Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1875 — Finding Fault With the World. [ARTICLE]

Finding Fault With the World.

There is a class of people in the world who make it ofe chief business of their lives to depreciate existence and its blessings, who speak of this world as a “ vale of tears,” an “abode of sin and sorrow,”a “ daily cross,” a “ realm of blasted hopes,” and so on through the entire category of such expressions. Life, they tell us, is not worth living; they wish they had never been born or had died in infancy, and we cannot help indulging tlie thought that if they had nobody would have been the loser by it. Everything looks to them sad and lugubrious. Their spectacles are smoked glass, and their jaundiced eyes see everything bright through this dusky medium. Every misfortune which comes, every streak of ill-luck which befalls them, is a direct “ judgment” from the Almighty; as though they believed that the God of love and power spent the whole time in studying out refinement of cruelty wherewith to afflict His children whom He professes to love. If a man eats too much at dinner, drinks too much and smokes too many cigars and dies of apoplexy at forty, when he ought by the laws of nature to have lived to eighty, God is arraigned; and tlie man’s friends and the clergyman who preaches his funeral sermon call his death a “mysterious dispensation of Providence.” If a mother dresses her tender little child so as to show in bare neck and arms, and its plump legs—beautiful, we admit — but none the less sensitive to cold on that account, if she fills the child’s stomach with bon bom , and its head with knowledge intended only for riper years, and the child dies, as of course it will, then everybody sympathizes with her, and urges her to be resigned to the will of Providence. And the afflicted mother w T eeps, and wonders what she has ever done to deserve such an afflicting stroke. Men who are brought up to know right from wrong cheat, and lie, and swindle, and speculate, and build up fortunes, and invest them in fancy stocks which rise into existence like soap-bubbles, and by and by the bubble bursts, the fine things are swept away, and these men will have the assurance to say that God has dealt harshly with them, and that the punishment is more than they can bear. “ The gods help those who help themselves.” As true a line as was ever penned, and in nine cases out of ten our world is just what we make it. If we resolve to see only the dark side, we shall of course see no sunshine. If we choose to live in a cellar, the sun will not be likely to come down out of the heavens and seek us out in our obscurity. If we meet trouble half way it will accept the tacit invitation, and be ever present with us. “ A merry heart doeth good,” and the greatest things which can be showered upon a lamily are good-nature and cheerfulness. —“ Kate Thorn," in 'N. T. Weekly.

Rhode Island has'a rifle association, of which Gen. Burnside is President. Unless they can obtain permission to put up a target in a neighboring State the shooting wifi have to be at a very short range. • m - The total expenses for running the New Haven public schools last year were $157,655. There are 211 teachers (twenty-five men) and 11,465 pupils in the schools, and the average attendance was 7,595.