the spectacle that met our eyes when the day
for the much-advertised parade finally arrived.

Twenty thousand men, we were told, were
in line, and as we gazed at the turn-out, we
could quite believe the statement.

All walks of life, and all of the Scranton
industries were represented.

Mules, that hadn't been brought into the
daylight for years, had been hoisted from the
line shafts.

Factories were closed down for the occasion,
and their employees marshaled solidly in im-
posing divisions.

Stores advertised that business would be
suspended, while their employees marched.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 69

The Scranton lodges furnished a remark-
able quota of their membership to swell the
ranks of the parade.

City officials, the fire and police departments
turned out.

It was a tribute upon which no man could
gaze without tears in his eyes and a swelling
in his heart, and Mr. Sunday regarded it
as one of the supreme events of his life, and
we all shared his gratification and apprecia-
tion.

Suddenly, as the marchers, with heads erect
and banners flying, wended their way through
the principal business streets, there was a com-
motion from the lines of spectators.

A heavy brewery wagon rumbled into their
midst, through the line of the parade, while
the driver whipped up his team, with appar-
ently no thought of the disturbance he was
creating.

A few minutes later there was another burst
of shouts, and the same wagon appeared in
the ranks of the parade, from the opposite side
of the street.

Sullenly, and with muttered protests, the
marchers broke ranks to allow it to pass.

When a few blocks farther on, the driver
showed up again, his purpose was plain.

70 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

It was obvious that he was obeying orders to
disrupt the line of march.

The men of the Scranton Bolt and Xut
Works, with white faces of silent wrath, let
him reach the middle of the street, and then,
as though by a mighty, concerted effort, they
sprang at the heads of his horses, and before
he realized what was taking place, or that he
had gone too far, they had stripped the harness
from the animals, and turned the heavy w^agon
over on its side.

As they did so, some one started the chorus
of "De Brewer's Big Hosses," and it was taken
up with a volume that made itself heard for
blocks.

The driver scrambled to the pavement, but
he did not dare to utter a protest as he saw the
temper of the crowd.

Still singing, the parade parted sufficiently
to allow the marchers to pass by the over-
turned wagon in the street, and the fuming
driver was left behind to correct the damage
as he could, and realizing in his heart the sting-
ing public rebuke that had been administered
to him.

Afterward it developed that he had been
employed to do his utmost to bring confusion
into the ranks of the marchers, with the pur-

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

pose of detracting from the effect and enthusi-
asm of the occasion.

But the effort only served to deepen the en-
thusiasm, and reacted, in approved boomerang
fashion, on the heads of those who conceived
it.

Not only was the parade one of the great
public successes of any event in Scranton his-
tory for years, but the petty plot of the brew-
eries served to give more support and approval
than ever to Mr. Sunday's efforts, and the
campaign closed in a burst of praise that made
the eyes of every worker dim with tears, as
we finally bid good-by and God-speed to the
city, that had rallied so nobly to our labors in
its behalf.

The climax in the history of this song, so
far as Scranton is concerned, came long after
the campaign was closed, and its incidents had
become a part of the history of the city.

It is another of the many illustrations that
could be supplied from every section of the
country that Mr. Sunday's efforts are not
transitory in their effects, but produce results
that are too deep-reaching and genuine not to
be lasting.

It happened that an Italian boy was run
over by one of the Scranton brewery drivers,

72 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

who did their best not to notice the public dis-
dain and disapproval toward them.

The parents of the stricken child appealed
to one of the leading lawyers of the city to
take their case, and to see if damages could
not be collected in court against the brewery,
whose employee was so obviously at fault.

The attorney was one of those sincere, ear-
nest Christians, who cannot hear a call for help
without responding.

He took the suit against the brewery, and
marshaled his best legal thought and judg-
ment in the matter.

Finally the case came to trial, but in his
heart he felt that it was a losing issue, unless
something unforeseen came to his aid.

The power of the breweries had permeated
almost every part of the city, and he sensed,
rather than knew, when he faced the jury,
that the lawyer for the defense had made cer-
tain beforehand of the verdict.

But he wasn't the kind of a man to give up
without the most gallant struggle.

He believed in going down with his ship.

And so he presented his evidence and his
witnesses and made his most impassioned pleas,
fought his opponents at every possible legal
opening which they left him.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

He was doing his best, but that sixth sense
of all true lawyers told him that he was making
no headway, that he was laboring in vain.

When the case was adjourned for lunch, he
approached the counsel for the breweries with
the suggestion of a compromise.

"Why not settle the case now for a nominal
sum?" he asked. "Suppose I could persuade
my client to accept four hundred dollars?
Would you be willing to concede to that
offer?"

The lawyer for the breweries gave him a
look of contempt.

"Four hundred dollars!" he snorted. "Not
a dollar! Why should we compromise when
we have the case won as it stands?"

And he stalked out to luncheon, leaving the
opposing counsel staring at his notes, and won-
dering if the other's statement was, indeed,
correct.

The afternoon session was called, and the
moment at last arrived for the summing up of
the prosecution.

The attorney for the parents of the Italian
child took his position, and faced the jury, for
his last effort, realizing, as he confronted the
rows of bored-looking men that they had prob-
ably already made up their minds against him.

74 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

Nevertheless, he allowed none of his inward
doubt and trepidation to show in his words,
or manner, as he launched into one of the most
vivid speeches he had ever delivered on behalf
of a client.

But it wasn't producing results.

He knew that, in spite of his efforts to throw
his whole soul into the words that poured from
his hps.

It was at this point that an inspiration seized
him, as brilliant as a flash of lightning from
a clear summer sky.

He stopped short in his eloquent sentences,
glanced down as though about to resume his
chair, and then, suddenly, began to hum the
tune of "De Brewer's Big Hosses Can't Run
Over Me."

The jurymen heard the tune, and sat sud-
denly erect.

Without further preamble, the lawyer raised
his voice in the words of the song.

He knew that it was known to every section
of the city, that it had left its imprint in hun-
dreds of homes, and with the vision of the
sudden inspiration that had come to him, he
faced the jury, and sang the words through
to the end.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 75

Almost insensibly the atmosphere of the
court room changed.

Almost insensibly the bored look faded from
the faces of the jurors.

Almost insensibly the nodding spectators
straightened in their chairs.

The lawyer for the breweries, who was al-
ready beginning to put his papers and docu-
ments away, began to glare across at his oppo-
nent, and to try to catch the eye of the pre-
siding judge, but that gentleman had also been
caught by the spirit and the lilt of the music,
and, to his horror and amazement, the highly
paid counsel for the brewery interests saw that
the judge was actually keeping time with his
gavel on the judicial bench.

The lawyer for the plaintiffs ended his song,
and sat down with a smile.

He knew enough to stop at the physcho-
logical moment.

The judge dismissed the jury, and its mem-
bers filed out of the court room, several of
them humming the words of the song under
their breaths as they retired.

A half an hour later the foreman reported
that their verdict was ready.

"We award sixteen hundred dollars for the
plaintiff!" he announced, and a cheer, which

76 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

could not be repressed, broke over the court
room.

The counsel for the liquor interests thrust
his hat on his head, and shoved his papers
into his brief case. He had nothing to say.

He had been beaten by a song.

The case, for which he had refused a few
hours before to compromise for a paltry sum
had gone against him, in spite of his convic-
tion that he was thoroughly assured of the
result.

"De Brewer's Big Hosses" had worsted the
liquor interests once more.

Few of us appreciate the psychology of
music. But there is more than psychology in
the great gospel hymns.

There is the appeal of the soul, struggling
to find the light which it has been denied,
struggling to find the haven which a turbulent
life has kept farther and farther in the distance.

God touches the hearts of men in a variety
of ways. But there is no method so direct or
so certain as that of music.

We say that music has the power to soothe
the savage beasts. It also has the power to
woo and win the forces of sin, which are far
more devouring in their effects than the beasts
of the jungle.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 77

It is not a matter of sentiment. It is a mat-
ter of salvation.

It is food for the hungry heart, crying out
for that which the world cannot supply, which
can only be received from God.

It is unfair to say that music awakens only
the sentiment of men. It calls into being the
best and the noblest traits with them.

It is music that leads the soldiers on the
battlefield to the last charge against desperate
odds. It is music which leads the soldiers of
peace, on the battlefields of God, to the charge
on the ramparts of the devil, where everything
seems against them, and where victory seems
impossible.

I have in mind, in closing this bird's eye
glimpse of the results that have crowned the
singing of "De Brewer's Big Hosses," a story
that has been told to me of the victory which
one man, alone, and single-handed, has ob-
tained, through the help of God, over the
demon, Alcohol, when even his wife had given
him up for lost, and considered him as worse
than dead to her.

He was a newspaper reporter in a Pennsyl-
vania city, and, in his sober moments, acknowl-
edged to be one of the brightest men in the
community.

78 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

His power of description, and his keen, in-
cisive analysis of current events always ob-
tained him a position on one of the local
papers even when it was known that he had
been discharged from a competitor because of
drunkenness.

When the craze for drink seized him, he for-
got everything else.

He was its blinded slave, content only to
satisfy the sudden thirst that had come upon
him, and utterly reckless of how it was ac-
complished.

Friends sent him to various sanitariums and
institutions that advertised a "sure cure" for
the drink habit, but all to no purpose.

There is only one "sure cure" for the drink
habit — the grace of God.

Drugs may dull the senses, and blunt the ap-
petite for the time being, but only the saving
help of God can make the victim immune from
the temptation when it comes upon him.

The reporter tried conscientiously to make
good.

He truly loved his wife. He was truly
grateful to his friends. He truly realized the
opportunities for his God-given talent of writ-
ing, which he was deliberately throwing away.

And often for weeks at a time he succeeded

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 79

in conquering the appetite that was always
gnawing at his heart.

But, always, a more than usual temptation
would sweep down upon him, before which he
seemed as powerless as a chip in Niagara.

Before the smell of liquor he was as help-
less as a slave in chains.

Finally, on one more than usually pro-
tracted ''spree," during which he was absent
from home and friends for ten days, his child
was taken with a violent attack of diphtheria,
and died in the night.

When he was sobered enough to return
home, it was to receive the first news of the
tragedy, that had come in his absence.

His wife met him at the door with a white,
set face. She was through.

"I have tried for ten years," she said, in a
hard, dull voice. "It is useless for me to try
longer. I have given you my life, my youth,
my happiness. They have meant nothing to
you. It is not fair to ask me to stay with you
longer."

And she left him to the misery of his little,
darkened home.

He staggered back to the newspaper office
and the publisher met him with a stern face.

"You are done with us," he said. "You

80 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

are a brilliant man, and you have given us ex-
cellent service in your sober days.

"But we can't afford to have a man on our
pay roll that may fail us at a critical moment.
I'm sorry, but there is no use to argue the
question."

And the poor fellow received the balance
due him at the cashier's window, and lurched
out into the street, feeling that the world had
suddenly come to an end for him.

But even the awful catastrophe that had
fallen on him, was not sufficient to make him
brace up, and fight against the tide that was
wrecking his life.

He spent the few bills in his pockets at the
first saloon, and for days lay in a semi-stupor
in a shack on the edge of town.

For weeks he hung about the railroad yards,
where the men he had known and befriended as
a reporter, gave him enough to keep him from
actual starvation.

But they regarded him as a hopeless derelict,
whose only salvation would be in death.

They gave him money as they would give to
the victim of an incurable disease.

He was a likable fellow, who made friends
easily, and his ability was undoubted.

But he was like a man marked by the lep-

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 81

rosy. He was the horrible example of the
community, whom men could only pity.

It was about this time that Mr. Sunday
opened a campaign there.

The publisher of the newspaper, where the
reporter had been employed, was an unusual
type of Christian, a man who tried to conduct
his paper as he felt Jesus would do, were He
alive, and at the editorial desk.

This may seem incredible, but it's a fact.
He kept himself poor because of his personal
donations to charity and deserving victims of
misfortune.

And he was always losing splendid business
contracts because of his insistence on cham-
pioning the cause of right, as he saw it.

An opened Bible on his editorial desk could
be seen whenever a visitor happened to enter his
office unexpectedly, and it was plain that the
Bible was not there for show.

The publisher made diligent use of it. Of
course, it was impossible for him always to
measure up to all of his ideals. There are
limits to human efforts and a wholesale re-
form of society might mean a wreckage and
ruin.

But he tried as sincerely and conscientiously
as was in his limited power to conduct his

82 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

newspaper and his own life as he felt the Great
Master would have him do, were He always by
his side.

When the Billy Sunday campaign was an-
nounced, the publisher had a sudden inspira-
tion, and sent for the discharged reporter.

The man was ushered into his private office,
a pitiable object, with ragged clothes, and a
face that had not seen a razor for days.

Without a word, the publisher gave him a
bill, and told him to get himself cleaned up, and
then report to him for instructions.

The newspaper man obeyed instructions,
and, late in the afternoon came back, in a new
suit, with a shave, and a hair cut, but wTith his
hands trembling, for he had not had a drink
for hours.

"I want you to report the Sunday meetings
for this paper," said the publisher. "We are
going to give them all the space they want.
While Mr. Sunday is here, this newspaper be-
longs to him. I want you to do your best."

The reporter said nothing, but after a
moment staggered from the office.

The publisher turned back to his work. He
was trying a desperate experiment from his
viewpoint. It was his hope that the man
might be touched by the grace of God at the

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 83

meetings, and so influenced as to seize the only
life line that could be flung to him now.

For a week there was no apparent result.

The reporter kept sober, and contributed
some of the most brilliant accounts of our
meetings that have ever been written.

Then one night we missed him from the
newspaper table.

His place was taken by another man, for the
publisher, knowing that the man might go
down under his temptation at any moment, had
provided a substitute for such an emergency.

On the third night the reporter reappeared,
showing plainly by his pale face and shaking
hands the reason for his absence.

It was on this evening that we sang for the
first time the song, "De Brewer's Big Hosses
Can't Run Over Me."

It was received with more than usual ap-
plause, and in the report of the service the re-
porter seized upon the song, and made much
of it.

Two nights later it was sung again, by spe-
cial request, and, when at the close of the meet-
ing the invitation was given, the reporter sur-
prised his associates by climbing down from
the press table, and taking his place in the saw-
dust trail.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

When he took Mr. Sunday's hand, there
was a desperate gleam of earnestness in his
eyes, but he said nothing.

He returned to his office, and wrote his ac-
count of the service, as though nothing had
happened in his own life, but there was a
new note in his article, which had never been
there before, a sense of conviction that struck
all who read it.

From that time on he was constant in his
attendance at the press stands, but he was more
silent and taciturn even than before.

He had nothing to say beyond a curt word
of thanks to those who congratulated him on
the stand he had taken.

The publisher, who had engineered the ex-
periment, said nothing.

He was wise enough to know that nothing
but the voice of God could have an effect in a
life as far gone as this one.

And so the meetings drew gradually to a
close.

The change in the newspaper man was now
obvious. His shaking hand was gone. His
blood-shot eyes had disappeared. The pallor
in his face was slowly giving way before the
normal flush of health.

And his articles were proving to be some of

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 85

the most inspiring that had ever been written
of our campaigns.

It was plain that he had found something
which he had missed before — that a power had
come into his life which was holding him to
soberness, where drugs had failed completely.

Local physicians, who had attended him at
various periods, regarded him with amazement,
and some of them said that it was only an
overly excited product of the emotions.

But he remained sober. There could be
no doubting that fact.

Would the effect continue? From time to
time we heard from the city, and occasionally
the publisher sent us a word of the conditions
which had followed our meetings, but nothing
was said of the reporter.

It was only a short time ago, through a
friend, that I heard of the sequel of the story.

The newspaper man's conversion, strange as
it may seem, from a medical diagnosis, had
been permanent.

His appetite for liquor had disappeared as
though an unseen power had wiped it from
his life.

It developed that once he had told his story
to the publisher, who had undertaken the ex-
periment of his reformation.

86 DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES

The crowning impulse in his stand for Christ
had come through the singing of "De Brewer's
Big Hosses."

The song had suggested the question, which
he had often asked himself before, Why should
the power of the breweries wreck my life, and
those of my loved ones?

Why haven't I the power and the manhood
to fight such a force for evil?

Why should I stand by, and let the Big
Hosses of the Brewers run over me, and my
wife, and my home, and reduce me to a con-
dition of pauperism and beggary, and charity?

Am I not a man? Has not God given me
the knowledge of right and wrong — and the
power to demonstrate that knowledge in my
own life?

Why then should I let any men, or any or-
ganization of men send me to the devil?

Why should I admit that the big horses of
the brewers can hurl me to the ground, and
batter out my hope of peace in this world —
and the next?

Surely, there must be something I can do to
defend myself?

Surely there must be something that will
come to my rescue when I haven't the power
to fight on in the face of temptation ?

