Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1890 — TRUE WORTH. [ARTICLE]

TRUE WORTH.

Not What One Has, But What one is. Rev. Parkhust la Harper’s Young People. Now certainly one object that God had in sending His Son away from home, putting Him down here on the earth for a few years, letting Him fare exactly as other boys and girls had to fare, giving Him no "push,” but making Him take His chances, was to show us that it is the boy and girl that God thinks of. and not the fineness of the. clothes they wear, the amount of money they have to spend, or the sumptuousness of the house in which they live. It is not that God objects to fine houses; we can see from the wonderful beautiful of this world which God has made how much He thinks of beautiful things; but by giving His Son Jesus only plain clothes to wear, and only an ordinary house to occupy, and a cheap shed to be born ing, He shows us that it is always the boy He thinks of first, and not the sumptuous dwelling that the boy has his home in; the baby that He thinks of first, and not the fancy cradle that the baby is rocked in. It was only a few days age that I went through the Babies’ Ward of the Postgraduate Medical Hospital on East Twentieth Street, New York city. The siok children that are gathered there are drawn from some of the poorest and most hopeless homes in town; but all these little ones had been nicely washed, tastily dressed, the wards in which they were gathered as neatly furnished, and the little cribs in which they were lying as cleanly and tidy in their arrangement as any that could be found in our best homes; and the consequence of it all was that the poor little waifs looked exactly as any that you could discover in-the most palatial residences along our main avenues. God would teach us tben by such cases as these, and especially by the case of His own Son, our Lord, born of poor parents in a cheap little house, that the worth of boys or girls is something entirely apart from tne kind of clothes they wear, or the style of the house in which they live; that the worth of a child is what the child is, not what the childs has, that a diamond is still a diamond though its brightness bo hidden or soiled, and that the humble roof and the lowly manger may nevertheless shelter the dearest of God’s little ones—His own Holy Child our Saviour.