e world, which looked
more dreary and miserable through the multiplying lenses of his own
tears. But he was one of those whose heart had been quickened in its
death anguish by the resurrection voice of Christ; and he came forth
to life and comfort. He bravely resolved to do all that one man could
to lessen the great sum of misery. He sold his estates in Silesia,
bought in Berlin a large building that had been used as barracks for
the soldiers, and, fitting it up in plain, commodious apartments,
formed there a great family-establishment, into which he received the
wrecks and fragments of families that had been broken up by the
war,--orphan children, widowed and helpless women, decrepit old
people, disabled soldiers. These he made his family, and constituted
himself their father and chief. He abode with them, and cared for them
as a parent. He had schools for the children; the more advanced he put
to trades and employments; he set up a hospital for the sick; and for
all he had the priestly ministrations of his own Christ-like heart.
The celebrated Professor Tholuck, one of the most learned men of
modern Germany, was an early protege of the old Baron's, who,
discerning his talents, put him in the way of a liberal education. In
his earlier years, like many others of the young who play with life,
ignorant of its needs, Tholuck piqued himself on a lordly skepticism
with regard to the commonly received Christianity, and even wrote an
essay to prove the superiority of the Mohammedan to the Christian
religion. In speaking of his conversion, he says,--"What moved me was
no argument, nor any spoken reproof, but simply that divine image of
the old Baron walking before my soul. That life was an argument always
present to me, and which I never could answer; and so I became a
Christian." In the life of this man we see the victory over sorrow.
How many with means like his, when desolated by like bereavements,
have lain coldly and idly gazing on the miseries of life, and weaving
around themselves icy tissues of doubt and despair,--doubting the
being of a God, doubting the reality of a Providence, doubting the
divine love, embittered and rebellious against the power which they
could not resist, yet to which they would not submit! In such a chill
heart-freeze lies the danger of sorrow. And it is a mortal danger. It
is a torpor that must be resisted, as the man in the whirling snows
must bestir himself, or he will perish. The apathy of mela