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES 87

It was these questions that led him to fling
his whole problem on the all-protecting arms
of God, which led him from the reporters'
table to the saw-dust trail, where before those
men, who had known him in the days of his sin,
he made a public profession to the great God,
who will show erring men the way to the Cross.

De Brewer's Big Hosses had won again I

They will always win if the message of the
song is allowed to sink deeply enough.

They will always win if a conviction of the
evil they are doing can be established in those
lives, which they have mangled beneath their
heavy feet.

They will always win if their victims can be
given breathing space enough to see the great
gulf between God and the devil — the gulf be-
tween the cupidity and the greed of the brew-
ers, that thrive on wrecked lives, and the all-
saving grace of God, that seeks only the lost,
and seeks only to point the way of salvation
to men, who have abandoned all hope in this
life, and that to come.

Oh, I'll harness dem hosses to de temp'rance cart,
Hit 'em wid a gad to gib 'em a start;
I'll teach 'em how for to haw and gee,
For dem big hosses can't run over me!

Molly and the Baby, Don't Yoa Know*

H.S.T«ylor.

SOLO.

1. There's & pa-tient lit • tie wom-an here be -low,

2. You may tell the liq - our - eel - ler Dot to crow,

3. You may tell the pol • i - ti-cians they may go,

And

will

lit-tio kid that ought to have a show;
ner-er get a niek-el from me now;
in for pro-hi-bi-tion, head and toe!

Now I'll give the whis- ky up,
He may keep his pois-oned trash*
For at last I've turned my cost,

And I'll take a cof - fee cup With Mol-ly and the Ba-by, don't you know!
And I'll put a-way my cash For Mol-ly and the Ba-by, don't you knowl
And I'll cast a tercp'rance vote For Mol-ly and the Ba-by, don't you know!

Molly and the Baby.

Don't jou know, don't yon know, what a fel«lov ought to do,

He should try to be a man, and to do the best he can

MOLLY AND THE BABY

There's a patient little woman here below,

And a little kid that ought to have a show;

Now 111 give the whiskey up

And I'll take a coffee cup

With Mollie and the Baby, don't you know !

The most interesting and unusual types of
persons with whom we have come in contact, in
our work, are victims of drink.

The kind of a man who becomes the slave of
the drink habit is nearly always temperamental
and highly emotional. For that reason, he is
often dramatic in his conversation, and sur-
prisingly sudden in yielding to the influence of
music.

Sometimes, it takes a long time for a convic-
tion of sin to fall upon him, but the drunkard
is often pathetically conscious of his state.
And although drink does, undoubtedly, de-
stroy much of the finer feelings, it does not
harden the heart. The workers who have dealt
with our converts can testify to the agony of

MOLLY AND THE BABY 91

penitence which is so common among those
whose lives have been ruined by alcohol.

Many in New York will remember "the
Professor" as he came to be called.

Unbelievably dirty and ragged as he was,
when he first became a conspicuous figure at
the Billy Sunday meetings, there was yet about
him the faint reflection of education and cul-
ture. His speech too, although blurred and
indistinct, had the delicate and elusive modula-
tions, which spell refinement and scholarship.

Night after night, his tall, gaunt figure
would come staggering in, only to slump down
in a seat ; and soon he would be either asleep or
in an unconscious condition, swaying about, his
eyes half closed, his face pale, a point to which
many eyes wandered in distress and pity.

Some of the workers tried to talk to him, but
his replies seemed to indicate that he was not
able to understand what they said. But all the
time, God's grace was working in his heart, and
talking to his brain, although the poor fellow
seemed more intoxicated on every night.

At last, when we had grown accustomed to
seeing him get up and stumble out toward the
close of the meetings, he came down the aisle
with hundreds of others. That night, however,
he was worse than ever. If those around him

MOLLY AND THE BABY

had not helped him, he would never have
reached our platform. As it was, he had no
more than done so, when he fell flat upon his
face in the sawdust.

It was so hopeless to expect him to remem-
ber what he had done that we supposed his con-
version would not last out the night. But we
saw that he had shelter, anyway. The next
day he was still frightfully intoxicated, but in
moments of consciousness he reiterated the one
statement he had made the night before: "I am
through — at last!"

The kind persons who took him in saw that
he had a bath, and clean clothes and sustaining
food. Two days afterward he came to the
meeting, shaking like a man with a chill, for
the alcohol was draining out of him, but he was
clear eyed and resolute.

Then we saw that he really had a fighting
chance for salvation, although whether his frail
body would outlive the period of physical re-
construction was a question.

That night, after the meeting, sitting be-
tween me and a sweet faced woman whom we
called (behind her back) "The Angel," the
Professor told us his story.

Fifteen years before he had been the head of
a department in a well known Xew Jersey col-

MOLLY AND THE BABY 93

lege. He had been a member of some of the
exclusive New York clubs. He had been wel-
comed and received in the most select circles.
Of course, he did not say so, but we could see,
as he talked, that he must have been exception-
ally brilliant and charming.

His college work was very exacting, and he
was often fagged and weary. He formed the
habit of drinking brandy or whiskey late at
night, as he sat alone, striving to keep up with
the demands of his office.

Pretty soon it was so that he could not work
without stimulants. Then, one day, to his hor-
ror, he awoke at noon on the floor of his study,
with an empty whiskey bottle to tell him that
he must have been lying there, intoxicated, for
hours. He had missed his morning lecture.

This frightened him, and he tried to leave
drink alone entirely, only to discover that he
was a hopeless victim of the habit.

Secretly terrified, he struggled, but if he
succeeded in not drinking anything for a week,
he ended by spending Sunday in a condition of
abject intoxication.

It was not long before the college became
aware of his weakness. In six weeks he was
asked to resign his professorship.

Disgraced, humiliated, without means of

94 MOLLY AND THE BABY

livelihood, he sank with startling swiftness.
Trembling, but clear and lucid in mind, the
poor fellow outlined to us his downward
plunge. The Angel's compassionate heart
was wrung by the story. She put her hand on
his shoulder to steady him as he told us of his
conversion.

He had no recollection, whatever, of how he
had happened to be in the vicinity of the taber-
nacle. He had long since ceased to have a
place to sleep or regular food. He must have
followed the crowd. At any rate, the first
definite fact he remembered was that a song
was being sung. It was this :

There's a patient little woman here below,

And a little kid that ought to have a show;

Now I'll give the whiskey up,

And I'll take a coffee cup

With Molly and the Baby, don't you know !

You may tell the liquor-seller not to crow,

He will never get a nickel from me now;

He may keep his poisoned trash,

And I'll put away my cash,

For Molly and the Baby, don't you know!

You may tell the politicians they may go,

I am in for prohibition, head and toe!

For at last I've turned my coat,

And I'll cast a temp'rance vote,

For Molly and the Baby, don't you know !

MOLLY AND THE BABY

The song brought home to his dazed mind
all that he had lost. There was no Mollie
waiting for him. No little children would ever
climb his knee. No forgiving kiss would ever
fall on his lips. He had forfeited his man's
birthright. There was nothing to call to him.
Behind him, years ago, lay the associations of
his college days and his professorship. In the
fifteen years since that time he had known
only outcasts like himself. Never, he said,
would there be a sweet, pure woman to bless
him with her love.

And out of all that suffering, which went on
in his heart from day to day, while he wandered
the streets, and begged for the few cents which
would buy him a drink and a morsel of food,
there gradually arose the determination to for-
sake that which had dragged him down. But
he was not certain that he could do so. He
knew, better than any one could tell him, how
his body, soaked with the poison, would make
him suffer if he tried to eliminate it.

That night when he had "hit the trail," we
had sung the song of Mollie again. (A fact
which I had forgotten.) And although he
was more intoxicated, even, than usual, the
processes of his mind were astonishingly clear.
He had known perfectly what he was doing al-

MOLLY AND THE BABY

though he had been utterly unable to say more
than the one sentence, "I am through — at last."

The Angel spoke to him words of such in-
spired cheer and power that the others slipped
away, leaving them together.

We understood that the Angel obtained the
Professor some light clerical work. In a week
he had so changed in appearance, and was so
happy and so eager to re-establish himself that
even those who did not know his story turned
and looked after him, for it almost seemed as
though a radiance shone from his face.

He was a handsome man, when his beard was
trimmed and his hair cut; gradually his reju-
venation went on. He bought some clothes
which fitted him. His hands grew steady, and
his speech took on the clipped incisiveness of
the man who knows what he is talking about.

Those by whom he was employed discovered
that they could entrust him with much more
exacting work, paying well. Incredible as it
may seem, before long he was again earning a
good salary.

A few weeks after the close of the Xew York
campaign, he wrote to a friend as follows: —

"I know you will rejoice with me when I tell
you that the lady, who was so appropriately

MOLLY AND THE BABY 97

nicknamed the Angel at your meetings has
consented to become my wife. It hardly seems
possible that that terrible vision of loneliness,
homelessness and lovelessness which your song,
Mollie and the Baby, put before me, — that
vision which drove me crying, to the feet of
Christ, is to be dispelled by a home and a dear
wife of my own. Think of it ! She is willing
to trust me. She is willing to believe in me.
I can hardly believe my good fortune. Day
and night I thank God who has brought me
out of my sin.

"We are to have a little home, and Mollie —
and, perhaps, if God wills, the babies, will be
mine. Need I say the song I like to hear best
from the Angel? Yours, in Christ,

"The Professor."

It is a strange fact that men are sometimes
converted while so intoxicated that they cannot
speak a coherent word. In Philadelphia a
man stumbled down the trail, one night, in such
a condition that he fell against those around
him. That night, too, we had sung "Molly
and the Baby." We have grown accustomed
to seeing one or two drunken men on the trail
whenever we sing that selection, for it has a
peculiar searching appeal for them.

98 MOLLY AND THE BABY

This man, while apparently so intoxicated,
was able to tell the workers who approached
him, his story.

A year before he had had a home, and a wife,
Mollie, and two beautiful children. He was
a mining engineer, and his business called him
away from his home at that time. He met a
wild crowd of men, and began to drink, a habit
he had never known before.

He lost his position with the firm of con-
structors who had hired him, and secured an-
other, not so good, which took him further
away from his home. He lost that also in a
month, and then he could not get anything, at
all, to do.

At first, he had written to his wife, but as
he sunk lower and lower, and had drifted from
town to town, his letters stopped. It had been
six months, now, since he had written at all.

The last he had heard from her, one of the
children was ill, and she had frantically begged
him to come home. But the grip of alcohol
was so complete that even this appeal made
no effect.

He had wandered far. The little town
where his Molly waited for him was a thousand
miles away. A collection was taken up for
him and he was sent to a boarding house, where

MOLLY AND THE BABY 99

he would be looked after and then a telegram
was dispatched in his name to his wife.

The answer came back, collect: "Come
home. May died three months ago. No
money. Am desperate."

A purse was made up and telegraphed to
the woman, whom the workers kept on calling
"Mollie," although they now knew her right
name, and then they set to work to help her
husband.

It was two weeks before they could get him
on his feet, for he was terribly exhausted.

It is hard to conceive such a passion of grati-
tude as he poured out in prayer, just before he
left for his home. And when, kneeling around
him, with the workers who had interested them-
selves in him, he burst into sobs, which told,
better than words, of his contrite heart.

His wife wrote the workers on his arrival.
She was a tenderly nurtured and educated
woman, it appeared, but she had been unable
to get any proper work to do, when she had
been thrown on her own resources, and she had
been obliged to do ironing in a laundry in order
to keep food in the mouth of her remaining
child and herself.

She was convinced that her husband would
never have been returned to her, if it had not

100 MOLLY AND THE BABY

been for the song which touched his heart, and
showed him his vision of God. He told her
that he had been so despairing of himself and
of hope for the future that he had grimly de-
termined to put her and his children out of his
recollection, and had deliberately tried to end
his own wretched life in as short a time as pos-
sible, by drink. Judging by the condition in
which we had first seen him, he had almost suc-
ceeded.

The number of men who wander away from
wives, children and homes, through the influ-
ence of drink, must be amazingly large. In
every city where we have had a campaign, the
singing of "Molly and the Baby" brings at
least one of these poor wanderers to repent-
ance, and I happen to know that in most cases
it is lasting.

In Pittsburgh, one night, a trio of shabby,
unshaven men came down the trail together, as
we were singing that song. But they were en-
tire strangers to each other. After the work-
ers had interviewed them, they began to ex-
change confidences.

"It was the song that did it for me," one
said. "There is a little woman in a village
down south waiting for me, if she is still alive.

MOLLY AND THE BABY 101

I have done my best to forget her, but as the
song was sung, I could see her again, before
my very eyes, it seemed to me."

"Same here," said another. "My wife is
way up in Vermont. My two boys, too. I'm
going home to them if I have to walk the ties."

The third man, who had been trying to con-
trol himself, broke down at this point and burst
into a torrent of the most heartrending sobs.
The workers quieted him as well as they could,
and prayed with him, and finally he told his
story, one of the saddest narratives of the cam-
paign.

This Molly was dead. She and her baby
had been buried, only the week before, in the
same grave.

He had been a photographer, with a splendid
business, when he first began to drink. He
was "a good fellow" writh many friends, and
although he was newly married, he began to
spend more and more of his evenings in saloons
with his chums.

His business suffered first. His young
wife, of a timid, sensitive nature, remonstrated
with him gently. He answered that she had
no right to dictate to him as to his conduct.
Crushed and broken she said nothing more.

102 MOLLY AND THE BABY

He knew, in his heart, that she was right, but
the devil of perversity made him go all the
faster in the road of destruction.

One night in a fit of intoxication, he had
struck her. In the morning, she went to her
mother. He would always remember her little
sobs as she packed her little bag, but at the
time he laughed at them.

Shortly afterward he sold out his business
and obtained a position as an assistant camera
man with a motion picture firm in another
city. Contrary to his expectations the rules of
conduct in his new field were most severe.
The first day he appeared for work with liquor
on his breath, he was discharged.

He never wrote to his wife. He worked,
occasionally, long enough for money for liquor,
wandering from one place to another, and sink-
ing lower and lower in the scale, until he was
actually reduced to beggary.

On the day of his conversion he had hap-
pened to see our Tabernacle, and drawn solely
by curiosity, he had followed the crowd.

The service awakened the memories of his
other life, memories that he had told himself
were dead, and then the call of God found its
way into his heart. He sobbed out his peni-
tence at the Cross, determined to sober himself,

MOLLY AND THE BABY 103

find work, and to write the good news to his
Molly. Then, as he came out of the meeting,
in an afternoon newspaper which some one had
thrown away, he saw a column of items of cor-
respondence from his home town.

Trembling, he pulled the newspaper from
his ragged coat, and showed it to us. Among
the items was a paragraph which read : —

"Our townspeople will learn with the deep-
est regret of the death of Mrs. and her

week old infant, which occurred at the home of
her mother, in Ohio, three days ago. She was
one of our most popular girls, and her untimely
death will cause sorrow in many circles."

No one could have listened, dry eyed, to the
poor fellow's burst of grief.

He had come back, — too late.

There was nothing to do but pray for him.
The workers knelt together about him and
those other two wanderers, and prayed that
God would help the stricken sinner to endure
his sorrow.

They hear from him once in a while. He is
a mission worker, now, giving all his time, and
strength to the helping of others. Those who
work with him say that his singing of "Molly
and the Baby," and the story of his own life
(which he never can tell without tears) form

104 MOLLY AND THE BABY

the most appealing temperance sermon to
which they ever listened.

The hardest drinkers to reach, and touch, we
have found, are those who still manage to pre-
serve their appearance of respectability, in
spite of their habit.

In one city, where we conducted a campaign,
a well dressed, prosperous looking man at-
tracted our attention, as we looked over the
audience.

We could see that his face reflected trouble
or grief of some kind. But it never occurred
to us that he might be a spasmodic drunkard
until one night, when, by request, we sang
"Molly and the Baby."

He was seated near the front, and we could
see his face distinctly. He shivered, it seemed
to us, as we began to sing, and as verse after
verse was ended, his head sank lower and
lower on his breast.

We all felt strangely attracted to him, and
to the problem which his agitation presented.
Later on in the service we were asked to re-
peat the song. This time, there was no doubt-
ing the effect which it had on him. His head
fell to his hands, and his shoulders shook. By
the glances of those who sat near him we
judged that he must be sobbing. When the

MOLLY AND THE BABY 105

call for trail hitters was given, he was the first
to respond.

His story was an unusual one, and he gave it
freely, in an intelligent, cultured voice.

He was a physician. And he had married,
we judged, an exceedingly fine woman. They
had several children, many friends, and were
most happy, until the doctor began frequent-
ing a club, where heavy drinking was the
custom.

A number of his wealthy patients were mem-
bers, and at first he excused himself for his in-
dulgence, on the basis of "good business."

