Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 February 1917 — Conquering Might of Weakness [ARTICLE]

Conquering Might of Weakness

By REV. CHARLES F.

AKED

Famous Minister and Peace Advocate ,i . . j -jr.

Some of the noblest Jives which have been lived on .earth .have-been those of chronic invalids—None of us desire to be sick, and it would be wrong to get into such a mood that we are not anxious to fight disease wherever we find it. Preventable evils ought to be prevented. Yet we know that if the records of the world’s great sufferers should be,.destroyed we should lose some of the brightest pages in all the history of life upon the planet. The entire conception of heroism haa been raised and raised for all time and for all the race by those poor things” who have made the sickbed a mount of transfiguration. Where amongst the young giants of tfie gymnasium and the football field, “feeling their biceps and thanking God there is not a morbid fiber in their bodies,” will you find the lives of blended sweetness and splendor which the annals of sickness show? Weak men and women, the nerves raw with suffering, the days full of pain, the nights heavy with the sleepless hours, men and women in the home, the office, the store, the schoolroom, work righteousness, and find that power is made perfect in weakness. God be praised for the heroic sufferer. The world would be a poor, place without the like of you. Is comfort something soothing, inducing a placid, sweet content, an anodyne for the soul? No, it is fortitude. Pain and weakness are hard to bear. They take from us of life. But the half that remains is greater than the whole.