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Lecture at Pilgrim Congregational Church
Lecture at Pilgrim Congregational Church, Cleveland, Ohio, November 13, 1928.
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Madam President and members of the Ladies’ Club and your guests and Dr. Bradley, I feel it a very great honor to be with you this evening, for I estimate that no single man has done more to raise the standards of the people of Cleveland than has your own pastor. I am so happy to be here with you tonight. I remember on back through the years that Dr. Bradley has spent with you and worked for the Christian people of this City to have recognized that he was always in the forefront of the thinking. I have an idea that the message that I shall bring to you will not be new to you because Dr. Bradley has given it to you before. And I also recognize that the message that I bring from time to time is not entirely happily received in some communities because they are not yet ready for this teaching.
I am going to ask you to think with me of some of the problems of the church today and see how our problems are changing. This is not the same world as you were born into and I was born into. We find ourselves even in this decade required to re-orient ourselves and I think I might save time by having the opportunity to use slides as I talk along and I do not wish to have you feel that this is a formal lecture, but I want you to feel free at any time to ask questions.
I will have you think with me of the first vision that most of us had of the structure of the universe, of the nature of heaven and the earth. And if you will read your first chapter of Genesis and succeeding chapters you will readily orient yourself to the circumstances.
Here we have the firmament and there were a lot of little holes in it and the light was shining through. Here are the earth and the waters of the firmament and above the stars were shining through and there was water underneath and there was a heaven way up above there. I am sure you started out with just such conceptions as that. What was wrong with that? What was the origin of that heaven, that earth, that foundation? It is very simple.
That Bible story was written at a time when it was not known that all of the things that we think of as knowledge were different expressions of the same thing–truth. Consequently, everything that was understood was natural and everything that was not understood was supernatural. Mostly everything was over in the supernatural. And that is the difficulty people have to get over from one generation to another. Dr. Bradley has been the guide directing people over to the natural here.
That conception of heaven and earth and of God was pretty small. Someone has recently expressed it as a vest pocket edition of the universe. A pretty small proposition.
In this next slide I have arranged some of the supernatural and a general class of the natural under the heading of knowledge–scientific and religious.
We will find that mechanics and sound and heat and electricity and magnetism and light were all thought of as different expressions of different things. Now we know they are different expressions of the same thing. Keep in mind that our Bible was written when it was thought that mechanics, sound, heat and light had no relation to each other and that all of the things that go to make up spiritual life had no contact or relationship to any of these factors. But we find ourselves today recognizing that people have come to have a new vision of the order of the universe, and we find that we are living in an orderly universe controlled by natural laws–laws that are understandable.
Along about 700 B.C. a group of wonderful scientists worked on these different branches of knowledge, but they did not realise that they were related.
We find along about the thirteenth century that it was recognized that mechanics and sound were different expressions of the same thing. When we hear we are hearing vibrations of the air.
Along about the seventeenth century many of these were different expressions of the same thing. For example, we find that this great river of light was not recognized as being related to……And then we find that heat was found to be related to sound and mechanics and that made a single river. When you and I were born it was thought that there were two great expressions of matter and energy, entirely independent and unrelated, and I presume that many people today do not recognize that the table you have eaten on and the light that is coming to you from that bulb are the same, though different expressions of the same thing. Indeed, it is only the last twenty years perhaps that we have come to recognize through great research work that the energy that comes from the sun and from the stars and from our electric lights and any other sources of artificial light is an expression as energy of ultimate units which may come together in form and be matter or material.
The dinner we have eaten tonight was a part of the sun but a few months ago. We have actually eaten tonight substance that was in the sun and came to the earth as energy. You know your plants don’t grow until the sun comes to them.
I presume no single mistake has occurred in our thinking that is so fundamentally responsible for our lack of proper orientation than is our failure to recognize that life itself is a product of force, which force may take the form of these physical things around us. I find myself tempted to spend a little too much time here because I want to take you over into some of the practical fields, so we will go immediately to the next column and have you think about what has been happening through the years.
We have the mythology preceding the dawn of history, or coming into history with its dawn. That mythology had with it all of the conceptions of the early tribes that lived on the face of the earth, and that mythology expressed itself in the early religions with individual conceptions of the light that came, not knowledge and part of religion, which had gone from matter to sun and furnished the basis for our Old Testament. Our Old Testament was written for that period in which all of these forms of knowledge were separate.
We are being asked to go back to the period when all of these separate rivers of truth had no relation to each other. Is it reasonable that the people who lived in that time should set the standards for this time? Why has it been so difficult for the people to orient themselves? They were not responsible, but it is a fundamental truth that the church has often been the greatest stumbling block in the way of the progress of the truth. I am speaking about the early religions back through the years. Is it only back through the years? No.