His wife, a keen eyed, sincere Christian, saw
the danger, at once, and tried to avert it. She
begged and prayed, but her husband went his
way. At first, nothing unusual happened, but
gradually those wealthy patients, with whom
he had first learned to drink, began to give
their patronage to other physicians, and they
wTere always men who were known not to touch
liquor in any form. In a crisis they preferred
a doctor whose brain was not dulled by
whiskey.

His wife pointed these facts out to him, but
by this time he was too far in the clutches of
alcohol to heed her warning.

He still had a practice, but it was steadily

106 MOLLY AND THE BABY

dwindling. He managed to keep from alco-
hol during the day, but after dinner he drank
half the night. When his wife saw that the
situation was apparently hopeless, she had
gone to live in a little country cottage, which
she owned, taking her children with her. The
estrangement between them was unknown to
most of their friends, but was none the less
acute.

"It was only tonight," the doctor said, "as
you sang, that I realized how everything worth
while was slipping away from me. I saw that
my wife and my children and my home were
going; that I was losing my practice; that I
was losing my skill ; and that in a few months
more my hand would be so uncertain that I
would no longer dare to attempt an operation.
And more than all else I saw that I was losing
God.

" 'Molly and the Baby' " he said, with misty
eyes, "brought me back to the Cross. It
pierced through my conceit and self-sufficiency.
I saw what my wife must have suffered. I
saw why she took the children away from my
influence. I saw that the very fact of her love
for me had made her remove herself from an
atmosphere, which I had polluted. I am go-
ing to her tonight, Mr. Rodeheaver," he

MOLLY AND THE BABY 107

ended. "I shall take the midnight train to
that quiet little village where she lives, and I
shall kneel beside the bed of our children and
pledge myself never again to touch a drop of
liquor. And with God's help, I shall keep
that pledge."

Molly and the Babies would welcome him
home, we knew, with open arms. We heard
later of how they did so, in a letter that the doc-
tor wrote.

Late at night, after his wife was in bed, he
arrived at the sleepy little station.

He walked down the village street, and
knocked at the door of the little house, with
its vines, and flowers, and garden.

He wrote that he would never forget how
the moon shone down, and showed him how
his wife and children had been occupying them-
selves at home while he was drinking himself to
ruin in the city. Everywhere were evidences
of their loving, thrifty care. There were
chicken coops in the back garden ; rows of peas
and poles of beans; flowers, and a pigeon loft
on the roof of the old barn.

When his wife opened the door that sixth
sense, which women possess, told her, before a
word was spoken, what had happened. She
fell, sobbing, into his arms.

108

MOLLY AND THE BABY

Together they knelt beside the beds in which
their children lay. Together, they prayed for
strength to resist his temptation. Together,
they clasped hands and pledged themselves to
the fight.

He is now fast becoming one of the best
surgeons of the city. His wife and children
love him dearly, and are intensely proud of
him. And his patients, even those from whom
he first learned to use intoxicants, are again on
his books.

"Molly and the Baby," had helped another
man to victory — and to God.

You may tell the politicians they may go,

I am in for prohibition, head and toe !

For at last I've turned my coat

And I'll cast a temperance vote

For Molly and the Baby, don't you know.

He Will Not Let Me Fall.

Chobus.

He will not let me fall, He will not let me fall,

He will not let me tell.

109

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

The number and variety of the stories which
have come to us of temptation, overcome
through the message of our songs, would as-
tonish those who have not had an opportunity
for intimate, personal work for the Kingdom.

It is literally true that certain of the great
gospel songs not only have sung their way
around the world, but have sung their way into
every class of society and every type of men
and women, from the millionaire to the derelict.

I have in mind in this connection a song that
has had a peculiar effect in winning to Christ
converts, who had been caught in the meshes of
a great temptation, and who were hesitating
before the last fatal plunge.

This is the song, "Jesus Will Not Let Me
Fall," with its inspired words of hope and in-
spiration, and its soft, winning music, wonder-
fully calculated to appeal to those hearts strug-
gling in the sea of doubt and trial.

Let me give you the words of the song before
no

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 111

I tell you something of the instances of soul-
saving and reformation, accomplished through
them.

My faith temptation shall not move,
For Jesus knows it all,
And holds me with His arms of love —
He will not let me fall.

When grief is more than I can bear —
Too weak am I to call —
If I but lift my heart in pray'r,
He will not let me fall.

Sometimes I falter, filled with fear,
I can not see at all,
His voice I never fail to hear —
"I will not let thee fall."

He will not let me fall,

He is my Strength, my Hope, my all,

He will not let me fall.

How wonderfully true is the message of this
song.

How suggestive of an all-saving, all-power-
ful friend in those great moments of stress and
temptation when life seems utterly black and
desolate, and we seem so helpless and inade-
quate to save ourselves I

112 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

He will not let you fall! The words mean
just what they say.

Never has Jesus allowed His protecting
arms to slip when once they close about the
truly repentant sinner, honestly seeking the
way of salvation.

He is the one friend who never fails — the
one Savior, who has the power and the will and
the love to scatter our clouds in an instant of
time.

And how few of us really know him! How
few of us have ever had a real, personal, inti-
mate experience of His love and power!

At the close of one of our meetings in a large
eastern city, a haggard young man, whose face
bore the tell-tale marks of growing dissipation,
approached one of our workers.

He had been one of the crowd who had taken
a public stand for a new life and a new vision,
and it was evident that his experience had
touched him very deeply.

His voice was husky and his eyes moist as he
took the hand of the worker, and said tremu-
lously,

"You will never know what that song has
done for me. You will never know of the
crowning sin from which it has saved me."

He hesitated.

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 113

"If I had not come to the service tonight, be-
fore twelve o'clock tonight I would have been
a thief in the eyes of the law."

The worker saw that the young man was
suffering from a desperate agitation, and tried
to calm him. After a while, the other was
able to continue his narrative.

He was a young man of a good family, living
in a small town upstate, from which he had
come to the city, where, through the influence
of friends, he had secured a position in a bank.

All would have gone well had he not met sev-
eral young men, who prided themselves on
their experience and knowledge of the night
life of the city, and under whose guidance he
learned to drink, and then to gamble.

The fever of the cards seized hold on him,
and gradually he saw all of his former ideals
slipping away from him, and was forgetting
completely those habits of strict church attend-
ance, in which he had been reared at home.

Then the luck at the gambling tables began
to go against him.

He found himself losing more and more un-
til finally he was facing the awful fact that
unless he could raise money at once, in excess
of his salary, he would be exposed to his em-
ployers, and lose his position.

114 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

At this moment of his great temptation, the
combination of one of the bank vaults was ac-
cidentally left on his desk, by the mistake of
his immediate superior.

It was one of the old-fashioned banks, where
the office staff was more of a congenial family
than a business organization, and whose clients
had come down through two generations.

There was no difficulty in his extracting a
package of bills from the vault when he was
sent into that section of the bank at closing
hours on a trivial errand, and his theft was so
small that he knew it would probably be set
down to an error or bookkeeping, or if not, that
there was practically no chance that any direct
charge could fall on him.

With the stolen bills in his pocket, he had
paced the streets for hours.

The man, to whom he owed the gambling
debt had given him until midnight to pay — or
suffer exposure.

While he was feverishly debating whether or
not to meet him, for even then the horror of
what he had done had begun to seize him, his
steps had taken him past the Sunday Taber-
nacle.

The music pouring out through the doors,

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 115

and the bright lights had attracted his tired
steps and worn-out mind.

He dropped into a back seat, almost uncon-
scious of what he was doing.

It was not until the song, "He Will Not Let
Me Fall" began to roll out over the great au-
dience that the real meaning and import of its
words began to enter his heart.

He straightened suddenly in his seat and lis-
tened with rapt atttention until the song was
finished. Through the darkness of his tempta-
tion and doubt a great light of hope was sud-
denly flashing before him.

There was a promise in that song — a sacred
promise. With a surge all the memories of
his boyhood days flooded back to him, and
with them the patient faith of his mother, whose
vision of God had never been dimmed.

He saw with a terrifying clearness what he
had done, and what he was about to do. Be-
cause of his weakness he was drifting into delib-
erate sin.

When the invitation was given he was one of
the first and the most determined to come for-
ward. His decision was taken.

His mind was made up. He would restore
the money in his pocket the first thing the next

116 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

day, and tell his employer frankly the whole
story, no matter what the consequences.

He was prepared for the worst, but for-
tunately the president of the bank was a Chris-
tian gentleman, who endeavored to put into
practice in his day's work the teachings of
Christ.

He heard the boy's story through without
comment. Hardly had the young man fin-
ished when the gambler to whom he owed the
money, sent in word that he wished an imme-
diate interview.

The president motioned the young clerk to
remain and when the man was shown into the
room, turned on him with an anger that made
him quail.

"I will pay you what you claim is owing to
you," he finished, "and my young friend can
repay it to me as a personal loan out of his sal-
ary.

"If I ever hear of his going near you again
not only will I at once discharge him, but I
will see that your case is taken without delay to
the attention of the proper officers of the law."

The gambler slunk out of the room, and the
young bank clerk returned to his desk, with the
light of a new hope and a new resolution in his
eyes.

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 117

They were not emotions of the moment,
either.

Today he is one of the most energetic and
tireless Y. M. C. A. workers in his city, and
in little more than a year has led through his
personal efforts over a hundred young business
men to the Christ, wrho proved to him to be
such a wonderful friend in need.

J esus will not let you fall ! No, indeed !

If you feel yourself slipping, it is because of
sin, and because of your own lack of faith —
never because of God.

He never forgets the promises He has made
to men through His only begotten Son.

le u my Strength, my Hope, my all, He will not let me fall.

There is another story from an entirely dif-
ferent environment, connected with this song,
that I would like to tell you — a story of a dif-
ferent kind of temptation and a different kind
of a victory.

This is a story told to one of our women
workers. During one of our afternoon meet-
ings an unusual spirit of sympathy and inspira-

118 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

tion seemed to pervade the audience, and at the
close of the service, among the scores who took
their stand for consecrated lives was a middle-
aged, stylishly dressed woman, who was easily
identified as one of the best known society
ladies of the city.

Her stand was a distinct surprise, and some-
thing of a sensation; but it was evidently even
more of a surprise to the woman, herself.

It was no spasmodic sentiment seeking a mo-
mentary expression.

It was an earnest, genuine vision of God,
and it had thrust a sudden white glare into the
hidden recesses of her soul, with some surpris-
ing results.

"It may seem strange," she said, "but that
song, 'He Will Not Let Me Fall/ seemed al-
most a mirror, in which I saw for the first time
my real life, and the selfishness and worldliness
which I had always managed to hide from my-
self before.

"For the first time I realized that I had
missed the Greatest Friend of All — and that I
had done so, because in my worldly pride, I
thought I hadn't needed Him.

"And so I had allowed myself to drift away
into the pursuit of selfish social ambitions until
I was at a point where nothing else mattered."

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 119

She hesitated.

"My husband died about a year ago, and on
his death I found that unfortunate investment
had reduced what I had always thought to be
an assured fortune to practically nothing.

"In fact, I did not have enough to continue
the expenses of our home without running into
debt.

"But I could not bring myself to economize
because my daughter had just been introduced
to society, and I was afraid, if I let our friends
know our real financial condition, it would in-
jure her socially, and, and — so I have kept
things going, hoping that my girl would make
a rich marriage, which would solve our difficul-
ties.

"A short time ago a man proposed to her,
who stands among the wealthiest bachelors of
the city, a man who is received into the most ex-
clusive society, but whose personal life I know
would not bear investigation.

"There were many ugly stories told of his
various affairs and of his heartless conduct with
different women, but when he asked for my girl
as his wife I saw only the fact that his money
would restore us to the position which we had
always enjoyed, and would eliminate all of my
troubles.

120 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

"So I encouraged my daughter to tempor-
ize with him, although I knew she did not love
him, and we had about made up our minds to
give him a favorable answer to his suit. I told
myself it was the only way out for us — that
without money or social prestige we could have
no friends.

"It was not until I came to the meeting to-
day and heard that song, 'He Will Not Let
Me Fall,' that I saw in all of my doubt and
worry I had missed the greatest help of all —
that if I had taken my burden and trouble to
J esus, really sincere in the belief that he could
and would save me — I would never have
even considered sacrificing my daughter, for
that is what I see now it amounted to.

"Her marriage to such a man, without love,
would have been nothing less than a sin, which
I, in my blindness and selfishness, was allow-
ing her to commit in order that we could profit
financially and socially."

So ended her story with a gesture of quiet
determination.

"I am going home now to tell her that when
the man calls tonight she is to refuse his pro-
posals point-blank, and to tell her just what
those refusals will cost her and me.

"We will have to give up our home and ser-

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 121

vants, and I don't know just what the future
will have in store for us as a result, but of one
thing I am sure, and that is I have the promise
of Jesus that, no matter what comes, He will
see me through — He will not let me fall!

"And I would rather have that blessed as-
surance than all of the worldly relief which we
could get otherwise. I know that my daugh-
ter will share my views. In fact, I can see
now the reproach with which she has regarded
me more than once when I urged this suit to
her."

She meant what she said, and she lost no time
in putting her determination into execution.

The contemplated marriage was broken off,
and mother and daughter moved into a hum-
bler, cheaper home where they had to do their
own work, and face the petty little economies
of life,

But there was far greater happiness in store
for them than either had dreamed.

Little more than a year later the daughter
met and fell really in love with a promising
young man, who, although poor, was sure of
a high place in his profession, and I am con-
fident that when the two were married, the
mother, who blessed the union, did so with a
clean heart, and a clear vision of God, and an

122 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

assurance of the future for herself and her
child, which she could never have had in that
other marriage.

He will not let me fall.

When grief is more than I can bear —

Too weak am I to call —

If I but lift my heart in pray'r,

He will not let me fall.

What a precious promise in those lines !

A young married couple, whose three-year-
old daughter had suddenly been taken from
them by death, furnished another striking ex-
ample of the message of this song.

The child was one of the brightest and most
winsome little ones in the neighborhood.

The little girl was a beautiful creature, with
an aureole of golden curls about her merry
face, and a disposition that earned for her the
loving name of "Little Miss Sunshine."

Her parents fairly idolized her, and their
devotion was a household word.

One night the mother was awakened by a
croupy gurgle from the cot of their loved one.

In less than ten hours, in spite of the best
medical aid they could secure, they saw their
darling snatched from them in a convulsive
death struggle.

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 123

The day before their home had been the
abode of laughter and life and love. Now it
was stricken by the shadow of death.

For weeks the young parents literally
dragged their sad way about their daily duties,
with a grief that was pitiful to see.

It was about this time that we opened a cam-
paign in the community, and in the first days
some of the neighbors persuaded the young
couple to attend with them.

They came several times.

Neither had been active in Christian work.
They had thought of joining a church, but had
never done so, and the death of their child had
turned their half-formed resolution now into
a sullen bitterness.

It was not until our campaign was well under
way that the Christian friends of the young
couple, who had been watching eagerly for the
first sign that their hearts had been touched,
were rewarded.

One night we sang the song, "He Will Not
Let Me Fall."

When we reached the second verse, those
sitting nearest the young husband and wife
suddenly saw the latter burst into sobs, and a
moment later tears glistened in the eyes of the
man at her side.

124 HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL

When the invitation was given they were
among the first to take their stand, and their
faces were streaked with tears.

But no longer were they tears of a hopeless
anguish and grief.

There was a light in their moistened eyes
like the radiance of a beautiful rainbow show-
ing through the clouds of a storm.

For the first time they had glimpsed the
wonderful promise of that Great Friend, whose
love for us is so great and tender and enduring
that it buries even those griefs of the flesh
which come to us.

They had found the Crucified Jesus — and
their dead child had shown them the way to
the Cross.

The stories of this song could be multiplied
indefinitely.

Experiences could be given of the results of
its singing which embrace the whole gamut of
human emotions, and every station of life —
for there is no love like that of Jesus, there is
no promise like that promise of Christ to
stricken men and women, which has endured
through the ages — there is no inspiration as
satisfying and as all-embracing as the strength
of His Helping Hand, and the comfort of His
ever-present Spirit, and the guidance of His

HE WILL NOT LET ME FALL 125

never-dying Word for He has told us that in
His Presence all those who are grief -stricken,
and heavy-laden, and beset to the point of des-
peration may find rest and refuge.

He offers us the Haven of His love, always
waiting for us.

Are there any who can refuse that wonder-
ful invitation?

Sweeter As the Years Go By.

