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Is the oldest and most popular scientific ard THOUGHTS THAT HAVE HELPED ceased to regard them as thoughts, but ME. A SERMON, BY REV. A. B. CURTIS, BIG RAPIDS, MICH. We hear a great deal said in these days about "books that have helped me," books that have come to us and spoken to us as a brother would do, books that have revealed to us powers and possibilities in our own souls that we had never dreamed of. These are not always the books that our literature critics judge to be greatest, but they are books that our hearts pronounce good. We love them, we read them again and again; and they help us. We hear much said too about "friends that have helped me," friends that have clung to us through good report and evil report, friends that have stood by us in the time of our need and have not forsaken us when the dark hours of sorrow or failure beset us. We love such friends and they help us; indeed they help us most because we love them. But there is another subject akin to these, which, once suggested, immediately throws us into a channel of delightful and searching recollection. It sets our thoughts gladly but reverently hunting among the intellectual birththroes of the past for forgotten gems. This subject is the one now before us, "Thoughts that have Helped Me." As soon as it is suggested, each one of us can fill it with meaning from his own past experience. How the thoughts come crowding upon us as we stop to recall them; thoughts that have been our constant companions from our early youth, thoughts that have been the mainstays of our later life, thoughts that have become so imbedded in our very life's activities that we had almost have come to speak of them as duties, or loves, or even prayers, perhaps; and yet we see at a glance, as we recall them, that they are, at bottom, thoughts that have helped us. There are marked passages in our favorite edition of Longfellow, or Emerson, or Dickens, that we had entirely forgotten, have no recollection of ever having read; and yet as we search deep down into our lives we find them there transformed into a part of our very selves, they having be come the fixed principles of our lives, the everyday work-tools of character. And as we meditate, we trace them right back to the forgotten marked passage, back to the thought that had helped us. What boon companions some of these thoughts have been to us! How they have shaped our lives into a beauty and lovableness we had never dreamed of! What hordes of grimy, bitter thoughts they have driven away and scattered, as the autumn wind scatters the chaff ! They have wrinkled our foreheads, too, sometimes, as we have struggled with the most stubborn of them; and yet, for every wrinkle, they have added, as a reward, a new curve to the smile, a brighter twinkle to the eye, and a mellower sweetness to the voice. By what long and painful wrestlings with evil and superstition they have sometimes had to be won! Struggles that so often leave us weak and famished as was Hiawatha after his struggle with Mondamin, or lame for the remainder of life like Jacob after his wrestling with the angel. But when the struggle is all over, even while the pains of hunger and exhaustion are still upon us, we feel that the thoughts have helped us. As an angel of mercy they come to anoint our wounds with the oil of gladness; they come as an elixir of life to infuse new hope and life and ambition. There are many thoughts which are in themselves both natural and commonplace that help us beyond description. The thought of a career of strict integrity in the mind of a business man, the thought of a son's love in the mother's heart as she goes about her daily drudgery, the thought of requited love in the heart of youth,-all these are thoughts of everyday occurrence that bridge the minor chasms of life. And these humble thoughts easily rise to greater thoughts whereby life's greater needs and more dire calamities are met. The thought of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man originated right here in this natural affection that was found helpful. In some hallowed Hebrew home these thoughts were born with the boys and girls that began to cluster around the fireside. And these thoughts have kept the faith of many firm and strong when they have felt compelled to give up all else in the old church symbols. Powerfully helpful thoughts, these of spiritual fatherhood and brotherhood are! It is of thoughts that have helped me that I had intended to speak; and to render them intelligible I will give a bit of experience. It relates to the sad dest, dreariest, most dismal period of my life, and I cannot recall it without feelings of sadness nigh unto tears. One night during the last term of the last year of my college course, I awoke suddenly from a profound slumber in a very unearthly state of mind. I had dreamed that I was dead. At the moment of waking, pleasure and pain battled for the possession of consciousness. A thrill of pleasure came at the thought that it was only a dream, and by a strange illusion so common to the semiconscious condition immediately following slumber, I felt angry with myself for awaking and coming back to life again now that I had gone to the trouble of dying. For some moments I continued to feel sorry it was only a dream. It is not a sufficient explanation of this dream to say that to all This men a weariness and dissatisfaction with life is sure to come at some time. It is not sufficient to lay it to sentimental hopes blasted by a chill, relentless breeze, or to the dreams of youth now first seen to be impossible, veritable dreams thin as mountain air. was my period of lamentation over the decay of a religious faith, narrowly orthodox and doubly rooted and grounded in views of God and man. Suddenly, amidst brightest prospects, the slender cord snapped, rent in twain at top and bottom; the man-end and the God-end went to pieces at the same moment. And now, lo, a friend with a cold shoulder, a God with averted face, and a dream hideous, hellish, and haunting! I need not go into the details of the calamity, indeed I ask pardon for touching at all upon a personal matter; suffice it to say I did not now believe in much of anything that I once did. I felt reckless and careless. The home with its associations, with its love that I knew was mine, alone kept me from I know not what course of vagrancy or crime. I refer to all this only for the purpose of calling attention to the thoughts that helped me out of the terrible condition of mind into which I had fallen. One of the first to come to the rescue was the thought of the solidarity of the race. Happiness and heaven's rewards are not the highest motives of life. There is something better for man than selfish happiness. We are our brothers' keepers, and he that seeks to find his life shall surely lose it. Joys and sorrows are social. He only truly lives who draws close to the heart of humanity. As Paul has so wisely suggested, we can only bear our own burdens when we bear the burdens of others as members of the state, the city, and the home; when mine and thine slip out of our thought and we live in the larger life of our friends and fellows. Another thought that helped me was the thought that somehow law, however stern and heartless and inexorable it seemed, must be rooted and grounded in love. Much of it seems loveless, selfdestructive and without any consistent |