Don’t it make you ashamed that you are living in an era when a state one week ago today voted to prohibit the teaching to the young life of the community the means by which and through which God made his universe? Is there anything which can compare with humans and to say with God, “You are mistaken in what you have written of the earth,” and as written so much that “any one who wills to know the truth may see.”
It is not only the people of the sixteenth and fourteenth centuries that we have to have sympathy for. Do you realize that there are people who are living within five hundred miles of you who still believe that the earth is flat? Is it any wonder that it has been so hard for people to reach God–to find God? And I am going to say another thing. I believe that science has done more to help us believe in God in the last few years than religion has done within the last fifty years. When we get to know God, we will get to know God and his truths. When we know his universe, we know God. You can’t imagine such a thing as truth and not being a part of God.
So as we come down through the years we find that the church took the attitude that it was infallible. We find developing a conviction that we should study the human body–we should dissect animals. But the church said, “No, you must not do it,” and the church would make this interpretation. The church issued this great bulletin.
BLOODROOT, on account of the red juice, is good for the blood.
LIVERWORT, being a leaf shaped like the liver, cures diseases of the liver.
EYEBRIGHT, being marked and spotted, cures diseases of the eyes.
BUGLOSS, resembling a snake’s head, cures snake bites.
CELANDINE, being yellow in color, cures jaundice.
RED FLANNEL, which looks like blood, cures blood taints and therefore rheumatism.
BEAR’S GREASE, being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is recommended for persons fearing baldness.
If I were to ask you if you had rheumatism real bad and right within reach of you there was a piece of gray flannel and a piece of red flannel, which would you take? I guess a lot of you would take the red flannel.
My father had a farm, and I am thankful that I was brought up on a country farm. But I am particularly thankful that I had a father and mother who were not afraid to let me have any book I wanted. Mother and also father would invite the preacher to come home with the family for supper on Sunday evening in order that the children might have contact with the college preachers. There were two preachers at our church. I remember the young preacher of the district saying at the supper table one Sunday evening, “Mr. Price, I read a new book that I would have given a thousand dollars if I had not seen and that is The Origin of the Species by a man named Darwin. Father said, “Why, young man, are you afraid of truth?” “No, but if that is true then there is nothing in religion.” Father said, “I will take a chance on truth taking care of itself.” I had that book and father bought it for me. It was worth more than a thousand dollars to that man that he read that book. He got a vision that we must tear down the sectarian borders and that we must look for truth for truth’s sake.
My father had a house on our farm which he rented. One day the tenant came to father and said, “I have to move. I have just found out that that house we are living in is haunted.” Father said, “What have you heard?” He answered, “I have heard that there was a man killed at the time that well was blasted. Is that true?” Father said, “Yes.” So the man said, “Well, I am going, for we heard the dishes rattling last night.” And move he did. But before he left, father came to me and said, “Weston, I wish you would go and have a talk with his wife.” So I went up and said, “Mrs. ———, I hear this house is haunted.” She said, “You must not come around looking for spooks while we are living here.” I said, “You and I both have been brought up in this community and you and I both know there is nothing in this thing about spooks.” She thought a moment and said, “My sister saw a spook all right enough,” She believed it.
A week ago I heard a group of people talking about just as nonsensical things as they were believing.
If we take these things coming down through the struggle of the truth and fiction we find some of the most horrible persecutions we have ever seen. It would make your blood and mine run cold to see those terrible persecutions that had for their foundation hates that no more represented Christ than that red flannel represented truth. We find the great crusaders starting out on their crusades to kill. We find in the life-time of our grandfathers the question as to whether or not witches should be put to death. I won’t take time to go into that story as it is hideous in the development of the world, but just let me give you one illustration of the Black Death, which took half of the people in England in one epidemic, and they had a means for actually preventing the Black Death. If they would hire people to stand around the house and beat on tin pans from the time the epidemic started until the epidemic was over, no one in that house would get the plague and they said it was an absolute proof of the activity of Satan and what they had to do was scare these spirits away. What do you suppose they were doing? They were chasing away the rats that were carrying the germs that were infected with the plague.
There are a lot of the things that we are doing today that are hang-overs. I would have you think of where we came from. Now this may shock some of you.
That is a picture of the sun. At the time of an eclipse the moon has come between us and the sun. And we see these great flames go out into space, going out 250,000 miles and more. It is known that the same material that the sun is made from is the same material that the earth is made from. But they know that all of the material that the sun is made of, or the stars, or practically all of the things that they are made of, man finds nearly all of them in our earth. But there was one that they did not find in our earth. Later they found helium and now it is put in balloons and these balloons can now cross the ocean.
