People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1896 — USE OE GOOD CHEER. [ARTICLE]

USE OE GOOD CHEER.

MYRON W. REED DRAWS A WHOLESOME LESSON. Power of Hope In Homan Life—Cheerfml View of the Future Hu n Good Effect for the Present —Cheerfulness a Characteristic of Colorado People. Dexter, the land locater, once a familiar feature on the streets of Denver, furnished Rev. Myron W. Reed with ■abject matter for his latest discourse. The hopefulness of the land locater, the millions of residents he saw in his mind that would some day occupy the great western desert of the 60’s and his unfailing good humor, led to the topic, “Good Cheer.” Taking his text from the twenty-fourth verse of the eighth chapter of Romans: “Now we are saved by hope,” Rev. Mr. Reed said: “Four years ago a familiar figure vanished from our streets. His name was J. C. Dexter. I will not forget a day in his company driving out east on the plains to look at a square mile es railroad land. He did most of the. talking. He had plenty of imagination. He saw all I saw —the gray, empty, arid plain, but it was not gray, empty and arid to him. In his mind he saw iVsettied with people, roads made, farms cultivated, school houses 'built. He saw the children on the way. He saw the plain green with grass and grain. He had a sanguine faith that if a man would do his part, plough and plant, the Lord would have mercy on him and send rain. I was cynical that day and full of objections, but he answered them offhand. He was too sanguine, but he was happier in his hope than I was in my doubt. He was of the material which settled America. What we may think of the visions of hopeful people, they are the kind of people one likes to be with. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, “Weep and you weep alone. “Sickness hides, goes into a quiet place and turns its face to the wall., “The old dog pet of the house finds some lonesome place to die. Dying seems to him to be a desertion and he prill not be caught at it. It is the almost universal instinct. The only dead birds we find are those that have perished by violence. The others lie curled up somewhere, but hope seeks company and company seeks hope. The popular men in Libby prison were the men who were planning some ditch of deliverance. Mulberry Sellers Attractive. “The Mulberry Sellers kind of men are attractive. Age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite variety of resources. The survivor of a lost cause who is still hopeful and not lost with the cause, is pFeasant to see. There are people who have use for sunshine and for rain, and for what happens. Mr. Riley’s farmer says:

“It haint no use so grumble and complain, It’s just as cheap and easy to rejice; When God sorts out the weather and sends rain, Why, rain’s my chice.

“Hope has some solid foundation in experience. The figures of last year have sent the miner and the farmer into this year with some confidence. David, in the twenty-third psalm argues from God’s goodness to himself in the past. ‘Surely,’ he says, ‘goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.’ A strong, wise, good Father will not be apt to change His character. If we keep on trusting He will keep on giving, so the children argue. Not one of us has had so rocky a road to tread as King David, and yet he said an hundred times God is good, and He will be good. He shouldered his own mistakes and sins. He had made his road hard himself. He thanked God as we do, that we do not realize past paip and grief. Time and occupation will cure almost anything. Pool people have a certain advantage over the rich; they cannot afford the luxury of a long woe. After the funeral they must go to work. “There is a mercy of God in the gift of memory and in the gift of forgetting. Memory has large holes in it, the disagreeable and the painful slip through. There is a river that I have visited five summers. It is associated with friends living and dead. It is history that I have suffered on that river; toiled and sweat and fought flies on that river until I could almost wish I was dead. I never left it without a resolution never to see it again, but now it requires an effort to call up the discomfort. The agreeable side of tnat river comes up without calling. I was thinking last night that I would visit that white water again. If we could realize the awful crush of the roots giving away who would ever have another tooth pulled? We forget an old dyspepsia and dip gaily into midnight chicken salad. Temperament and Hope. “Temperament has to do with hope. I have seen an eagle in a snow Btorm sitting on a tree top, with his head down, covered with snow and filled with woe. But the chicadees seemed to like it The mirth of Mother Carey’b chickens is a sign of a storm; they ere silent