Mn.CH.tL

L Of Je-eus' love that sought me When I was lost in sin, Of won-droui

2. He trod in old Ju - de - a Life's pathway long a - go; The peo - pie

3. 'Twas wondrous love which led Him For us to suf fer loss— To bear with-
in h h i . i . j> h h j i v. 3

grace that brought me Back to His fold a - gain, of heights and depths of
thronged a- bout Him, His sav - ing grace to know; He healed the bro ken-
out a mur-mur The an-guish of the cross. With saints re deemed in

' J. h J1 fj- * J- * *

mer - cy Far deep • er than the sea, And high - er than the heav ens My
heart -ed, And caused the blind to see; And still His great heart yearaeth In
glo - ry, Let us ourvoic-es raise, Till heav'n and earth re ech- o With

A A J ^i^J^i i I r>

theme shaB er - er be: Sweet -er as the years go by, .
love for e • veil me.

our Ee deem ex's praise. Sweet • er as tbo years go by, lis

A- J J J J m , , 0 lM . f f

■ Qb „ K fcj J.J. ■ —

fr— ;

Sweet • er as the years go by;

sweet • er as the years go t

gg£ 6 i 1 1 r r i

Rich-er, full - er, deep • er,

p ;

126

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 127
Sweeter As the Years Go By.

Je • ios' love is sweet - er, Sweet - er as the yean go by.

VII

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

Some one has said that it is love which makes
the world go round.

How wonderfully true this statement is few
persons realize, who have not to deal with the
heart-aches and soul-bruises of humanity.

We see its applications emphasized in the
so-called popular songs of the day, where the
publishers, frankly commercial, call always for
"sentiment," more sentiment, not knowing
what it is, but alive to the fact that a song which
can touch the heart strings is always sure of a
big sale.

And the great mass of the public, fighting
always for something above and beyond the
day's work, are deceived by those advertised
songs of sentiment, which, instead of being
really inspirational, are only maudlin and
mawkish.

There is no true, and sure, and enduring
sentiment in the human breast that is not based

128

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 129

on something besides the world, and the things
and creatures of the world.

I often think that there can be no really true
and genuine love that does not contain, first of
all, an overpowering love for, and a complete
surrender to God.

I am not speaking from theories. I am
speaking out of the depths of a wide and varied
experience of human nature.

No song in all of our repertoire emphasizes
better this higher and nobler appeal of love
and sentiment than "Sweeter as the Years Go

By."

It holds a message, which is certain to creep
under the hardest heart, and into the most in-
different soul, if the right opportunity is given
for the reception of its message.

Men and women are inherently good — not
bad. They would rather have righteousness
than sin.

They would rather grasp that which pulls
them up than that which drags them down.

They would rather fix their eyes on the
heights than on the depths.

I have in mind a story, which was told to one
of our workers as the result of the singing of
this song, by a well known woman in one of the
cities where we were conducting a campaign —

130 SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

a woman to whose life the message of the song
was particularly applicable, and who was made
suddenly, because of it, to glimpse the vision,
which for years she had stumbled blindly past.

But first let me give you the words of the
song that you may gather its application in
the stories that follow.

Of Jesus* love that sought me, when I was lost in sin,
Of wondrous grace that brought me, back to His fold
again,

Of heights and depths of mercy, far deeper than the sea,
And higher than the Heavens, my theme shall ever be.

He trod in old Judea, Life's pathway long ago;
The people thronged about Him, His saving grace to
know.

He healed the broken hearted, and caused the blind to

see,

And still His great heart yearneth, in love for even me.

'Twas wondrous love which led Him, for us to suffer loss,
To bear without a murmur, the anguish of the cross.
With saints redeemed in glory, let our voices raise
Till heaven and earth re-echo, with our Redeemer's
praise.

Are those not words of great meaning?
And when we sing the chorus, over and over
again, in response to the magnetic feeling
which runs through the congregation, and

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 131

shows in the softening of its great swell, there
is the intensity of all the finest and most sa-
cred feelings of men toward God.

Sweeter as the years go by, sweeter as the years go by,
Richer, fuller, deeper, Jesus' love is sweeter,
Sweeter as the years go by.

At the close of one of our afternoon services,
for women only, one of the so-called society
leaders of the community approached the plat-
form, with tears on her face, which she made
no effort to conceal.

"I want you to pray for me," she said, "I
have forgotten how to pray, myself, I know,
only that I need help, which no human hands
can give me — that my broken life can only be
mended by a power higher than that of men."

She looked at the workers in an anguish,
whose sincerity could not be mistaken.

"I would like to tell you my story," she con-
tinued. "You have probably heard others like
it before — of the mother who worshiped the
things of the world for her children, above the
blessing of God.

"It was not until I heard the words of the
song, 4 Sweeter as the Years Go By,' that I
realized my life was doomed to be more and
more bitter as time passes — because of my own

132 SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

sin and selfishness, and because I put God in
the background, and the world first.

"I married an ambitious man," she began,
"whose only thought was to make a success that
the world would applaud.

"He began to forge ahead in his profession,
that of a lawyer, and on my part I tried to ar-
range our domestic affairs to keep pace with
him.

"Instead of instilling into my home and into
my children the love of God before all other
things, I made both my son and daughter as
vain, in their youthful way, as I was.

"My daughter, I can see now, became fear-
fully self-conscious, and her only ambition in
life was to show off her pretty frock to her
companions and to be complimented on her
style and good looks.

"My boy degenerated gradually into a prig,
and I was actually proud of him, proud of his
manners, and the way in which he bowed when-
ever a lady entered the room.

"I thought his manners more important than
his morals.

"And worse than all, I began to encourage
my husband, who before this, had been a
strictly temperate man, to have wine in his

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 133

house for the benefit of his fashionable clients,
and even to serve it on our table.

"I might have known the result, had I not
been so blinded by the idols of the world."

Her voice broke at this point, and it was only
in fitful periods that she was able to complete
her narrative.

I will shorten it from the facts, which the
worker later gathered in the community.

Edgar, that boy who was to be a social suc-
cess, is serving his time in prison. It will be
years before he will be released. Florence, the
beautiful, wayward girl who kept the tongues
of the town wagging, has disappeared. Her
mother wishes, though, that Florence were ly-
ing quietly in the family plot.

And the father, who was so brilliant, who
made so much money, is one of the subjects of
discussion over the dinner tables, for there is
hardly a day when he cannot be seen, stagger-
ing through the streets, still handsome, still
well dressed, but undeniably drunk.

When the scandal of Edgar's forgery of his
employer's name first came out, the mother was
confident that his father, the brilliant lawyer,
could speedily clear him.

But the father did not clear the son. On

l$4t SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

tHe day when the trial was set, the father was
too intoxicated to take charge of his son's case.
Another lawyer was hastily called.

Edgar disliked the substitute attorney, and
in full view of the courtroom, and in the hear-
ing of the judge, he cursed him, in a fit of the
temper which his mother had never curbed.
The judge in his charge to the jury said that
the young man needed a lesson. They took
the hint, and gave the boy a long sentence.

You would have thought that that would
teach the mother her lesson, but it did not seem
to do so. She went on with her entertain-
ments, and the set, who were her associates,
went to them, and Florence was allowed to
flirt, and to drink, and to smoke, for those
things were "fashionable!"

Pretty soon there was ugly gossip about the
girl, but her mother would not listen to it.
Florence, she said, did no more than any of the
others of her circle.

She disappeared suddenly. She has never
been found. Not a word has come from her,
not a clew to her whereabouts has been dis-
covered.

And at last the mother began to awaken to
the real cause of it all.

"I was slipping down the road of fashion,"

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 135

she said. "Not only that, but I had dragged
my husband, and my children with me. My
husband had never taken a drink in his life
until I told him that he ought to have wine for
his guests and to drink with them.

"I ought to have known better than to en-
courage Edgar in thinking that money is ev-
erything worth living for. I ought to have
known that no girl should be allowed the things
in which I encouraged Florence. And my sin
has found me out!"

There is not much comfort for the poor
mother today. Friends are praying that her
husband will find the strength of God which
will stop him from drinking, and for those two
unfortunate children. For the son there is
hope. The discipline of the prison and the
influence of the chaplain there may prevail.
But for the daughter —

It all began with the violation of the First
Commandment, when the mother put aside the
one standard by which any life can be ruled,
the rule of God.

First she worshiped ambition — then she
worshiped "society," then it was money, more
money, and pleasure, until every other consid-
eration in the world was laid aside, and nothing
mattered except following the "fashions."

136 SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

She said to the worker! —

4 'It makes me shudder, now, when I hear the
girls, who used to be the friends of Florence,
talking, laughing, smoking cigarettes, drink-
ing— and what they talk about and laugh over.
It's the fashion for girls to smoke! It's the
fashion for them to drink, and to drink enough,
sometimes, so that they are no longer mis-
tresses of themselves.

"Oh, I can see, now that it is too late! A
girl who still blushes is laughed at. No won-
der my child fell. I encouraged her to develop
nothing but worldly appetites, no one can know
how I suffer — now!"

What she says is so true, so pathetically
true!

It was the mother who had sinned first — and
the fruits of her sin were visited on her through
those dearer to her than herself.

Her pathetic words, as she finished her story,
will never be forgotten by the sympathetic
auditor, who heard them, and who tried to
comfort the belated penitent.

"It wasn't until the words of that wonder-
ful song penetrated my soul," she sobbed, "that
I began to picture, almost for the first time, in
all of its awful reality, my darkened home, and
saddened life, as the years go by.

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 187

"Instead of a peaceful, happy, contented
home, worshiping God, we have a desolate
house of bitter memories.

"Instead of a son and daughter, serving the
Lord in every way possible, we don't want to
mention our children — and, when we do, it is
with tears and blistering heart-aches.

"Instead of a husband, devoting his life to
the Kingdom, I have the bitter consciousness
that my husband has become a drunkard,
largely through my own fault and blindness.

"I can see now that, in my mad pursuit of
the idols of the world, I have missed com-
pletely that wonderful, everlasting, all-satis-
fying peace of God which alone can make life
sweeter as the years go by.

"Oh, what would I not give to unroll the
past, and to live my life over again."

Hers was the cry of a soul in agony — the
cry of a soul that is beginning to glimpse the
greater things that it has lost.

But how often do we hear just such a cry re-
peated all around us!

It seems to me that this particular song,
"Sweeter as the Years Go By" has, above all,
a peculiar domestic appeal.

It is suggestive not only of the barren in-
dividual life, without the spirit of God to

138 SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

sweeten the advancing years, but it is even
more suggestive of the darkened home, and
the deserted hearth-stone, whose children are
wanderers from God, and whose parents, too
late, see how, and where they might have kept
them for the Kingdom and themselves — if they
had only had the right vision at the right time !

Sweeter as the years go by !

Will your home be sweeter, and happier, and
mellower, and more God-fearing, and more
God-surrendering as the sands of life drip
slowly but relentlessly out?

Will your home be a nearer and nearer ap-
proach to that ideal, which the grace of God
promises men, and which will alone make pos-
sible the full realization of that wonderful
promise of peace on Earth?

Another story, connected with this song,
comes to me, as the concluding illustration of
some of the wonderful results accomplished by
its message.

A bent-shouldered, grizzled-haired man one
evening approached our workers, at the close
of a more than usually responsive campaign in
a large Middle Western city.

He had taken his stand for Christ and a
new life, but it was clear that he wished to un-
burden himself of his individual problems, and

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 139

obtain a more personal word of encouragement
and help.

To one of our workers he was identified as a
member of a leading commercial firm of the
city, and, catching a sympathetic eye, he told
his story, and presented his problem.

His wife had died many years before, leav-
ing him with the care and upbringing of their
only son, who, at that time, was only nine.

He had been buried in his business cares,
and had sent the lad first to boarding school
and then to college, allowing him ample spend-
ing money, and thinking his duty as a parent
was finished, when he saw the boy for a short
time during his vacations.

The result was easy enough to see.

The young man had drifted into a fast set
at college, and, in an unusually wild escapade,
had forged his father's name to a small check.

The parent had settled for the check, but
had promptly taken his son out of school, and,
without waiting to sift the affair to the bot-
tom had told him he would have to make his
own way in future.

The father thought his son's act was a crime
and a disgrace. True — but it was more of a
blow to his own pride and vanity.

For two years now he had not heard from

140 SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

his boy, and he had occupied his large home in
solitary state, trying to make up by money
what he could not obtain by love.

The singing of the song, "Sweeter as the
Years Go By," for the first time had shown
him the emptiness of his home and the empti-
ness of his heart — and a reason for them which
he had never allowed himself to face before.

He had cast off his boy, the son whom he
had allowed for years to drift from him, and
now in the days of his old age, with the grave
coming nearer and nearer, he realized that
there was nothing in his life but his business.

And, in its most successful form, business is
always a cold, abstract proposition.

The father saw now that he, too, had sinned,
that his own neglect and lack of sympathy
were partly responsible for his boy's fault, and,
that while instantly ready to condemn his son,
he had passed his own share in that fault com-
pletely by.

The next day he engaged private detectives
to trace his son, and six weeks later found the
young man, working as a laborer in a mill in
a near-by city, a bitter and discouraged young-
ster, at a time when he should be full of the
flush and enthusiasm of youth.

Fortunately he had escaped the worst of the

SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY 141

evil habits, which might have attached to him,
and fortunately, too, he had been made of stern
enough material to work with his hands rather
than become a derelict of society.

The first advances of his father were re-
pelled with cold suspicion.

The word, father, meant nothing to him ex-
cept a surge of bitter memories.

Even after the first interview with his par-
ent, he turned away.

But a short time later, God touched his
heart, also, when an accident in the mill threat-
ened to make him a cripple for life, and he re-
covered to find that the careful nursing, to
which he owed the use of his limbs, had been
obtained and paid for by his parent.

Father and son were united — really for the
first time in their lives, and the young man re-
turned to the darkened home to do his best
toward making the years grow sweeter as they
rolled by in the scales of his parent's life.

The song had found both a son and a father
— or rather had reclaimed them for each other,
and for God.

Today, the father has retired from active
business, and not only has his son taken his
place, but he is rapidly making his influence
felt as one of the most alert and aggressive

142 SWEETER AS THE YEARS GO BY

champions of the Kingdom in the community.

"Sweeter as the Years Go By" had been
made true for that home by the grace of God
— and its occupants were the first to realize
and appreciate that fact.

Is it true of your home?

His Love is Far Better Than Gold.

1. The love of the Christ is so pre - cioos, That no nor tal its

2. He meets ev - 'ry need with the prcm - ise, No good tbicgs from Hit

3. My heart ev - er yearns with a long • ing, To be - hold the great

wealth can un-fold; Hia grace is a store-house of rich - es to me, Bis
own te with-hold; Bo dai - I y I trust in the Cro - ci - fied One, His
joy of my soul, For • ev - er to dwell in the presence of Him, Whose-

bet • ter than gold,. Its full - ness can nev - tt be

tax, Uz boHsr than (old, IU /uU-mm oad ■

144 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

Hli Lore Is Far Better Than Gold.

VIII

HIS LOVE IS FAR BETTER THAN GOLD

The love of the Christ is so precious,
That no mortal its wealth can unfold;

His grace is a storehouse of riches to me,
His love is far better than gold.

There is only the difference of a letter be-
tween Gold and God — and there may be the
difference of eternity.

Gold is the background of the present narra-
tive. But it is not a story of the power of
Gold. It is a story of the power beyond gold.

It is the story of how Thomas Bailey lost his
millions at sixty — and at seventy won them
back, and with them that which his millions
could not buy.

What he had failed to purchase with one of
the biggest bank balances in Chicago he pur-
chased with a song at a little wayside church.

That which he had been unable to buy as a
millionaire was given to him as a tramp — for
the asking.

145

14(5 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

It is a story you may find it difficult to ex-
plain. God can not be explained. He can
only be accepted as a fact above and beyond
us. We can accept him with our faith — but
we cannot explain him by our analysis, or the
methods by which He chooses to paint those
life-studies that He exhibits to our view.

We see Thomas Bailey, the mountain boy,
the millionaire, the tramp, and again the mil-
lionaire, and we may try to dissect him by psy-
chology— only to find that psychology is to-
tally inadequate.

For the case of Thomas Bailey is beyond
psychology.

Incidentally, Thomas Bailey is not his true
name, nor Chicago his correct address. There
are too many thousands who know the real
man — or of him.

And this is an intimate history.

When Thomas Bailey was sixteen years old
he had sixteen pennies in the pockets of his
ragged jeans, a birthday gift from his mother.
She had saved them, one by one, from the
scanty pittance which had passed through her
hands in the whole course of that year.

The Baileys lived on a rocky little farm, far
up in the Ozark mountains. They had a few
hogs and some hens, and when Richard Bailey

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 147

stayed sober long enough to do the work, they
had a meager field of corn and potatoes.

If the boy Thomas had not learned to shoot
as soon as his arms were strong enough to lift
a gun, the iron pot which hung on the crane
over the open fire would seldom have had a
bit of meat in it.