Let us suppose that some great wandering star of the universe should come sweeping along when these great flames are sweeping out and pull out a great mass of that flaming mass and it would not come back to the sun. In some such way our planet was formed.
When you look at the sun through a spectroscope you are looking at the sun with an instrument that will pick out all the lines. If you take the calcium line, you will find these great. It is limestone. All of this prominent line and all of that has to do with this substance, calcium. You find these great dark spots and those dark spots are surrounded by great masses of calcium. It is interesting to know that we heat a metal with the hot white rays. It would be as physically impossible for two great substances to produce the same band as it would be for people to be in the same spot at the same time.
Here are iron lines and magnesium lines and calcium lines and sodium lines. Whenever you see a line at that mass you know it is sodium.
And that band that produces it as yellow comes to you as something that stimulates you and I. When we take this calcium line and we let the light come from it, and it is shed on light of any kind, a combination of that calcium line will produce effects that are characteristic of that.
Here we have our calcium taking different form. You will recognize the different lengths of tusks on these elephants and finally we come down to a tusk that is very similar to that of the animals we know.
Also, as the head gets larger the neck must get shorter. We find then this process of classification that makes structure based upon a very fundamental law.
Mosquitoes can only get so large. Why? Mosquitoes can never get large like animals for a very fundamental law, which is this–when you increase the size of anything ten-fold, you have increased its weight not in the same proportion that you have increased the surface area. You are all familiar with the fact that a mouse can drop from the ceiling to the floor without hurting itself. Why? A mouse can drop into a well a mile deep and run away. It would not hurt itself. Why? Because the relation of surface area to size increases as it gets smaller. Now a dog falling into that well a mile deep would be killed instantly; a man would crack open. A dog would splash and a mouse would not be heard. Just stop to think a minute, You remember all these insects how they fall off and never fall hard enough to hurt at all. These small things have no consideration for gravity. A bird never can get more than a certain size. An ostrich could not fly. Its weight would get so great it would, or rather could, not have wings great enough.
Coming back the other way, following this law down to the small things you immediately see, since the surface increases in proportion to size, the size of the bacteria. They have enough surface on the outside so they absorb all of the food they want on the outside. The smaller you get the greater that force becomes and you will find at once the force of the follicle. Now then taking that as your basis, just think of some of the laws that have developed this way.
Here we find the fish developing their gills because they could not absorb enough in their surface.
The inner surface of our intestinal tract would cover a surface as large as all of these. You take the little end arteries in our body that let these chemicals go through and be absorbed in the flesh. I found out how much road surface that would cover, and I found it would cover the distance from here to Painsville. Nature has built in these infoldings. I remember picking up the head of a deer and taking the deer’s head apart. I had been paddling along and the deer was in the distance, but it would jump up and run off and snort and give signals. The deer recognized that we were present by the odor.
We have developed these various individual traits. So then if we pass on to another fact, we find that we are controlled by the law of heredity. In this picture the father has dark hair.
A black spot on the surface of a cow of either sex would reproduce itself in the law of heredity in the proportion of 23 to 20.
(Story about Jacob and [Laban]. All those cows that were spotted were to go to Jacob and all those that were not spotted were to go to [Laban].)
(Reproduction of guinea pigs.) We find a black and a white guinea pig will always produce a black, and in the next generation we find that they would get three black and one white; and in the next generation they would get five black and three white. That has to do only with the organs, the cells, the structures that we reproduce.
We have here two guinea pigs. Now these female guinea pigs had black guinea pigs. They took the ovaries of the white guinea pig and planted them in the ovaries of the black guinea pig and she became pregnant and her offsprings were all black guinea pigs.
We may not always understand this. There are some factors that we can control, forces that would make it easy for characteristics to develop instead of making it hard for characteristics to develop in preparing the type of humanity that will be capable of developing them.
In this picture we have this series of embryonic forms. In the first three [months] of your intrauterine life, you could not tell which you were going to be: a fish, a salamander, a tortoise or a human. You went through all of those stages in that order and if something happened to mother just at the time, a starvation for the want of some vitamin, you may have carried forward to your birth a deformity that was characteristic of that form that you were in when that suppression came upon mother. There are people born with fish gills in their neck. They go to the doctor and have them sewed up and you may not know it, but there are people born with one external orifice in the body, just as a chicken has but one for fluid and solid matter. Why, it is not the course of God. It is not the activity of the devil. It is not a sin that mother had some interference, preventing her body from functioning properly.
When you take these various series in the first three of the uteral life, we were like that first, then like that, then like that. How does that come to be so? If you are not afraid of the truth you will find that God has made man gradually. It is not any more unworthy to know how God did it, or to know that he did it gradually, or to know that just by the waving of a wand he did it.
