Part 9 (1/2)

THE WHISPERING GALLERY

If you ever go to London, one of the many buildings which will be pointed out to you will be Saint Paul's Cathedral, which is capped by a wonderful dome. And if you ask the guide, he will show you in that dome a strange room known as the ”Whispering Gallery.” In this gallery your lowest whisper can be heard on the other side of the room, a great distance away. It would be hard to tell secrets in a room like that.

But there is a still more wonderful whispering gallery than that. It is the one which each one of us carries about in his own soul. In that gallery even things we _think_, whether we say them or not, are heard by G.o.d, our Creator. No thought escapes Him. ”In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” If we ”take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth,” even there G.o.d is still.

This would be a very terrible thing to realize if all our thoughts were evil thoughts, unkind and unlovely. For then we should be like the man who, when he was young, ill-treated his old father and mother. When he grew up, this young man became very wealthy, and he used to carry candy in his pocket as he walked in the parks to give to the children, because he wanted their love. But the children would take his candy, then scamper away like frightened squirrels, because something inside seemed to tell them that the man was not really kind at heart. Older people felt the same way about him, and a chill came over them when they were with him. So they avoided him. It would be unbearable to think that only our evil thoughts were open to G.o.d in that way.

But while G.o.d knows all the wickedness in our hearts, and we cannot hide anything from Him, G.o.d also knows the good thoughts that are whispered in the gallery of our soul. And when we wish ever so greatly that we could do something to help somebody, but cannot do it; or when we would like to be good, but are tripped up by some temptation, G.o.d knows then how hard we try, and gives us credit for our effort, even though we fail to do what we wanted to.

Let us remember the Whispering Gallery of the soul, then, and when we think evil thoughts, even though we never tell them to our nearest friend, let us be sure G.o.d knows them. And when we try hard to be good and to do good, but fail, let us also remember that G.o.d sees it, even though none else knows. Our prayer each morning ought to be like the psalmist's: ”Let the words of my mouth, and the _meditations of my heart_ be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

THE HE-SAID GIRL

Sometimes, when I am walking along the street, I catch s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation as I pa.s.s by a group of little girls. And often I hear the phrase ”He said” this, or ”He said” that. There are girls who do not seem to talk about much else but what this boy or that boy has said, and these girls I call ”he-said” girls.

Now, of course it is all right for girls to think about the boys. We could not stop that if we would, and we would not stop it if we could.

The danger comes when a girl thinks of little else. The girl who begins by devoting all her thought to boys is apt to end by being a very unattractive and unpopular sort of woman. Every girl ought to get along well with the girls of her own age as well as with the boys. There is something wrong with the girl who cannot get along with her girl friends. And so I say to you that if you do not want to be thoroughly unhappy as a woman, try to win the friends.h.i.+p of girls as well as boys.

A good plan for the ”he-said” girl is to take her father as her ideal, and hero and lover. Then, as she grows to womanhood, she will not be satisfied with any man who is not in some measure as good as her father.

In the meanwhile beware of being a ”he-said” girl.

ON DECK

When I was a boy I belonged to a baseball team in the village where I lived, and when we played games with a team from another village we had a scorer who not only kept tally of the runs, but also told us who was to be the next at the bat. He would say, ”So-and-so is at the bat, So-and-so is on deck.” And when he told a boy he was ”on deck,” that boy knew he was to be the next one at the bat.

Boys and girls are always on deck, whether they are playing ball or not, for a boy or girl never knows when he is going to be called upon to play some part in the game called Life. And the strange thing about it is, there is no scorer who tells you that you are on deck. So you never get any warning, and you may be on deck and not know it, and so miss your chance.

Samuel, for instance, was a boy who used to close the curtains and put out the candles at night in the temple away back hundreds of years before Christ was born. One evening he had put out the lights and closed the curtains, just the same as he had a hundred times before, and then lay down to sleep. He little thought that this particular day he was on deck, and was to be called into the game by G.o.d. But that night G.o.d called him, and sent him on a very important errand that was to change his whole life and the history of his people.

And things like that are happening in America to-day. I read a story the other day of a young student who was overtaken by a rainstorm, and borrowed an umbrella of a lawyer. He returned it a few days later with a note of thanks. Not long afterward he received a letter from the lawyer offering him a position in his office on account of his good handwriting. The student took the position, kept on with his studies in college, and after he graduated from college went right along in that office till he became a man of influence. He didn't know what it meant when he wrote that note. He was on deck.

The lesson that I want to draw is this: That you must be on the lookout and do well the things that come to you each day, for who knows but you may be on deck that very day, and be called to play some important part?

For only those are called who are on deck; that is, ready to play. The boy or girl who does not do his work well day by day may miss his chance of being called to take some larger place in life when the times comes.

Take this motto from the Old Testament: ”Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

THE TERROR BY NIGHT

In some parts of Canada, where the country is still thinly settled by people, wild animals are quite numerous. In one of these communities there once lived a boy who was in the village late one night. He had been at the village-store, and had heard the men talking about a wildcat that had been seen in that neighbourhood a short time before.