The one rough room of the log cabin, and
the coarse food, and the insufficient clothing
were things to which Thomas had been accus-
tomed all his life, but to which he had never
grown reconciled.

Listening greedily to the stories, which
Grandpop McNeil could sometimes be coaxed
to tell, the silent, sullen lad would glimpse a
world in which life was different, and he would
clench his hard fist, and silently vow that some
day he would go out and make it his own.

The one thing necessary for that world was
the possession of gold. Grandpop never tired
of stating this fact.

For the lack of gold he had been obliged to
come back to the mountains, where his father's
cabin stood untenanted, to spend the end of his
days in the dull monotony, which sometimes
seemed to make of him a mouthing idiot.

For the lack of gold, even in that fascinating
world beyond the mountains, he had been

148 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

obliged to forego many pleasures, pleasures
for which he still longed, and the memory of
which, now forever beyond his reach, would
bring on one of his famous "cussin' spells,,, to
which young Thomas would listen with a si-
lent, grim amusement as unlike any boyish
emotion as could be imagined.

And now, with the sixteen pennies, and
with a "two bit piece," the accumulation of
years, and with the additional asset of six rac-
coon skins, surreptitiously trapped and hidden
from his father's rapacity, Thomas determined
on taking the step, to which all his dreaming,
all his rebellion at fate, all his listening to
Grandpop McNeil, had been drawing him.

"Mom!" he drawled. "Reckon I'll go
down t' th' Settlement fer a spell!"

His mother, spinning before the door, was
silent a long time.

Then she spoke.

"I'm right sorry I gin ye th' gift," she said,
somberly. "Them as goes thar don't never
come back."

Thomas had heard that many times before,
and he peered, with renewed interest, down
the steep, rough trail which dipped away al-
most before their door. Fifty miles, it was,
to the Settlement, as the mountaineers called

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 149

the little town, to which their scanty produce
went, once a month, by mule team.

The team was due to leave tomorrow morn-
ing. One man would take it — almost the only
one who ever did. Many a family lived there
in the hills, no member of which had ever been
"down yon" for generations.

Young Thomas was not excited at the pros-
pect of this wonderful thing happening to him.
He shut his stern young mouth tight and
thought of only one thing: the gold which he
must get, which he must keep, and which he
must keep on getting — in that world where it
was king.

In this wise did Thomas Bailey, the great
financier, begin his career. The road before
him was long, and the difficulties enormous,
but he had never faltered. He had never
paused to make a friend or to view a flower,
or to read a book, or to extend a hand of help,
or a look of sympathy, or a penny of assist-
ance to any human being.

The only kiss his lips had ever given was the
rapturous one with which he saluted his first
piece of gold, for which he had exchanged the
fruit of his year's heavy, unskilled labor in the
little town at the foot of the Ozark Mountains.

In a year or two he had more gold, hidden

150 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

away in his ragged clothes, and he had learned
the further lesson that the man who can pay
cash can always outbid and underbuy the other
fellow.

On that knowledge he had reared the edifice
which had seated him, on his sixtieth birthday,
in a small, plain office in a tall, grim building
on State Street in Chicago, from which he con-
trolled the destinies of more people, more ruth-
lessly and more autocratically than many a
small potentate, whose kingdom has a well
known place on the map of Europe.

Thomas Bailey at sixty still had the frugal
habits of his youth. His personal expendi-
tures were exceeded, many times, by that of
his bookkeeper. He knew nothing of music
or of any other art, he had never been inside of
a church, he had no library, he owned just three
suits of clothes, he did not drink even coffee.

His life, and his love, his amusement and his
occupation for every waking hour was his pur-
suit of gold. Of course, he had long since
ceased to hoard the metal, itself.

But all his stocks and bonds, all the securi-
ties which lay in his safe deposit vaults, every
dollar invested in the thousand and one busi-
nesses which had yielded him profit — all these
things, stood to him for just so much of that

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 151

priceless thing, for which he had bartered his
youth, sacrificed, starved and pinched until it
had become the blood in his veins.

It was even more than that thin, cold fluid
which hardly warmed his lean, shrunken body
— it was a burning, roaring spirit which raged
through his mind and soul, and blotted out his
heart.

On this particular day Thomas Bailey, in
his shiny, worn suit of clothes, with his wrin-
kled hands, laid out along the arms of his of-
fice chair, sat inert, and his office force, not
daring to knock at his door, wandered uneasily
about, whispering uneasily at the astounding
story, which the tape was reeling off.

Finally, the head clerk, almost as old as
Bailey, himself, and amazingly like the em-
ployer for whom he had worked thirty years,
decided to brave his master's quick rage. He
softly opened the door, and went in. Bailey
raised his dull eyes.

"What is it?" he snapped, in one word, just
as he always did. The head clerk murmured
that he thought he had been rung for, and
backed out, a reassured grin on his withered
old face.

The office force grinned, too. Evidently
the old man knew what he was about. Prob-

152 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

ably this sudden dropping of stocks was but a
trick of the wily old fox. There would be
pickings, after the slaughter was over.

The office force had been trained not to
smile, but a perceptible air of content was re-
stored to it, while excited messengers from
other firms dashed in and out, trying to find
out what was really happening.

Old Bailey in his quiet office was almost ma-
jestically serene.

He glanced at the winding tape in the cor-
ner, but he did not rise to look. It was a cer-
tain test of will power he had contrived for his
own satisfaction, a test of his power over him-
self, and over those, who owed almost life to
him. He was the master — the tape was his
slave. He would prove it. He had made his
plans, he, who must be obeyed, and he had
given his orders. That was sufficient.

They would be followed, as he had issued
them. There were plenty who would like to,
but none, who would dare, to vary from them
by so much as a hair's breadth. Was not his
word absolute — his decision final?

At three o'clock his office force were look-
ing more serious. The old man had not gone
out to lunch that day. That was usual, they
knew, when something big was about to break.

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 153

So nothing was said to the silent figure who
stalked past them at four o'clock.

The headlines in the evening papers awoke
him from the only day dream of his life; awoke
him to screaming, cursing, furious rage ; awoke
him, too late.

Bailey might have saved something of that
long hoarded gold, if he had continued to be
the cool, level-headed man, who had piled up
so much of it, but from the moment that he
aroused himself, and realized how he had been
betrayed, he was little better than a madman.

He had deliberately sat through a whole
day, and not once looked at the thin strip of
paper, by whose unwinding he had literally
lived since his twenty-fifth year.

He, the great Thomas Bailey, had been
tricked, by those, who at any other time would
not have dared to lift a finger without his bid-
ding. And he had suffered it.

I am inclined to think that he was losing his
mind before he lost his fortune — the madness
of power, the intoxication of gold.

But I am told, that, incredible as it may
seem, two other instances almost exactly like
it, have been chronicled in the records of Wall
Street.

As a matter of fact, a large part of this nar-

154 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

rative was given to me by one of the financial
leaders of the United States — a man who has
spent over fifty years in the money markets
of America.

It took only six months for Thomas Bailey
to travel from that room of power on State
Street, to a fourth rate boarding house, whose
landlady put him out, and held his trunk for
debt.

Several times, after that, as he stumbled
from town to town, he was even arrested.
Sometimes they thought he was drunk, and
sometimes they considered him crazy, and once
he was taken for a drug fiend, and a kind
hearted woman put him in an institution for a
"cure."

He escaped from that place, a beggar now,
moving on and on. He could not have told
where his feet were taking him, but afterward
he traced that trail with wonder and awe. As
straight as the crow flies, he was making for
the Ozarks.

But all that time, a period of over two years,
while he alternately froze with the winter, and
burned with the summer, and lost all remem-
brance of that old Thomas Bailey, who had
ruled State Street, his soul was living through

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 155

a great battle, flashes from which sometimes
penetrated to his worn-out brain.

Once he saw a little gold ring lying by a
roadside, and with a savage gesture, more like
his former self than anything he had done for
months, he set his heel upon it. He got into
the habit of standing before jewelers' win-
dows, and sometimes he moved hastily away,
aware that he had been shaking his trembling
fist at them.

Bailey walked, one day, over a bridge which
was familiar to him. Eads had not built his
great span across the Mississippi when the boy
Thomas had first gone to St. Louis to begin his
pursuit of gold, but Bailey, the financier, had
often seen it as he passed through the city, on
his occasional trips to the western cities where
some of his great enterprises had their head-
quarters.

It was morning, radiant and sweet, as early
May often was in the Mississippi Valley.
Bailey lingered on the bridge until a police-
man moved him on. But the old man stayed
the officer with just the slightest shadow of the
authority, which had been his for so long.

"Do not disturb me," he said, gently. "I
want to think. I have just found out some-

156 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

thing." Confidentially, he took the wondering
policeman by the lapel of his coat.

"Gold — " he said impressively, "gold is not
the most precious thing in the world. There
is something else much greater and more valu-
able, but I have forgotten what it is. Could
you help me to remember, sir?"

St. Louis has an excellent public insane
asylum, and there Thomas Bailey spent the
next few months. The policeman took him
there at once. He seemed a quiet inoffensive
enough creature. The keepers soon grew into
the habit of thinking that he was almost a senile
idiot, and they did not think it necessary to
watch him closely.

This was how he found himself, one quiet,
twilight hour, walking down a suburban
street. He did not remember to have gone
out of the asylum gate which he had been for-
bidden to pass. But he must have done so —
he must have been walking for an hour or two.

There was an open space in the distance,
with a large tent on it. There were lights in
it, and people going in, and sounds of mu-
sic.

He went on. He paused before one of the
entrances. A young man looked at him,
stepped forward, and took him by the arm.

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 157

He found himself in a seat, one of thousands,
who were singing.

There was a choir on a raised platform. It
was a gospel tent. Somebody handed him a
song book, and invited him to sing with the
others.

He had never sung a note in his life. The
great, swelling volume of sound, which pressed
around him, struck through him with an ex-
quisite delight that was almost pain.

He trembled so that he could no longer hold
his book. The woman who sat beside him
looked keenly at him, and then with swift ten-
derness, she laid a hand on his shoulder, trem-
bling a little herself, at the revelations made
by that quivering old face, on which the lines
of greed were slowly breaking.

The speaker on the platform was talking.
Suddenly his interest quickened, and he bent
eagerly forward. The man was talking about
the one thing which Thomas Bailey knew all
about. He was talking about gold, and he
was asking, and answering that question,
which he had been trying to answer now for
months, and which had been always eluding
him.

And he was saying things which Thomas
Bailey's soul had been saying to him, over and

158 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

over again, while his weary feet had dragged
his body toward his boyhood home.

Bailey trembled so, now, that the woman
beside him looked anxiously at the usher, who
had posted himself at the end of the row of
seats.

Something, at once terrible and beautiful,
was happening. They feared to interfere
with it.

The wreck of the old Thomas Bailey was
wrestling with God, and they wondered
whether the man's frail body would endure the
struggle, which shook him from head to foot.

They were going to sing again. The
woman offered Bailey the book, but he could
not take it. She moved a little nearer, so that
her lips were close to his ear, and her clear,
piercing soprano gave him every word of the
song, as the great audience boomed it out.

The love of the Christ is so precious,
That no mortal its wealth can unfold;
His grace is a storehouse of riches to me,
His love is far better than gold.

He meets every need with the promise
No good things from His own to withhold.
So daily I trust in the Crucified One,
His love is far better than gold.

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 159

My heart ever yearns with a longing
To behold the great joy of my soul;
Forever to dwell in the presence of Him,
Whose love is far better than gold.

The woman was crying by that time. When
an old man takes his gray hair in his trembling
hands, and cries out the cry of the new-born, it
is something to stop the heart for a beat or two.

The usher forced his way to them, and came
to lay strong comforting hands on the sobbing
phantom of a man in the seat.

Again the long drawn notes of the singers
rang out, with the deep chanting of the basses
and contraltos :

"His 1-o-v-e (is far better)

is far better than g-o-l-d (better than gold) ;
Its f-u-l-l-(ness can never) ness

can never be told (never be told).
It m-a-k-e-s (me an heir)

me an heir to the mansions above,
For His 1-o-v-e- (is far better)
is far better than gold."

All the tears which Thomas Bailey had
never shed, all the love he had never felt, all
the remorse he had beaten from him, all his
terror of the God he had foresworn came upon
him in a rush.

160 HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD

People went out, weeping, from the sight.
Other people came to him. The woman knelt
beside him pouring out the pity and the
exaltation of her heart in prayer. And at last,
staggering, he was taken to a house, where
they put him to bed, and for a week fought to
keep his heart from beating its way out of its
frame, more bruised and battered now by its
marvelous rebirth than by all its years of life.

In time they won. In time a quavering'
voice thanked them, and a timid hand, un-
accustomed to such contact, pressed itself into
their reassuring palms.

This is the true story of how Thomas Bailey,
at sixty, became tramp, and at seventy, became
again a rich man. With his spiritual re-birth,
his mind seemed to regain almost at once its
old-time power.

As soon as his mental faculties, with all their
store of experience and commercial shrewd-
ness, began to find bodily strength behind
them, they set themselves, even more passion-
ately than before, to the task of gaining gold.

But it was not for the sake of remaking the
fortune he had lost. With his new birth had
come a new vision of life and its obligations.
He could not, of course, directly undo the
misery and havoc he had wrought in his previ-

HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN GOLD 161

ous career, but he could atone in part for them.
He could use the power of gold — not for self
— but for service.

Thomas Bailey figures that he can have, at
the best, only ten more working years. At
eighty, he says, he must have done his part to
pay off at least part of his debt to society. He
will not die before that time — he maintains God
will not let him. For the debt must be paid
first.

At times the clerks in his office can hear him
singing a certain song at his desk —

"For His love is more precious than gold!"

The thin, old voice quavers out the words,
and they glance at each other, a little dubi-
ously.

It is not often that clerks in a commercial
house are called upon to work for a man who
turns over every dollar of his profits to the pur-
poses of God — and who takes a glorified pleas-
ure in doing so.

But then it is not often that a man at seventy
is born again.

Mother's Prayers Have Followed Me.

B. D. i

I grieved my Lord from day to day, I scorned His love so full and

2. O'erdes-ert wild, o'er moun-tain high, A wan-der - er I chose to

3. He turned my dark - ness in - to light, This bless-ed Christ of Cal - va-

±1

free, And tho' I wan - dered far a - way, Mv motb-er's
be; A wretch • ed soul, con-demned to die, Still moth er's
ryl I'D praise His name both day and night, That moth-er's

pray're have fol- lowed me. I'm com - ing home, I'm com -tog

^— g-

1 ' t t

home, To Hve my wast - ed life a • new, For moth-er's

pray're have fol-lowed e

* I 1 *: * i: * 1 f- 11

e, Have fol-lowed me the whole world through.

»' f f t t' f *. , | g. U

162

MY MOTHER'S PRAYERS HAVE FOLLOWED ME

I grieved, my Lord, from day to day,
I scorned his love so full and free,

And tho' I wandered far away,

My mother's prayers have followed me.

This is the experience of a modern prodigal
— who came back.

It is also the story of a mother and her boy.

But, above all, it is the story of a mother's
prayers, as first she gave it to me, and then her
son.

You may not believe in prayer. You may
not believe that prayer is answered. Maybe,
you have not learned how to pray.

This is the record of prayers that were of-
fered apparently in vain, that fell back, month
after month, upon the lips that uttered them,
until at the last — but let me give you the curi-
ous facts in the life of Jack Xorton, the prodi-
gal, in the order in which they led up to the
great crisis of his career.

Jack was a fairly decent sort of a young fel-

163

164 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

low, for the only son of fond and doting par-
ents, who expected him to go through life on
ball bearings.

Following his graduation from the local
High School, they sent him, after many con-
sultations and arguments to one of the largest
Eastern colleges.

It wasn't long before Jack began picking
up more things on the side than he found in
the college curriculum. He was just a big,
overgrown, spoiled boy, and he looked on the
new world around him as a boy — and not as a
man.

One of the closest friends that he found at
the university was a youth of about his own
age, by the name of Dick Randolph. But
there the resemblance ceased. Dick's father
owned three or four hundred miles of railroads,
and Dick tried to make the world believe that
he was the original Kid Broadway.

Under his supervision Jack became more fa-
miliar with poker chips, and cocktails, and mu-
sical comedy actresses than with Greek and
Latin verbs, or Trigonometry. And his edu-
cation progressed amazingly along those lines.

When he finally returned to Homeburg,
with his sheepskin in his pocket, and a cigarette
in the corner of his mouth, he was already be-

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 165

ginning to feel a man of the world, and had his
future painted in bright and glowing colors.

His father's ambition had been to add the
words, "And Son" to the partnership sign over
at the paint factory that he had started forty
years ago in one room, and he had confidently
expected Jack to become one of the solid busi-
ness men of the community.

