The Law of Kindness

It always pays to live up to the law of kindness. One cannot always tell what great results will come in the train of seemingly small deeds that are performed with a desire to be helpful. An engineer of a passenger-train on a Mississippi railroad was driving through a snowstorm, eagerly scanning the track as far as he could see, when, halfway through a deep cut, something appeared lying on the rails. It was a sheep with her two little lambs. His first thought was that he could rush on without any damage to his train; but the sight of the innocent family cowering in the storm touched him, and he pulled the air-brake and sent his fireman ahead. In a few minutes the fireman came back with a terrified face. There had been a landslide, and just beyond the cut the track was covered with rocks. It seemed certain that if the train had gone on at full speed, in the blinding snow, it would have been impossible to stop in time to escape disaster.

In the absolute sense the incident was providential; but circumstantially the passengers on that railway owed their safety, if not their lives, to an engineer who was too tenderhearted to kill a sheep and her lambs. So many men and women who have given their earnest, faithful service to make a safer path for the neighbor’s boy, or bring greater happiness to the neighbor’s girl, have been thus saving their own dear ones. Unselfish devotion to the good of others is the surest way to take care of ourselves, for this is God’s world and not the devil’s.