I saw some venerable brethren on the
platform, bishops among them, wince when Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst,
rending some eminently respectable platitudes to shreds and
tatters, cried out for personal service, loving touch, as the key
to it all:--
"What if, when the poor leper came to the Lord to be healed, he had
said to Peter, or some other understrapper, 'Here, Peter, you go
touch that fellow and I'll pay you for it'? Or what if the Lord,
when he came on earth, had come a day at a time and brought his
lunch with him, and had gone home to heaven overnight? Would the
world ever have come to call him brother? We have got to give, not
our old clothes, not our prayers. Those are cheap. You can kneel
down on a carpet and pray where it is warm and comfortable. Not
our soup--that is sometimes very cheap. Not our money--a stingy
man will give money when he refuses to give himself. Just so soon
as a man feels that you sit down alongside of him in loving sympathy
with him, notwithstanding his poor, notwithstanding his sick and
his debased, estate, just so soon you begin to worm your way into
the very warmest spot in his life.
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