The boy's family, and a girl in the next
block, by the name of Mary Bradford, who
had had Jack's picture on the bureau in her
bed room ever since the summer before he
went away to college, had the same ideas about
his business career. But he promptly showed
them all that he had other plans.

"This is no place for me," he confided to his
father. "I'm going to New York, where a
man of my talents has a proper chance. I
think I'll be an architect. So if you'll let me
have what is coming to me I'll use it to start
at my new career. Take it from me — before
long you won't know your son!"

His father glanced at Jack's college-boy hat,
and rainbow shirt, and white trousers, flirting
with a lavender expanse of silk socks, and
shook his head, but he finally gave in and drew
a check for ten thousand to start his son and
heir in the battle with the world.

166 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

"I won't give you any advice," he said
grimly, "but when the money is gone, you
won't get any more. That's all I can say to
you — but it ought to be enough!"

Even a fond and doting parent sometimes
has moments of sanity — generally when it is
too late.

"I won't need any more," answered Jack
confidently.

"I didn't mean advice," said his father
curtly, "I mean money!"

Mary Bradford tried to smile when she
heard of Jack's plans, but it wasn't much of a
success, and she locked herself in her room, and
cried herself to sleep. She had a woman's in-
tuitions of the probable result.

His mother stole upstairs to her own pri-
vate little nook, and when she came down she
timidly held out a frayed, old fashioned Bible,
with a book-mark that she had embroidered
when she was a girl.

"It has been mine since I was a child," she
said. "When you read it, remember your
mother at home is praying that her boy will
make the best, and bravest, and biggest man in
the whole world."

Jack smiled patronizingly. "She is a bit
out of date," he said to himself, "and hasn't

MOTHER'S PRAYERS

167

had the chance to see life that I have, and know
that people who amount to anything have out-
grown that nonsense — but I may as well hu-
mor her."

So he slipped the Bible into the bottom of his
trunk, where it would be out of sight, waved
his hand to the folks on the porch, and swung
out of the front gate.

At last he was on his way to the great city,
where a man with brains could find a career
worthy of his greatness.

He didn't know that New York was a good
deal like Homeburg, except in size, and that
the only difference was that it had more va-
rieties of human nature, and failure, and suc-
cess, and more opportunities for getting the
best, or the worst out of a man.

His old college chum, Dick Randolph, se-
cured him a berth in an architect's office, but
Jack was more interested in that part of the
day after five o'clock in the afternoon.

He fell into the habit of telling those out-
side the office that he was only working to
please his father out in Indiana, who owned
half a dozen townships, but had old-fashioned
ideas.

Dick Randolph prided himself that he was
one of the star patrons of Broadway, and,

168 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

through his introductions, Jack found himself
generously received in a certain type of restau-
rants and cafes. But he was not deserving
them as much as he was himself. As long as
he had money to pay his way, they would make
that way alluring to him. That is the custom
of Broadway, and Jack, not being wise in the
ways of the world, saw the easy things of life
being handed to him simply by stretching out
his hand for them.

It was about this time that his scheme of life
was further complicated, when he met a golden-
haired, soulful-eyed girl in a Forty-second
Street musical comedy, called Flossy Brandon.
Her hair and her soulful eyes were both arti-
ficial, except that they were manufactured by
different processes, but Jack didn't know it.

Before he realized it he was hopelessly,
blindly infatuated.

Letters continued to come to him regularly
with the Homeburg post mark, although he
seldom bothered to answer them now. He
didn't have to. A mother has an extra sense
— where her boy is concerned. God gave her
an especial wireless telegraphy for her own ex-
clusive use.

His mother added always to her letters the
words, "You will know that I am praying for

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 169

you, every night at eight o'clock, winter or
summer." She never forgot to write that
postscript. It was a part of her life.

Broadway was a closed book to her, but she
didn't need to open it. She had a mother's
conviction that the man out in the world, once
the boy at her knees, and still the boy in her
heart, needed her prayers. That was enough
for her.

One evening Jack entertained at a dinner in
his apartment.

It was Flossie Brandon who found his moth-
er's frayed Bible, that she discovered on the
bottom shelf of a stand in the corner. Jack
faced the crowd with a flushed, embarassed
face, as the girl held it up, and called the atten-
tion of the others to her find.

As he stared at it, the door of the cuckoo
clock in the corner opened. One — two — three
— four — five — six — seven — eight times came
the shrill note of the toy bird. Eight o'clock!

It might have been coincidence, of course.
But Jack Norton doesn't think so — now.

Suddenly through the frayed cover of the
Bible he seemed to catch a vision — his mother
in her room at home on her knees, and the post-
scripts of her letters flashed back to him; —
1 'At eight o'clock every evening I shall be

170 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

praying for you." The next moment he swept
the vision from him, and laughed as he pointed
to the Bible.

"Oh, that's a relic! Quite a curiosity, isn't
it?" he stammered.

"And whose picture is this, may I ask?" de-
manded Flossie coldly, stopping before a pho-
tograph of Mary Bradford on the wall.

Jack flushed.

"Oh, that's another relic!" he laughed again.

Flossie was a difficult young woman to
please. She measured men only by one stand-
ard, the amount of money they would spend
on her. The boy found his bank account gone,
and his debts growing like a snow-ball, in his
frantic effort to live up to her extravagant ex-
pectations.

One day Jack saw the cashier drop the com-
bination of the office safe. The boy, on a sud-
den impulse, put his foot over it, and when he
went home to dinner it was in his pocket.

His creditors were beginning to be insulting,
and here was a chance to pay his debts, per-
haps with money over, and no risk, to himself.
If the safe were robbed, it would be impossible
for any one to suspect that he had a hand in it.

He slipped back to the office that evening.
The safe was an old fashioned type, and the

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 171

combination made it absurdly simple for him to
open it.

Jack was twirling the last of the tumblers
when a low, whirring sound back of him made
him jump with a face like a sheet. But it was
only the office clock preparing to strike.

One — two — three — f our — five — six — seven
— eight!

Jack stared at the safe like a man suddenly
paralyzed.

It could not be coincidence again — and yet
it must be! Jack pushed his hand over his
face. It was suddenly dripping with per-
spiration. Perhaps you can find a satisfactory
explanation. Jack has ceased to try.

Burning his brain, as he stood there, were
the words of his mother's letters, "Remember,
every evening at eight o'clock I shall be pray-
ing for you — winter or summer P

In the mirror-like silver handle of the safe
he seemed to see reflected the figure of a kneel-
ing woman — his mother by her bed-side in her
room at home.

A mother never forgets her promise to her
boy.

"Brace up! You are letting your nerves
get away with you!" he taunted himself.

With an oath he swung open the safe door,

172 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

and stuffed a bundle of the yellow bills in the
cash drawer into his pocket. The picture of
his mother had gone.

When he returned to his rooms he found
that he had stolen two thousand dollars.

The next morning the head of the firm had
him on the carpet with the rest of the staff.
Jack didn't like the look in his eyes, but he told
himself it was impossible to connect him with
the robbery.

A week later he was called into the private
office again.

"You're through, Norton," his employer
said. "You can get your time on your way
out."

The boy began to bluster. "What do you
mean?"

"I mean that a young fellow who has as
many outside interests as we find you have is of
no further use to us!"

Jack went out with his head high.

Jobs were easy, he told himself. He found
Dick Randolph, and approached him on the
subject of another connection.

"I had to tell the office I couldn't stand their
old fashioned methods any longer," he said.
"Introduce me to somebody who can appreci-
ate real brains."

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 173

But Dick shook his head. "You'll have to
dig for yourself, I'm afraid. I have all that I
can attend to just now!" he said coldly.

"Then let me have a hundred until Tues-
day."

Dick shook his head again. "I'm over-
drawn at the bank, and my father is threaten-
ing to stop my allowance. Wish you luck, old
man!"

Jack changed to his evening clothes, and
hunted up Flossie Brandon. Here at least he
would find some one who understood him.

She looked at him with a sneer when he had
finished his story.

"I don't see how that affects me," she said,
putting on her hat.

"But I did it all for you," cried Jack.

"That's what they all say," Flossie yawned.
"If they won't send you any more money from
home, pawn what you can, and go to work in
earnest! I have an engagement, my dear
boy!"

Jack staggered out into the street. His
world had come to an end.

He thought that he was a very much de-
ceived and wronged young man, and he hired
all of the bar-tenders he could find to help him
forget his troubles.

174 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

They were doing their best after thirty days
interval, but they hadn't succeeded, although
he had pawned everything that a pawn-shop
would take, and had borrowed all the money
his friends would loan him.

The only thing that whiskey can make a man
forget, whether it is poured from a cut glass
decanter on a mahogany bar, or from a black
bottle on a tramp's hip, is his manhood.

Jack drifted from Forty-second Street
down to Fourteenth Street, and then with short
steps to the Bowery.

The farther a man gets on the toboggan the
faster he shoots.

The one-time tango idol of the Broadway
lobster palaces degenerated into a street-corner
beggar, and an object of police suspicion. One
evening he slouched out from a doorway over
to a taxicab, where a party of men and women
in Fifth Avenue togs were stepping gingerly
out onto the walk for a slumming trip.

"Please, can you give me the price of a cup
of coffee and a bed," he whined.

The man nearest him turned impatiently.
It was Dick Randolph.

Jack saw the look of recognition in the oth-
er's eyes, and then Dick tossed him a two-
dollar bill.

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 175

"Take this, and beat it, you bum!"

Jack stuffed the bill into his pocket and
shuffled off. His hands were clenched, and
something inside of him was burning like a hot
coal.

He stopped a block away, hesitating be-
tween a Childs restaurant and a corner saloon.
Should he get a steak, or another drink?

He turned suddenly from both restaurant
and saloon with a wild look like fever in his
eyes. Dick Randolph had called him a bum
— and Dick Randolph was right.

Why continue a hopeless fight?

He pushed into a dismal little pawn shop,
heavy with the atmosphere of lost hopes, and
for his two-dcllar bill he received a second hand
revolver, a box of cartridges, and fifteen cents
in change.

He stopped again in a small park, scowled at
a spoony couple on a bench before him, and
loaded his revolver behind them.

He was raising the weapon to his head when
another voice checked him.

It was that of a girl on the street corner,
singing to the accompaniment of a bass drum
and a cornet.

The revolver fell to his side.

176 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

Clear and high the girl's voice was ringing
as she reached the chorus of her song :

"I'm coming home,
I'm coming home to live my wasted life anew.
For mother's prayers have followed me,
Have followed me the whole world through."

And then the second verse in the same ar-
resting, penetrating key ; —

"O'er desert wild, o'er mountain high,
A wanderer I chose to be,
A wretched soul condemned to die,
Still mother's prayers have followed me."

Jack dropped the revolver into his pocket,
and stumbled out into the street. He was
walking like a man in his sleep.

The girl reached the song's concluding verse :

"He turned my darkness into light,
This blessed Christ of Calvary,
I'll praise His name both day and night,
That mother's prayers have followed me."

As the words died away, she turned toward
the doors of a corner mission hall.

Jack slouched after the two men with her
who were carrying the bass drum and the cor-
net.

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 177

The words of the song kept dancing in the
air before him, and through them he seemed
to see vaguely, as at a great distance, his
mother on her knees, with her hands over her
eyes. A strange mist covered her face, and
he couldn't see it plainly, but he knew it was
there. And he knew that he was weak, and
dizzy, and sick, and that something was hap-
pening to him that he couldn't understand.

He dropped onto a pine bench in the rear of
the mission hall, and fumbled with his hat.

There were other men on the benches, and
two or three women — most of them battered
wrecks from the streets — who looked as though
they had lost their way and didn't know
whether they could ever find it again, or not.

An aisle in the center led up to a platform,
on which stood a man with a beaming smile,
that seemed to take in everybody in the hall.

Jack's eyes fixed themselves suddenly on a
clock on the wall over the man's head. Its
hands pointed exactly to eight.

He tried to remember something that kept
slipping away from him, and then like a flash it
came to him, the forgotten postscripts of his
mother's letters — "Remember, I shall always
be praying for you at eight o'clock, winter or
summer."

178 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

Coincidence a third time? Or mental
telepathy ? Or the spirit of God ? Jack gives
the facts. He can't give the reason for them.

All he knows was that he was staggering to
his feet, and stumbling down the aisle.

Suddenly the mist faded from the picture of
his mother that had been dancing in the air
before him. He saw her face distinctly now,
as distinctly as though she were in the room
with him. And through her tears she was
smiling. At the platform he dropped to his
knees weakly.

He knew that for the first time since he had
fallen out of the apple tree, and broken his
arm, when he was a boy, there was something
salty in his eyes that didn't belong there.

The man on the platform reached over, and
gave him a thump on the shoulders, and led

After the service he sat down at his side,
him to a front bench.

He didn't ask questions. He was too good a
judge of human nature. Before Jack knew
it, he was giving the other the story of his
life.

"God hasn't any use for a man with a skele-
ton in his closet or for a quitter," said the
superintendent when the boy had finished.
"You can't get right with God unless you're

MOTHER'S PRAYERS

179

right with men. You must go back to your
firm and tell them it was you who robbed their
safe."

''But they will send me to prison if I do!"

"That's up to them. You sinned deliber-
ately, and you must pay — as they decide, not
you. You've got to stand on your own feet,
or not at all."

Jack's glance fell to the floor, and his hands
clenched as he fought out the battle with him-
self. He raised his eyes steadily.

"I'll— I'll go through with it."

"You understand what it means?"

"I understand!" the boy said quietly.
"You're right. God cant have any use for a
quitter!"

The superintendent put Jack to bed, and
then sent off a long telegram, which he read
over carefully before he gave it to the messen-
ger boy.

The next afternoon the ex-Broadway Kid
and the superintendent of the mission were
ushered into the private office of Jack's former
employer.

There was a queer taste in the boy's mouth,
and a queer light in his eyes, but he faced the
head of the firm without a quiver, and told his
story.

180 MOTHER'S PRAYERS

"Is it the penitentiary?" he asked when he
had finished.

His employer looked at his desk for a mo-
ment in silence.

"I've got to do my duty!" he said grimly,
and pushed a button before him.

Jack caught his breath. Above him he saw
again the picture of his mother on her knees
and he closed his eyes to blot it out. If they
could only keep it from her !

"Go to it!" he said huskily. "I'm ready!"

Behind him the door opened. It must be
the detectives. For an instant he stood rigid,
and then, without turning, he held his wrists
out behind him, for the handcuffs.

But it was not the grip of steel that caught
them. It was something soft, and moist, and
warm. With a gasp he whirled. It was his
mother's hands.

And behind her stood his father. It was his
father who spoke first.

"We've come to take you home," he said.
"We need a new firm sign at the old factory!"

Jack stared dumbly. The room was whirl-
ing over his head.

"But what about the money I owe here, the
money I stole," he stammered.

"I'll pay it back, son, and give you a chance

MOTHER'S PRAYERS 181

to work it out for me! If you tell me the
prodigal has learned his lesson we'll all try to
forget it! What do you say?"

A month later, in the dusk of a summer
evening, Jack stole up on the porch of the old
home cottage, sweet with the scent of honey-
suckle and lilacs. He was holding the hand of
a girl beside him, a girl with shining eyes.

His mother rose from her easy chair, and
dropped her knitting.

"I've brought you home a new daughter,"
he said; "Mary Bradford has promised to take
a chance with me, in spite of the past!"

A few minutes afterward he pulled Mary
across to the piano.

"Play for me," he begged.

"What shall it be?" she asked.

"My favorite song, of course!" And he
added softly, "The song that brought me back
to myself, and to you and to God."

The girl smiled, and her hands ran lightly
over the keys, as, through the room, there
floated the strains of "My Mother's Prayers
Have Followed Me!"

He turned my darkness into light,

This blessed Christ of Calvary!
I'll praise his name both day and night,

That mother's prayers have followed me.

Are Ton Counting the Cost?

U DolerOtfdoa.

B. D AcHey.

1. Your Sav-iour is call-ing from Cal- va-ry's tree, His sac-ri-fice

2. How can you neg-Iect His sal - va-tion so great? His word Stand-eth

3. Why tar - ry to gath-er the treas-ures of earth That short-ly most

4. For what shall it prof - it you there, tho' you gain The wealth of the

' J J' J i . „ . , J J

can you re • fuse? Re-ject His sal-va-tion so pre-cious and free,Your
true ev er - more; Come, en- ter the king-dom be-fore its too late: Come
cruin-ble a - way Come, lay op the jew-els of in - fi-niteworth, That
world as a whole? 0 shall not your la - bor be worse than in vain, If

■U J J J J J

hope of e-W-ni-ty lose?

while there's a wide-o-pen d«or! Are yon couuting the cost, are you counting the
shine thro' e- ter- ni-ty's day.
there by you lose your own soul?

cost ?When your Lord you refuse are you count-ingthe cost? I^you^kno^with-out

gAJM \ i II

-ens your soul will be lost? When your Lord ;

pou refuse ar

e you counting the cost?

eb^ r rii a i-T^^f

'-I--1— g-g ft V \ p h

"are you counting the cost?"