and in hiding in a calm. “But cheerfullness 1b an* achievement Cheerfulness for the last three years in Colorado is an exploit. 1 have not made any continuous success of it myself. But on Sundays I have made an effort. ‘Be of good cheer,’ says Jesus Christ; it is -a commandment. There is, on the whole. ntft enough in any man’s past to make him mirthful. “I dislike to think of Wordsworth reading his old poetry to visitors, and of Sumner editing several volumes of his own speeches. The materials for cheerfulness must be drawn from the future. I have seen a $200,000 horse, Palo Alto, bnt he did not quite suit me. We think' we remember perfect things, but we are mistaken. Happy childhood will not bear examination. Mother’s cooking is a good deal of a dream. The doughnut of the middle states, the nut cake of Vermont is not the thing for a growing child. Old homes will find everything shrunk; you will come back to Colorado sooner than you expected.

K{fact of Imagination. “A former pastor is more in the imagination that in fact. Ido not believe that Henry Ward Beecher could fill his old pulpit. The imagination has played around him, magnified him. Ruskin says that two children, side by side, read out of the same book, the same page, but in a few days one hal gone on in the book and is chapters ahead. They never are reading the same page together again. Sail ships are together in port, but not long together on the. sea. School mates, chums, drift wider apart than ships. Friends must be careful. The likeminded are the only people who keep together. ‘How can two walk together except they be agreed?’ Some old prophet says that. I believe there are forty-four literary clubs of women in Colorado. Perhaps there are four of similar men’s clubs. ‘This,’ as a friend of mine remarks, ’is going to work inharmony.’ “Men must prepare themselves for conversation outside of mines and corner lots. The festival to come in September of music and literature, pionlered by the Welsh people of Colorado, insists that the men of this state call their minds off, now and then, from earth and things made of earth. ‘Whatsoever things are true,’ says Paul, ‘Whatsoever things are lovely, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think of these things.’ Mines and corner lots, and eastern capital, and the Monroe doctrine and Dr. Jamieson’s raid and political conventions are important, but they are not lovely. We men must know the difference between ‘Mill on Liberty’ and ‘The Mill on the Floss.’ I do not desire to hear any more about ‘the red flag of socialism.’ There is only one woman in Colorado that falls into that hole. Enough men have fallen Into it co seem to fill it. But ignorance Is wider than a church door and deeper than a well. '

The Radcliff Hanclng. “The sources of hope are mostly in front. Colnmbus discovered America; he discovered an outlying, outcroo-

ping edge of it. The '49ers and the 's»ers discovered more of it, much remaining to be discovered. We must discover an America where people can live together without Winchesters; where man will not peddle cowardly and ignorant and criminal gossip, and where an old man and an old soldier will not take it into his head that he must kill the peddler of such gossip, and then calmly and without regret be hanged for it. Abraham and Lot discovered an empty earth, where one could go to the west and one to the east and so avoid a quarrel. Now we are to discover an America where all sorts and conditions can live together and work together, each for all, and avoid a quarrel that way. “We have a large number of people who are in Colorado, not for silver or gold, but for health. No infirmity of the lungs has any power on hope. That kind of an individual has compensation. He is, as I meet him, a cheerful being. He has, like Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘an absolute confidence in the utimate decency of things.’ “Some years ago I was one of the judges selected to pronounce on the relative merit of some three hundred Colorado poems. Many of them were written by invalids, by people under the weather, by people in debt, by people all broken up. was not a doleful poem in the lot; not A poem of grief. Nearly all of them touched upon or dwelt in the mineral. ‘For the strength of the hills we bless thee, 0 God.’ David had said that before them.

Culorndo Has Hope. “It braces one to see the hope of our people. Silver may be in temporary disgrace beyond the river and over the ocean. I used to declaim a speech which had in it, ‘I go, but I return.’ Meantime there seems to be hope left in Colorado, and muscle and courage aud gold. Cripple Creek is not looking backward to Cherry creek and moaning about ’59. Leadville joins with St. Paul and Montreal in making fun of winter. In the ice palace Leadville binds the captive in strands made out 6! its own hair. I have forgotten what the sex of winter is. It is safe to call winter ‘it.’ Colorado is in the future, and we throw our thoughts ahead, and ‘as a man thinketh so is he.’ “General Wolfe, an invalid, lived in bed the most of one winter on the necessity that he must one night get up and dress and proceed to take Quebec. Ht said to his surgeon: ‘You can’t cure me, but fix me up for a forlorn hope.’ He must die, but he saw with dying eyes victory. That ,1s enough. The soldier said: ‘I am content.’ “We are commanded not to take anxious thoughts about tomorrow by the only One who surely knows what tomorrow will be. We do not know, as a rule we people tomorrow with apprehensions, with fears. Now, fear is a sickening, deadly thing; it invites, opens the door and asks to dinner the guest we dread. "As we know nothing about tomorrow, have our choice, why not people It with the best we can Imagine, and go to sleep serene. Draw on GOtl yon

