Christ. But we must first win them to ourselves.

You may have heard of the boy whose home was near a wood. One day he
was in the wood, and he thought he heard the voice of another boy not
far off. He shouted, "Hallo, there!" and the voice shouted back,
"Hallo, there!" He did not know that it was the echo of his own voice,
and he shouted again: "You are a mean boy!" Again the cry came back,
"You are a mean boy!" After some more of the same kind of thing he
went into the house and told his mother that there was a bad boy in
the wood. His mother, who understood how it was, said to him: "Oh, no!
You speak kindly to him, and see if he does not speak kindly to you."
He went to the wood again and shouted: "Hallo, there!" "Hallo, there!"
"You are a good boy." Of course the reply came, "You are a good boy."
"I love you." "I love you," said the other voice.

You smile at that, but this little story explains the secret of the
whole thing. Some of you perhaps think you have bad and disagreable
neighbors; most likely the trouble is with yourself. If you love your
neighbors they will love you. As I said before, love is the key that
will unlock every human heart. There is no man or woman in all this
land so low and so degraded but you can reach them with love,
gentleness and kindness. It may take years to do it, but it can be
done.

Love must be active. As some one has said: "A man may hoard up his
money; he may bury his talents in a napkin; but there is one thing he
cannot hoard up, and that is love." You cannot bury it. It _must_ flow
out. It cannot feed upon itself; it must have an object.

I remember reading a few years ago of something that happened when we
had the yellow fever in one of the Southern cities. There was a family
there who lived in a strange neighborhood where they had just moved.
The father was stricken down with the fever. There were so many fatal
cases happening that the authorities of the city did not stop to give
them a decent burial. The dead-cart used to go through the street
where the poor lived, and the bodies were carried away for burial.

The neighbors of this family were afraid, and no one would visit the
house because of the fever. It was not long before the mother was
stricken down. Before she died she called her boy to her, and said: "I
will soon be gone, but when I am dead Jesus will come and take care of
you." She had no one on earth to whom she could commit him. In a
little while she, too, wa