Stories of real life don't end always the way
we expect them to — or want them to.

God is always staging dramas, and picking
His settings from the familiar scenes about
us, and selecting His casts from men and
women that we know.

And sometimes He lets us watch their un-
folding. But He seldom gives us the climax
that we are anticipating. And then we try
frantically to explain the logic, or the motiva-
tion, or the characterization, and because we
can't understand it to our satisfaction we try
to tell ourselves that it is out of focus with life
— as it ought to be.

For instance, why should the singing of a
simple song change the whole life of Jim Tar-
leton almost instantly when, for over thirty
years, he had been deaf to every other emo-
tion and every other call except those of self?

And, after this reformation, which was a

183

184* "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

miracle to those who knew the man, why should
the end be as it was ?

But this is not an effort to tell why, or how
— it is only an effort to present the simple, un-
varnished facts in the case.

The story came from Frank Heneage, the
cotton broker, a big, steady-eyed chap, who
has made his fortune in ten years by the hard-
est kind of driving work. In all of his ten
years Heneage had never spared himself, or
any one else who was working for him. Nor
has he made his money in speculation. Deal-
ing in "futures" is in Heneage's mind more or
less gambling, and Heneage doesn't gamble.

He insisted that I go out to lunch with him,
and after we had taken the first edge off our
hunger — and Heneage has an appetite that is
a wonder — we settled back to talk.

"I have a strong story to tell you," he said;
"a story that some men wouldn't believe —
maybe I wouldn't, if I hadn't seen it develop
before my own eyes." He looked at me
thoughtfully. "I'm not much on psychology.
I'm not trying to explain the reasons back of
it all. I am just going to tell you what hap-
pened."

"Yes?" I encouraged.

"It's about Jim Tarleton," he continued; "I

ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 185

think I introduced him to you once, some years
ago?"

I nodded. I remembered Tarleton very
well. He was famous for his clothes, the lux-
ury of the furnishings of his room, his taste in
art, his extravagant parties. In appearance
and manner Jim Tarleton was called a typi-
cal dude; but for all that it had been my im-
pression that he had a lot of good qualities,
at heart, only that they had never been devel-
oped.

"Jim wasn't a bad fellow, all in all," Hene-
age continued, "a good deal of a young fool,
but not what you would call vicious at any
time. His one serious weakness was his ex-
travagance ; and as we all thought that he had
all the money in the world nobody ever both-
ered about his future. After he graduated at
college — and he took the senior Latin prize,
too — he and Al Cummings, who was of much
the same type, leased a New York apartment
on Park Avenue together, and lived there in
high style with a Japanese servant and a
French chef. Occasionally in the Broadway
restaurants I would see Jim and Al, dining in
splendor, with a whole circle of admiring
friends, men and women. Jim paid the bills,
I suppose, the men and women with him, good-

186 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

looking as they were, were evidently of the
parasite class, of the great white way.

"For two years Jim was conspicuous among
the white lights — then he disappeared. Men
have a habit of doing that on Broadway !

"Eight years went past without my seeing
him; then two months ago he showed up in
the office. And what do you think he was
doing ?"

I shook my head.

"Selling calendars at ten cents apiece.
Cheap little things with decorations of Kewpie
heads; the kind that would appeal to stenog-
raphers and office boys who wanted to make a
hit with their best girls."

"No?" The memory of Jim Tarleton,
lounging luxuriously on his tapestry covered
couch, and garbed in white flannels, white
shoes, and lavendar pin-striped silk shirt, came
back vividly to my memory. I remembered
the Kurdestan rugs on the floor, the priceless
etchings on the wall, the dainty, almost effem-
inate dimity curtains at the windows. All the
furniture of his rooms had been of the richest
mahogany, a rich dull brown, perfectly pol-
ished.

Jim Tarleton selling calendars! It seemed
absurd, grotesque.

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 187

"Poor old Jim hadn't any idea that it was
my office he had entered," said Heneage.
"He would have died, I think, rather than to
have come in if he had known, for Jim's pride
was as strong as his vanity. When, quite ac-
cidentally, I walked out and confronted him,
he shrank back as if he had been struck a
physical blow.

" 'Jim?' I said, 'Old Jim!' And held out
my hand. At first I thought that he wasn't
going to take it. Then he gripped me as if I
was holding him from falling from a treach-
erous pinnacle. As he seized my hand he be-
gan to cough, a hard, hacking cough that shook
him all over. With his left hand he fumbled
for his handkerchief. It was clean, but
ragged, and he passed it across his lips.

" 'Come in, Jim,' I said, 'and tell me about
it.'

"Without a word, he followed me into the
private office, and sat down in the big leather
chair I pulled up to the desk.

"For the first time I got a good look at him.
The boy was a pitiable sight. His shoes were
clean of dirt, but they hadn't been polished for
weeks evidently, a big crack ran across one of
them just at the place where the toes break in
walking, and through the cracks peeped the

188 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

faded yellow of what had once been white cot-
ton stockings.

"His trousers were shiny at the knees, and
were patched clumsily at the edges of the
pockets, and his coat was as threadbare as his
trousers, the edge of the collar beginning to
fray. His shirt was clean, but sewed up
around the neck with clumsy stitches, and his
collar was cracked at the front, cracks which
the poor chap had painstakingly tried to con-
ceal by knotting a faded red scarf into a big
bunch in front.

His face was dead white, with a sort of blue
tinge around the eyes and the mouth, and a
faint flush of pink on the tips of the cheek-
bones. His hair, though smoothly brushed,
hung down stragglingly behind.

" 'Tell me about it, Jim!' I said. And he
told me, in a dull, hopeless sort of a voice, whose
tones scarcely varied.

"When he had finished I got up for a min-
ute, and looked out of the window. To take
him to lunch, to give him a few dollars — that
was the least I could do. But couldn't I do
a great deal more? Was it possible to re-
make Jim's life? Was it too late?

"For some time I debated the problem.
Then I decided.

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 189

" 'Will you spend the rest of the day with
me, Jim?' I asked. He nodded; and then
broke out again in that paroxysm of coughing.

"I took Jim by the elbow, and we left. I
could almost hear the clerks and stenographers
in the outer office snickering as we passed. Of
course, they didn't make a sound, but I could
feel their attitude in the whole atmosphere.
And I guess Jim felt it too, for his head, that
used to be held so proudly and audaciously,
hung low between his shoulders.

"My destination was the Billy Sunday tab-
ernacle, for his New York campaign was at its
height at that time. I took Jim first to a dairy
lunch room, for I knew he would be embar-
rassed in one of the big restaurants, and I or-
dered about half the bill-of-fare for him.

"After the first ten minutes he was able to
talk, but at first the smell and the taste of the
food seemed almost to set him crazy.

"After the meal we got into the subway,
and went uptown to the huge tabernacle on the
Yankees' old ball field.

"The meeting seemed fairly to hypnotize
Jim. He just sat there, with his eyes dry and
staring and his face drawn. When we left
the tabernacle and started across the street
with the crowd, I had a chance to get a good

190 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

look at him. His eyes were very bright, and
unconsciously he was humming a tune, the
tune of one of those swinging, catchy hymns we
had heard —

"Are you counting the cost, are you counting the cost?
When your Lord you refuse are you counting the cost?
Do you know without Jesus your soul will be lost
When your Lord you refuse are you counting the cost?"

"The words were running through my head,
too. I didn't say anything. I didn't think it
was the time.

"When we got downtown again I bought a
good hearty dinner for him, and then took him
around to a cheap hotel I knew, one of those
clean, quiet places, supported by an endow-
ment, where a man can have a room with a
good bed for about three dollars a week.

"I wanted to wait until he had undressed and
got to bed, but I remembered the condition of
his wardrobe, and realized he would be em-
barrassed if I stayed. So I shook his hand,
and slapped him on the shoulder, and prom-
ised to look around for an easy job for him, for
in his condition he was in no shape to do hard
work, either physical, or mental.

"As I closed the door I heard him begin to
hum again the words of the song we had heard,

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 191

"Are you counting the cost? Are you count-
ing the cost?"

"Downstairs I told the clerk to keep Jim
there as long as he needed to stay, and to send
the bills to me. I am not a good Samaritan.
Anyone else who knew Jim in the old days
would have done the same for him. As I went
home, I guess I must have been humming that
song of his, for people turned to stare after me
in the street.

"I didn't see Jim again for a month, though
I found him a job running a freight elevator in
a large office building. He didn't have to do
heavy work there, and could sit on a stool while
the car was running, which was only at infre-
quent intervals.

"They gave him ten dollars a week, and to
Jim's credit, he refused to let me pay for his
lodgings after the second week. The clerk at
the hotel called me up, and told me that Mr.
Tarleton had paid for his room in advance.

"But he couldn't stick it out. About a
month later, as I told you, I saw him again —
I went hurrying up to his hotel in reply to a
hurry call. Jim was very sick, they told me,
and had been sent to a hospital just before I
arrived."

Heneage paused, and looked out of the win-

192 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

dow. Under his breath he was whistling
softly. I recognized the tune. It was again
the song: — "Are You Counting the Cost?"

"What had happened to him?" I asked,
"liquor, women, cards, or — what?"

"He hadn't 'counted the cost,' " came the
brief answer.

"What do you mean?"

"Just this," Heneage settled himself in his
chair again. "Jim hadn't kept his expense ac-
count, either with this world — or with God.
He had let everything slide. Always weak
and pleasure-loving, he had simply lost his grip
— his money, his health, and worst of all, his
faith. Xothing mattered except fun. And
he went after his fun recklessly with no thought
of the future."

"The story that he told me," Heneage con-
tinued, "had nothing particularly novel or
unique about it.

"Jim's life was merely a constant search for
a good time. Automobiling, tennis, golf, the
theater, late dinner parties, anything for a few
hours of sport.

"Jim Tarleton's moral decline had been
gradual, and his physical decay had been de-
layed by his comparative temperance — for he
was never chronically dissipated.

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 193

"He had fitted up his apartment in New
York with Al Cnmmings regardless of expense
with the one idea — a good time.

"Cummings, himself, didn't have any money
to speak of, but he made a splendid front, and
was received in the best circles, belonged to
three of the exclusive clubs, and was popular
with the girls and liked by their mothers, not-
withstanding his ineligibility as a husband for
a rich young debutante.

"Jim, who had about a hundred thousand in
his own right, and was an orphan, came from
the middle West, and like other foolish young
fellowrs, he wras dazzled by the apparent splen-
dors of the great white way.

"Cummings got him into his clubs, and, in
return Jim paid most of Cummings' bills, flor-
ists, wine-dealers', restaurants, taxi-cabs, and
so forth.

"Three or four times a week the twro of
them gave a big party, with some young mat-
ron of easy morals but of a distinguished name
acting as chaperone. All the delicacies of the
world, and the rarest wines were gathered to
regale the guests, and Jim's parties became
famous. Xot infrequently, too, there would
be a grand blow-out for certain beautiful

194 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

women of the stage, and the favors at these
parties would run up in the hundreds.

"Jim's morals, I repeat, weren't essentially
vicious.

"Of the more flagrant forms of licentious-
ness he disapproved heartily, but because they
seemed to him vulgar rather than because they
were wrong. He simply didn't realize that
there was anything in the world except the
pursuit of pleasure. God was an abstract con-
ception, quite outside of his understanding.
He knew that good English demands that you
spell the name of the Deity with a capital let-
ter. That was all.

"The life that he led couldn't go on at the
rate of even six per cent interest on a hundred
thousand principal. And within a very few
months he was dipping into his capital with
both hands, and spilling great splatters as he
drew them out. And, as his capital grew
smaller, his income decreased; so he had to
draw harder and harder on the principal.
Finally, in little more than two years after his
arrival in New York, he found himself prac-
tically penniless, and his first cheque came back
marked 'not sufficient funds.'

"That jarred him, but the soft life he had
been leading wasn't calculated to give him

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 195

careful thought. Still he didn't count the cost.
He had established such a reputation as a
spender that his credit remained good almost
everywhere for some time. The bills piled up,
unheeded, or rather, didn't pile up, for he
chucked them into the waste basket as fast as
they came in.

"Then Al Cummings, whose credit never
had been worth anything, came to him with the
request for a couple of hundred in cash. Jim
went to the club, and borrowed a thousand
from three or four friends. That wras easy
enough, and when Al was broke again, Jim
made another visit to the club — only he kept a
couple of hundred for his own pocket this
time.

"Credit was still good, but real cash, for
tips, for out-of-town dinners at road houses
where he wasn't known, and so on, was grow-
ing scanty. He made a third touch at his
club.

"It was there that he got his first jolt. The
young cashier of the Fifth Avenue Bank,
where Jim had once had an account, had been
drinking too much that night, and had gos-
siped. Four men, in succession, turned him
down; told him to come round to-morrow,
when they would be better fixed. But not one

196 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

of the four was in the club the next day. To-
ward two in the morning Jim gave up, and
walked home, his hands deep in the pockets of
his braided evening trousers.

"The next day Cummings needed more
money. Jim told him he couldn't get it; and
Cummings, fair weather friend, immediately
packed up, and went off to a house party in
Maine.

"A week later the Japanese servant, across
the breakfast table, murmured: "You no pay
two week now, Mis Tarleton."

"Xo, Koji," Jim replied, with a hollow feel-
ing, "I'll pay you next week."

"The end of the next week Koji left, silently
but with dark looks. A succession of servants
followed ; some stayed for two weeks or even a
month, some left within a day or two, warned
of a sinking ship by the persistence of trades-
men's demands at the back door.

"Jim began to look cautiously up and down
the street before venturing down the steps of
the apartment house.

"Then his name was posted in the most se-
lect of his clubs for non-payment of his house
charges. The same thing happened shortly at
the others. Another haven from creditors was
closed to him. He began the rounds of the

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 197

second-hand clothes shops, and dingy pawn-
shops.

His landlord endured longest of all. But
eventually there came a terse but polite note
from him asking Mr. Tarleton to vacate his
quarters. In a sort of trance Jim moved to
the best hotel in town. On the strength of his
former reputation he stayed there for a month;
then with only a suitcase, he stole away, seek-
ing harbor in a family hotel uptown.

"There he lasted less than two weeks. The
word was being passed along. The Hotel
Men's Association, ever vigilant, scented de-
cay.

"A third-rate hotel in a shabby side street,
noisy with the drays and trucks that load and
unload all day and most of the night at the
rear entrances of the big office buildings, was
his next refuge. But there, too, he was
quickly dispossessed.

"An unexpected invitation to a house party
tided him over the next month. He left with-
out tipping any of the servants and borrowed
ten dollars from his host to get back to town.
Home again — but what was home now?

"In desperation he wandered about the city
looking for work, any kind of a job. So long
as his clothes remained good, and he could

198 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

visit a barber shop regularly he was able to
pick up small employments at eight or ten dol-
lars a week. Assiduously he avoided his for-
mer haunts, seldom venturing north of Four-
teenth Street. He lived in a bare room, fur-
nished with a mean cot and a rickety wooden
chair, far down on the West Side near the
docks; paying for this accommodation the sum
of two and one half dollars a week.

"Utterly unfitted for any gainful work, he
had to be content with the smallest tasks ; and,
as his food grew poorer and less nourishing,
his strength ebbed. In the morning he had to
drive himself to work, his legs trembling, and
his body shivering in the crisp air from the
river front. It was bitterly hard to plod all
the way across and up town to the loft build-
ing in lower Fourth Avenue, where for ten
hours a day he addressed envelopes in a
wabbly, tremulous hand.

"Then he was discharged for bad penman-
ship, which was actually nothing but the re-
sult of his shattered nerves. That was only a
few months before he wandered into my office.
Meantime he had developed tuberculosis."

Heanage paused. "I think that about fin-
ishes the story/'

"But, what became of Jim?" I insisted.

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 199

"Were you able to put him on his feet again —
after all?"

"I told you that they took him to the hos-
pital. I hurried there at once from the hotel,
and I saw that the last crisis had come.

"I asked them if I could stay with him; and
they broke the rules for once. All night I sat
in an armchair beside the long narrow white
bed, set high up from the floor like those hos-
pital cots are, you know. Only a shaded night
lamp was burning.

1 'Toward dawn, just as the sky outside be-
gan to get gray, I heard a voice from the pil-
low. I leaned forward, but Jim's eyes were
still shut. He lay there, rigid, his thin hands,
above the sheets, folded on his breast. He
wasn't exactly singing; just droning in a sing-
song monotone.

