tion are but apparatus of the
gymnasium in which the fibres of his manhood are developed. He compels
respect and recognition from those who have ridiculed his poverty. Put
the other boy in a Vanderbilt family. Give him French and German
nurses; gratify every wish. Place him under the tutelage of great
masters and send him to Harvard. Give him thousands a year for
spending money, and let him travel extensively.

The two meet. The city lad is ashamed of his country brother. The
plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner
of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of
the other. The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no
chance in life," and envies the city youth. He thinks that it is a
cruel Providence that places such a wide gulf between them. They meet
again as men, but how changed! It is as easy to distinguish the
sturdy, self-made man from the one who has been propped up all his life
by wealth, position, and family influence, as it is for the shipbuilder
to tell the difference between the plank from the rugged mountain oak
and one from the sapling of the forest. If you think there is no
difference, place each plank in the bottom of a ship, and test them in
a hurricane at sea.

When God wants to educate a man, he does not send him to school to the
Graces, but to the Necessities. Through the pit and the dungeon Joseph
came to a throne. We are not conscious of the mighty cravings of our
half divine humanity; we are not aware of the god within us until some
chasm yawns which must be filled, or till the rending asunder of our
affections forces us to become conscious of a need. Paul in his Roman
cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in his
prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes of
revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David
Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa,
alone,--what failures they might all to themselves have seemed to be,
yet what mighty purposes was God working out by their apparent
humiliations!

Two highwaymen chancing once to pass a gibbet, one of them exclaimed:
"What a fine profession ours would be if there were no gibbets!" "Tut,
you blockhead," replied the other, "gibbets are the making of us; for,
if there were no gibbets, every one would be a highwayman." Just so
with every art, trade, or pursuit; it is the difficulties tha