cnilaren ot distrust. He is willing and able.

Th« Prodigal Son. "I think often of Jesus Christ’s story of the Prodigal Son. Hls limit, as he came back sick and sorry, was to be taken in as a hired servant. In less than a minute his father kissed him; in less than an hour he had new 'clothes on him, shoes on his feet and a ring on his finger, and music in his ears. It was all so much more than he imagined. ‘To die,’ said St. Paul, ‘is gain.’ I think he understood It. “We must find most of the sources of hope in the future, what it conceals for us. ‘Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man.’ It is more. “General Greeley spent Christmas day In reminiscence of the Christmas days In Arctic ice. When the first came around his crew had plenty and they celebrated the, day with a banquet and stories and songs. A year from that time Christmas day found them on half rations, but they celebrated in half-tone fashion. It was like a photograph taken from a photograph. Darkness and frost and short rations were beginning to tell on hope. No news from home was a powerful negative. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. The third Christmas the general describes vividly. The men out of their starvation allowance had begun two months before to save for the celebration. Each man put Into store an- ounce or so of his portion every week. Their shelter at the time was a stone wall three and a half feet high, a whale boat raised up, and upside down, was in the center for roof, and an old sail over all. A sbeet-iron stove with one length of pipe was the cooking range.

An Arctic Christman. “When the day came two men volunteered as cooks. The others crawled into their reindeer bags and tied the hoods tight to keep out the smoke. The cooking was heroic business, and the two men who did it were blind for days. But dinner was accomplished, mostly of soup. And then they tried to be jolly, tried to sing. It was the Lcrd’s song In a strange land. They tiled to tell stories and jolly one another, but before 8 o’clock they had all crawled Into their bags and were silent. “It was endurable to work up to Christmas, to prepare for It, but what next? But yet, like the little point of light that you see before the cathedral altar night and day, hope did not go quite out. It burned on, a little point of light and fire in a cold, black earth. What did these living skeletons, buried in deer skins and darkness, found hope on? Well, this: We are United States men, sent here by our country. There are 60,000,000 people at home thinking about us. There are strong, swift ships searching for us. All that money and skill and courage and love of a nation can do is being done. It was a hope well founded. ‘The Bear,’ made of oak and Iron, flying the ‘starspangled’ and piloted by a captain, himself piloted by Almighty God. one

aay iouna tnem. Tneir hope was founded on the nation whose sailors they were. “I like these stories of the Arctic and of the Nile. When It Is cold weather I read the stories of Bruce and Ledyard and Livingßtone breaking through the hot Jungle to find the fountain of the Nile. And when fervid July comes I take up the sttejr of Greely and Hayeß and Franklin and Dr. Kane.

Children of the Father. “I remember that when the ship Advance was frozen In, Dr. Kane and his men made two sledges. And when all ready to abandon the ship they baptized the sledge. In the name of God they named the two sledges. One ‘Faith’ and the other ‘Hope,’ and by these two they were saved. “These stories will do well enough for us. We are sailors ourselves. Our hope is a Power that sent us here. We are children of Almighty God. He knows where the ship Is frozen in Our eternity is his opportunity. Wo are never so well watched as when we must sleep. He, watching over Israel, neither slumbers nor sleeps. He seen Livingstone fallen on the trail lnlo Africa. He is with General Gordon In the Soudan, forsaken of men. His angels fly swift and fly straight. The only thing important is to be on a good errand.

“I know not where His Islands lift Their fronded palms In air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.”