"I made out the words faintly:

"Are you counting the cost, are you counting the cost?
When your Lord you refuse, are you counting the cost?
Do you know without Jesus your Soul will be lost?
When your Lord you refuse are you counting the cost?"

"On and on went that dead monotone from
his gray lips.

"Your Savior is calling from Calvary's tree
His sacrifice can you refuse

200 "ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?"

Eeject his salvation so pleasant and free
Your hope of eternity lose?"

"The voice became somewhat stronger. I
could catch the echo of the tune, a little shaky,
but firm enough to distinguish it, with over
and over again the same refrain, 'Are You
Counting the Cost?'

"It was quite light by this time. For a
moment I turned my attention away, and
looked out of the window. The ragged edge
of the roof tops of the tenements across the
street was dead black against the pale glow of
the sky at dawn ; early trucks rumbled by, and
now and then rose the clatter of a milk wagon.

"A terrible paroxysm of coughing drew me
back sharply. Jim had half-risen, propped
weakly on his elbows. Through his coughing
the words of the hymn came again and gradu-
ally clearer:

"O, shall not your labor be worse than in vain
If thereby you lose your own soul?
Are you counting the cost, are you counting — "

"He dropped back limply. I jumped for
the bellcord and pushed the button for the
nurse. She came running silently, with only
the swish of her skirts to herald her.

"I must get the doctor!" she cried.

"ARE YOU COUNTING THE COST?" 201

"Bending close above the bed, I searched
for a sign of life in Jim's face, but the features
were set, his skin a gray-like parchment.
Then, weakly, his big, hollow eyes opened, and
his lips moved.

"I — I guess I have found the cost — after all,
old man!"

If Your Heart Keeps Right.

^ - p • - pn — irT7-

1. If the dark shad-ovrs gath-er As yon go a- long, Do not griere for their"

2. Is your life jost a tan-gle,Full of toil and care? Smile a bit as yoe

3. There are blossom* of gladness 'Neath the winter's snow; From the r>#« and the

com - fog, Sing a cheer - y song! There is joy for the tak-ing; It wsl
jour- ney, Oth -ers' bur- dens share; You'll for • get all your troubles, Mak-inf
dark-noss Comes themoming'sglow; Ney - er give up the bat -tie, Ton wfll

Jit ? ilm f f , . ]L. * £ 7 « <f

soon be light,— Er-'ry cloud wears a rain-bow, If your heart keeps right,
their lire* bright; Skies will grow blue and sun -ny, If your heart keeps right,
win the fight, Gain the rest of the Vic -tor, If your heart keeps right.

If your heart keeps right, If your heart keeps right, There's a song <el

glad-nesa in the dark - est night; If yonr heart keeps right, If your

202

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 203

If Your Heart Keeps Right.

* '3

heart keeps right, E v-'ry cloud will wear a rain-bow, If your heart keepi right.

"if your heart keeps right"

If the dark shadows gather as you go along,
Do not grieve for their coming, sing a cheery song!
There is joy for the taking: it will soon be light, —
Every cloud wears a fainbow, if your heart keeps right.

A great many people make a mistake in
estimating the worth of gospel songs. A song
for use in gospel meetings is not always a gem
of classical music, and if it were, it would per-
haps not do the work for which it was designed.

This may seem unreasonable, but the basis
for the statement is grounded on the experi-
ence, not only of gospel workers but of musi-
cians.

No song or piece of music which has had the
human quality of touching hearts was ever per-
fect, from the musician's standpoint. For
perfection in any art means that those who
appreciate the finished product must be able
to understand the finer technical beauties,
rather than the more simple soul qualities.
Therefore, those songs which have stirred hu-

204

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 205

man hearts and souls the most have always
been the simpler melodies, which a child can
learn and feel.

So, in judging a song which does not hap-
pen to meet your personal standard of require-
ments, please remember that there are other
folks with other standards; and that, while you
may be drawn to a song because of its perfect
technical construction and dignity, the great
mass of us are not highly educated, musically,
and must be appealed to from angles which we
can understand.

The songs, which we have used in our cam-
paigns, have had their amazing popularity be-
cause those who wrote them were consecrated
men and women, and experienced in sounding
the depths of souls ; and in those depths, every
man is equal, as he stands before God. The
most intellectual mind is no more able to ap-
proach Him than the veriest publican, who can
reach out only with those intense human feel-
ings, which are common to all of us.

This, too, is the real reason why intellectual
people are no more Godly than those with less
opportunities of education. It is the practical
everyday thing of life with which we are mostly
concerned, wise and unlearned, and so the won-
derfully practical, helpful messages in many

206 "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

of our gospel songs reach right down to the
needs of everybody.

Unless you have studied the psychology of
this appeal as we have done through years of
work, you will not understand this fact readily.

A beautiful story is concerned with the song
"If Your Heart Keeps Right," and illustrates
this point excellently.

For a long time that song wTas one of the
most popular we had. It would spread like
wildfire through a community. Two elements
made its success, the two elements which have
always made a song popular and helpful, an
easy, pleasing melody, and a message which
strikes right down to the roots of human hearts.

In Pittsburg, for instance, the song seemed
fairly to permeate the life of the city. Boys
whistled it on the streets, women sang it at
their housework and staid business men
hummed it in their offices. In the great steel
plants, vaguely, in the midst of the roar of
machinery, you could hear men singing, "If
Your Heart Keeps Right." The degree and
extent to which the song permeated all the dif-
ferent stratas of life were really surprising,
even to us, who had grown accustomed to its
power.

The particular story I have in mind was

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 207

told to me when I was invited to the Shadyside
Presbyterian church, one of the wealthiest and
most fashionable of that city of many wonder-
ful churches. The audience was made up of
the aristocracy of the city, but they seemed in-
tensely interested in hearing me tell some of
the stories of our songs and their results.

I spoke, too, about the relationship of the
songs to our campaign, in general, and of the
great work for God which had been accom-
plished by them. When I had finished, a very
fine looking, sweet faced woman, in a gown,
whose quiet elegance told of her good taste and
position, approached me, and said, "I have a
confession to make.

"When the Sunday campaign first started
and I heard your song, "If Your Heart Keeps
Right," I was really disgusted. It seemed to
me that it was silly, cheap twaddle. I know
that those are extreme words, but I told you
that it was a confession I had to make and that
is it. So I will not hide the fact that I disliked
some of your songs, and that this song, in par-
ticular, offended what I chose to call my fas-
tidious musical taste. It really grated on my
nerves, and besides, I considered that it was not
at all in keeping with the dignity of a religious
campaign.

208 "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

"But, you see, I did not understand. I was
viewing that song from a narrow biased stand-
point.

"You know that I have always been inter-
ested in the deserving poor — so that sometimes
employers with whom I am acquainted ask me
to see to some special cases for them. It hap-
pened that the head of a great steel corpora-
tion asked me to call on the wife of a man who
had been hurt in the mill, and investigate the
real facts.

"The street to which I was directed was
quite unfamiliar to me, and, as a part of my
confession, I must add that I was frightened
when I saw the rough district through which
the street car was taking me.

"The point for which I was bound seemed
the worst of all, and I found that I would have
to go over a hill to reach the address I was
looking for. There were some rough looking
men hanging about, and I was growing more
and more nervous.

"I could not find the number of Bill Jones'
house — the man who was hurt. There was no
one, apparently, to aid me except the men, that
I felt were surveying me with glowering looks.

"I screwed up my courage, at last, turned
back, and with my heart beating rapidly, I

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 209

went up to one of them, and asked if he knew
where Bill Jones lived.

"I was never so surprised in my life. The
man at once removed his cap, and smiled. He
said that he knew the house, and would walk
there with me. The rest of the men also smiled
at me, and I was suddenly ashamed of my
fears of them. We walked along as pleas-
antly as though we were old friends, and fin-
ally he asked me:

" 'Lady, have you been down to the Tab-
ernacle yet?'

"I was surprised. Someway or other, you
know, in looking over the vast crowd which
filled the Tabernacle, it had not occurred to me
to think that men like these had been there.

"I was still more surprised when my new
friend said:

" 'Well, that place has made a great change
in some of us fellows over here.'

"I asked him to tell me about it, and after
speaking of various cases he said that he sup-
posed I would be most interested in hearing
about Bill Jones, so he went on:

" 'Well, Bill was always a good fellow.
Meant well, you know, but the trouble was, he
couldn't keep away from the drink. He had
a nice little wife and a baby, and every once in

210 "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

so often he would promise that now he was go-
ing to stop, for good, but the first thing we
knew, he would be at work, swearing at every-
one, with whiskey on his breath.

" 'Then, one night, he went down to the Tab-
ernacle. I guess his wife got him to go.
Anyway, before long a lot of us had taken our
stand for Christ, and along with us, Bill. He
was a changed man. Before he was hurt and
taken away to the hospital, you could hear
him, most any time, hurnmin' some of the songs
they sing down there. "If Your Heart Keeps
Right," was his favorite, and I guess it is the
favorite of most of us.'

"Right there was where I felt as if I ought
to beg his pardon for the thoughts I had held
about that song.

"But just then we came to the plain little
cottage where he said Bill lived, so we shook
hands, with hearty good will and parted.

"I had to climb down some very rickety
steps, for the poor place was below the level
of the street, and as I did so I heard some one
singing. 'Every cloud will wear a rainbow if
your heart keeps right.' I walked quietly to
the door and looked into a very neat, clean
room, but oh, so poorly furnished. There was
a woman in it, sitting in the only rocking chair,

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 211

and on her lap there lay a very frail, wan
baby.

"She had one of the Tabernacle song books
open. I recognized it at once, and I think I
was not surprised when her clear, true voice
kept on with the words of the very song which
I had so disliked. But now it brought tears
to my eyes. For she was very pale and worn
and shabby — a weak little woman, with big
tender eyes, and she looked off into a distant
corner of the room, as if she had her attention
fixed on a pleasant vision, while she sang:

"If Your Heart Keeps Right
If your heart keeps right
There's a song of gladness
In the darkest night.
If Your Heart Keeps Right
If your heart keeps right
Every cloud will wear a rainbow
If your heart keeps right."

"She saw me before she was quite through
with the verse, but she kept on as she smiled
and held out her hand.

"Although she was so poor, there was a quiet
self-possession about her which comes from
self-respecting womanhood. I told her that
her husband's employer had sent me to see if
there was anything she needed. She said that

212 "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

her great worry was not having enough money
— at least, money that she could spare — to go
over to the hospital to see her husband. She
wanted to visit him very much.

"I told her I thought that could be arranged.
And then I asked her if she liked the song she
had been singing. You should have seen her
face light up.

"Oh, yes, indeed, she loved it! She had
found such a lot of comfort out of the Taber-
nacle songs, especially this one.

"I saw that she was interested in music, and
soon she was telling me the whole story of Bill
and herself.

" 'Back in England,' she said, 'my father
was the leader of the choir in our little church,
and I played the organ. You know the sort
of life, ma'am — quiet like, and pleasant, but
with no chance to get ahead. So, when Bill
and I married, we came over here with others
to seek our fortune in the new land.

" 'Things went like a bit of all right for a
while, but then Bill got in with bad company
and started to drink. At first it wasn't so bad,
Then he lost the best job he had ever had.

" 'That discouraged him, and he took to
drinking harder than ever. Even the baby
didn't keep him from it. We had to sell off

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 213

most of the good furniture we had been able
to buy. Then we had to move from one place
to another until we came down to this place.
I'm afraid it's unhealthy, but it is all we can
afford. Things were going from bad to worse,
ma'am, and I didn't know what to do.

" 'Then some of the boys went down to the
Tabernacle. I think most of them went on a
lark, as you might say, but they came back
pretty serious, and their wives told me what a
change had come to them.

" 'So I finally persuaded Bill to go, too.
The third time he was converted! You can't
think what that was to me, ma'am !

" 'He stopped his drinking right away, and
the next payday after that he brought his en-
velope home to me, unopened. And kept on
doing that, too.

u 'I bought that nice, new rug you see there,
and we had started to fix up the house a little,
when Bill was hurt the other day and taken
to the hospital. But I don't think he will be
kept there long, do you?'

"Then I asked her some casual questions,
and she began to talk about the different songs,
in the course of which she told me something
which I think is the most affecting and touch-
ing tribute to the songs that I have ever heard.

3U "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

That song book was the only one in the whole
neighborhood. They were all very poor, in
the district. So the neighbor who had been
able to buy the solitary songbook loaned it out
first to one family and then another, so that
all might learn to sing the songs. This was
Mrs. Jones' 'day' for the book.

"She gave me a wonderful smile as she said
at the end that, although things looked blue
and discouraging, she believed in the promise
of the rainbow over the clouds 'if your heart
keeps right.'

"Her face was pale, and her little baby was
pale, and her house was poor, and all sorts of
difficulties lay before her and her husband, be-
fore they could overcome the troubles brought
on them by sin, but I knew that that rainbow
of God's love had begun to shine there."

All through the simple, affecting telling of
that story you could see tears and smiles sweep-
ing across the faces of the splendid women, who
listened with such strained attention. There
was a little pause as the speaker stopped to re-
gain her composure, and then she turned to
me, and said:

"I want to apologize for what I thought and
said about that song. I think, now, that it is
one of the most beautiful I know. Any song

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 215

which can bring joy and happiness to a whole
neighborhood as that has done, merits the con-
sideration, and the help of those who may not
need it in the same way."

Of course, we sang the chorus of "If Your
Heart Keeps Right." Then we closed the
meeting, and those wealthy women flocked
around her who had told the story. As they
did so I saw that most of them had money con-
cealed in their fingers, which they slipped to
her as secretly as they could.

So I was sure that material prosperity would
be added to that other and greater happiness
which the little woman in the cottage had
found.

People struggle and flounder against what
seems impossible difficulties, not recognizing
that sinfulness, in one of its many forms, is
the cause of their troubles. I do not mean to
say that conversion is a guarantee of prosper-
ity. But I do mean that often godliness
makes people take the right road, to which
sin has blinded them.

One of the most interesting stories about
this song concerns a newsboy in New York.

He was drawn to the vicinity of the Tab-
ernacle by the idea that he could sell to the

£16 "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

crowds the evening papers. He heard the
singing, and went in.

He had never been in church in his life, so
that the gospel of Christ fell upon virgin
ground and at once, and amazingly, took root.

He shook Mr. Sunday's hand, and, in his
own quaint phraseology, which I despair of
reproducing, he told the worker who took his
name that "dose guys" were all right, referring
to the members of the party. As for the songs,
he thought they were "grand."

After that we would see him, occasionally,
and one day a policeman who had been con-
verted the night before told a worker that the
newsboy's persistent singing of "If Your
Heart Keeps Right" had drawn him to come,
himself, and see what the meetings were like.

"The boy has his stand near a corner which
I frequently pass," the officer said, "and I be-
gan to notice a difference in him. He used to
get into fights with the other boys, for he's
Irish and quick tempered, but I saw that when
he felt like a scrimmage he would begin to
whistle instead and it would always be the tune,
'If Your Heart Keeps Right.' So we got to
talking, and he told me that he had been con-
verted, and asked me if I wouldn't come up to
the Tabernacle when I could. So I did, thank

"IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT" 217

God, and now I'm going on my way rejoic-
mg.

A very intimate sort of a story was told to
one of our workers, once. The speaker was
an unusually intelligent, fine looking girl, with
just a hint of sadness in her eyes.

"I began coming to the Tabernacle when
you folks first came to this city. Then, one
evening, you sang, 'My Wonderful Dream.'
I can't tell you how it affected me, but you
must know, how people often feel about these
songs. They simply seem to mean YOU.
Then Mr. Sunday said, in his talk, that many
so-called Christians came to church, appar-
ently only to keep the bench warm, and that
seemed to be ME, too.

"I thought with shame of my own sleepy
Christian life, and determined that I would
keep busy for God. I have done what I could.
At the present time I am working hard with a
Bible class in my neighborhood.

"But I have had a personal sorrow to bear.
The young man to whom I was engaged made
fun of my intense feeling, and when I told
him that I was firmly decided in my intention
of giving my life to God, he said he did not
care to marry a Christian girl. He told me he
wanted something different.

£18 "IF YOUR HEART KEEPS RIGHT"

"If ever I needed the Lord it was at that
time, and I found Him a friend in need. He
has proved a true friend to me ever since.
Even some of my girl friends do not ask me to
their homes any more, as they say I spoil their
fun.

"So, although I know I am doing right, I
so often feel lonely and blue. One night, in
particular, it didn't seem that I could stand it,
and I came to the Tabernacle. That evening
they sang 'If Your Heart Keeps Right.' You
can't imagine what a difference it meant to me !
It seemed to sweep away all my doubt and
struggle instantly."

As she left, there seemed, indeed, the light
of the heavenly "rainbow" on her glowing face.

THE END

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Song stories of the sawdust trail"

See other formats