Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 70, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1918 — TO WRONG THOUGHT [ARTICLE]

TO WRONG THOUGHT

Is Due Responsibility for Human Sorrow and Suffering. Story of Young Man Hidden Under Smoking Ledge Points a Moral for All of Us, Especially In These Troubled Times. Have you read the story? A trapper amid the snow-hushed hills of western Massachusetts spied smoke issuing from a ledge of rocks in the depths of a dense forest He did not know what to make of It All sorts of fearsome notions beset him as he ventured on attempts to solve the mystery. But when he had summoned help and they went in at the opening detected, bearing lanterns and all bands armed to meet whatever might be encountered, they discovered a lone man bending over a small fire in the act of roasting a bit of meat. And they learned from him that he was living there to escape the service men are summoned to render in war time! The mystery >f the smoking ledge would serve somebody well to po'nt a moral or adorn a tale. For most of life’s experiences that puzzle and trouble us mortals are much like this of the smoking ledge. We conjure np no end of dire thoughts about them — about diseases, disasters and especially such distresses as are now come on the world, when the whole of civilized life is like a smoking ledge. We think* of nature as malign, of fateful evil powers as lying in ambush against us, even of God himself as causing things which confound us as we go the rounds of common life. But by and by we discover, in one instance after another, that precisely what alarm and puzzle and trouble us are really due to some human aberration from right doing. We are wrong in thinking that fate or nature or God are responsible for the mysteries of suffering and sorrow. The truth is that some human being who has gone wrong is down under most of tho smoking ledges that mystify us. To get this clear In one’s mind is of the greatest importance, especially in times like theses This young man hid under the smoking ledge told a story vividly significant He was there to escape the duty of all when all that we cherish Is imperiled. He confessed that he had Crept out at night to buy food In a town miles away—he couldn’t subsist without drawing on the common provisions for welfare which are now In jeopardy. He acknowledged having been obliged by Illness in his cave to go and secretly spend a week In a hotel’s comfbrt—he would have died like a wild animal but for such shelter In the established order he was refusing to help maintain. He had even tramped far through the snow on a winter night to peer through a window at his sister’s family, happy around their home’s bright fireplace—his man’s heart, craven as It was, longed for a glimpse of those sanctities which sound-headed men are now going forth to safeguard. Food, shelter, the realm of love! These are the primary human imperatives, as even the man under the smoking ledge bears witness. And these, with many other blessings, are now put in peril by ruthless foes, overseas and here at home as truly. Could anything show the folly and wrong of failing to defend them more strikingly than the’ story of this man under the smoking ledge?—Boston Herald.