Sermon Illustration

Our task is not to condemn, or to judge another’s superficial unloveliness, but to look for underlying beauty. That is what we would have others do to us, and that is what we must do to others.

The natural man cannot discern the things of the spirit. We see this every day, not only as applied to imagination in its highest reaches, but in the ordinary interaction of men.

A boy was walking with his father along a lonely road at night, carrying a lantern. He told his father he was afraid, because the lantern showed such a little way ahead.

In the American Civil War, one of the officers of the Southern armies was taken a prisoner, and kept for quite awhile in a Federal prison. In his memoirs he recounts his prison experiences.

While the Americans were blockading Cuba, several captains endeavored to elude their vigilance by night, trusting that the darkness would conceal them as they passed between the American warships.

Two boys were playing in the snow one day, when one said to the other, “Let us see who can make the straightest path in the snow.” His companion readily accepted the proposition, and they started. One boy fixed his eyes on a tree, and walked along without taking his eyes off the object selected.

Of olden times on the coast of Cornwall there were wreckers. These men tied a lantern on the head of an ass, and drove the animal along the heights that fringe the shore.

In 1850 India was over a month’s journey from America via clipper ship. Now one can fly to India from the U.S. in a day. In the early 1800’s travel from New York to California involved months of riding on horseback through large tracts of unsettled wilderness. Now a man can cross the continent in a jet airliner within hours.

An amusing story is told of Ulysses S. Grant. One day during his Presidency he came into the room where his Cabinet was assembling, quietly laughing to himself. “I have just read,” said he, “one of the best anecdotes I have ever met. It was that John Adams, after he had been President, was one day taking a party out to dinner at his home in Quincy,