brecho cheapchic

He had been absent on business for some time, and in the meantime the bridge had been washed away, and a new one was being constructed. While the buttresses were in place, he drove up in his gig one very dark night, and gave the reins to his horse, who, he knew, was well accustomed to the road. They crossed safely over what he took to be the bridge, and came to an inn near the river. The landlady asked him, being an old acquaintance, what part of the country he had come in from. "From Newport," he answered. "Then you must have crossed the river?" said the woman in astonishment. "Yes, of course. How else could I have come?" "But how did you manage it, and in the dark too?" "The same as usual; there is no difficulty in driving over the bridge, even tho it be dark." "Bless the man!" said the landlady, "there is no bridge to drive over. You must have come along the planks left by the men." "Impossible," was the answer; and nothing could persuade the traveler that night that there was no bridge. But early next morning he went to the river-side, and found, as he had been told, that the bridge was gone. His horse had taken him safely over three planks, left by the workmen, where one false step, to the right or to the left, would instantly have plunged him into the swollen river beneath. The man stood aghast at the dreadful danger he had gone through, and so marvelously escaped. (Text)

As the Lucania was in mid-Atlantic a young man came to the purser and asked him to lend him ten pounds, as he was without money, and every hour was bringing him nearer to London. The purser said he had made it a rule not to lend money and suggested that the young man should borrow from some friend on board. "But I have no friend. The only person who would give me ten pounds is my mother, and she left London for New York the same day as we sailed from New York." The purser thought for a moment, and then he said, "We may get into speaking touch with the vessel on which your mother is, and then you could ask her to lend you the money by wireless telegraphy." The next night the young man was roused from sleep with the news that the Lucania was in communication with the boat on which his mother was a passenger. She readily handed a ten pound note to the purser on her ship, and he authorized the purser on the Lucania to give the young man this sum. The vessels were many miles apart in the darkness of the night, and yet the need on the one ship was met by the love on the other. What a light that throws on the force of prayer! "Ask and ye shall receive." (Text)

This is a type of our relation to God. Faith takes God at his word. "His divine power hath given us all things that pertain to life and Godliness through the knowledge of Him who hath called us to glory and virtue, whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises." Every gift of God that we accept and use for Him is a new proof of our faith.

A little girl one day, whose mother had entrusted her with a penny for some small purchase, was crushed in the streets. She did not drop the penny. Recovering from a fainting fit, dying, she opened her firmly-closed fist, and handed her mother the humble penny, whose small value she did not realize, saying to her: "I have not lost it." (Text)

Take the little "radioscope" in your hand-- a tiny tube less than an inch in length, closed at one end, with a small magnifying lens at the other. In the closed end of the tube you observe a small disk of paper covered with microscopic particles of yellow crystals--sulfid of zinc. In front of the yellow crystals is a small metallic pointer, like the second-hand of a very small watch, and on the end of the pointer is--nothing, absolutely nothing, so far as your eye can see. Look at it very carefully. No! Nothing! Now, take the little tube, go into a darkened room, and look into it through the lens end, and you will see a sight incredible. The metal pointer does have a minute speck of something on its tip, and between that tip and the yellow crystals are leaping showers of sparks of light. Will the shower stop after a few minutes? No. After an hour? No; nor after a thousand years! The calculation is that that all but invisible speck on the tip of the pointer will keep that shower of sparks going day and night, for thirty thousand years! For that speck is radium, which actually seems as tho it were a hot fragment struck off from God's great white throne, so amazing is its radiant energy.

It operates, not merely by setting "waves" in motion, but it throws off a stream of actual particles which move with an inconceivable velocity (at the rate, some physicists allege of 200,000 miles a second), and without--and here is the miracle--without any apparent diminution in the morsel of radium itself. It can hurl these particles literally through six inches of armor plate. It can and does send them right through your own head while you are looking at them, just as if your brain were a loose sieve, as perhaps it is, or a grove of trees quite wide apart, and a bright, flashing bird, all crimson and gold, were flying right through the trees, without even hitting his wings.

Now, what I want to say is that the modern discovery of such marvels as these, as being real, actual, objective, demonstrated facts, stretches the mind out into a thrilling series of undreamed-of possibilities, and this is a preparation for faith. This is the first step. This is the first lamp on the modern road to faith.--Albert J. Lyman.

The National Monetary Commission has just reported an investigation of this matter. About seventy per cent of the daily bank deposits consists of checks, and even more than half of the retail business is conducted in the same way, while the banks report weekly pay-rolls aggregating $134,800,000, seventy per cent of which is settled by checks.

This is a gigantic illustration of the principle of faith. We have faith in the integrity of the average man. We have faith in the business institutions of the country. We have faith that the future will be as good as the past. And in this faith we continue to accept bits of paper in return for most of our labor and the goods we sell.

In exalting the principle of faith in our relations toward God and the concerns of the next world, religion is merely applying to the Owner of all things the same rules that we apply without question to the petty properties of earth. --Christian Endeavor World.

A graphic account of how Adjutant S. H. M. Byers, of the Faith Iowa Infantry, carried to Grant before Richmond the news of General Sherman's advance through North Carolina on his march to the sea in 1865 is told in Harper's Weekly. After a perilous trip, he finally reached Grant's headquarters at City Point.

" I ripped open my clothing, handed him my dispatches, and excitedly watched the pleased changes on his flushed face while he hurriedly read the great news I had brought from Sherman," says Mr. Byers. "General Ord happened in at that moment, and the good news was repeated to him. Ord clanked his spurs together, rubbed his hands and manifested joy. 'I had my fears, I had my fears,' he muttered. 'And I, not a bit,' said Grant, springing from his seat by the window, 'I knew Sherman--I knew my man.'"