Let us take some of these deformities that people are born with. What causes those? Why, it may be that some force has come in there that might have been prevented. These fish forms that I am showing you have these deformities because there was just as much alcohol put in the water as there would be in the father’s blood.
I remember a circumstance that happened to us. Our boy was very ill, and finally we lost the fight. One of the good people of our church called and said, “I am just calling you to remind you that you have displeased the Lord and this is the Lord’s punishment for displeasing him.” This poor soul has now gone to Heaven. Her idea of God was not as large as it should have been.
In this picture the father was put in a box where he had to breathe alcohol before he was allowed to mate with that mother, and this is the defective rabbit that was their offspring. The black rabbit would have to be the child of the offspring of the black parents’ rabbit, and the white one the offspring of the white one.
“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
As I see Christ coming down the hill to the disciples and they could not understand him, I think he seemed to see the great hand of death taking the thousands of millions of people and he said, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make ye free.”
Here we have deformities developing in the offspring due to alcohol. In the third and fourth generations we get deformities of this kind.
Here is a little girl you see, only a little more than half my size. Why did she not grow up? Why, her parents wanted to make her beautiful so they tied a board on each side of her head and her head had to grow between the boards for seven years. I went to school with a girl who was supposed to be the most beautiful girl of her time. She could take her hands and put them around her waist, she was so tightly laced. Why, it is not so many years ago though that people, I would not have dared to say that at the time, were doing that. Only the Japanese, or rather the Chinese, would do a thing like that today.
Now we find a few years ago that the epidemic that we know as the yellow fever was caused by a mosquito, and a mosquito could get a germ and transfer that germ to the people and they would get the yellow fever. Truth said, “If you stamp out the mosquito you will stamp out yellow fever.” The church said, “There is nothing to it.”
If we take the next slide we will see an organism that does not look very nice. It is a wood tick that gets on cattle, and that tick when it gets on cattle makes them sick, and that is what caused the fever of the West called the Tick Fever. It was finally called that because it was found that when people were bitten by one of these ticks they developed the fever. We must learn not to let them bite us.
We find here an organism, a little thing like a fly, that produces sleeping sickness that took hundreds of thousands of people in Africa. It takes them nine months as a rule to die. That fly carries an organism, and if that fly bites us and we get that organism in our body we get the sleeping sickness.
Here we have for example a little girl that is not afflicted with one of those epidemics, but this little girl has a disturbance that is caused by the absence of the proper secretion that comes from the neck, the thyroid. This child is ignorant, could not learn anything at all because she did not have this little gland in her neck properly developed. There was something like thirteen thousand of these people in Italy thirty years ago and scarcely any today. At that time the Catholic Church where the disease was common urged the people to marry, but fortunately they did not reproduce rapidly. They took out the thyroid glands of an animal and fed them to this child and gave her the thing that her body could not make. Here we see her as a very beautiful child.
And here we have pollywogs with a tail that is as large as your hand. And those little frogs and these pollywogs were the same age. The difference was the quantity of the thyroid that had been fed to them. And that thing that makes a boy and girl develop along to womanhood and manhood along about sixteen years of age has to do with the functioning of these glands.
We see here two sheep the same age, and there was dissected from the neck of the small one the thyroid and the parathyroid glands, when it was a small animal, and it did not grow but the other one went on growing. There are a large number of people who could have developed to manhood and womanhood who could not because these forces were absent.
The next slide will show us two pictures of the same dog. There is a gland in our neck we call the parathyroid. There are two in animals. They are as long as a grain of wheat in humans and have the power of furnishing a chemical to our system; and if that calcium is not in our blood, the calcium goes down and down. But give them a little of the proper activator and they can again furnish calcium.
When those little parathyroid glands were taken from this dog’s neck it went into convulsions. But instead of letting it die, they took some of the juice of the parathyroid gland of an ox and injected it in the gland of the dog, and he jumped up and looked around; and they did it for months and months. If they stopped for a week he would go back into convulsions. And similarly some of these disturbances that people suffer are just as definite.
Here we have a child with its bones all out of shape with the disease called the rickets. Nine out of ten of the children born along the lakes had some rickets within the first two years of life. Before it was known how bones formed they were having rickets, because bones could not form because of the lack of the chemicals that would make it possible for that body to make bones; and that is a simple vitamin, and we see the picture of the bones of this child. Here we have these bones crooked. And here we have these bones broken, not because that child had an extra hard fall on the floor but because his bone was not very strong.
Next we will show another of these cases. See these bones. That shows seven fractures in the bone of that young man. One break was right after another. A few weeks ago a woman, knowing that I was studying this problem of how bones and teeth were formed, brought me a pet. It was a monkey, and what do you suppose was wrong with that monkey? It was just like some other people’s children and got what it wanted. What did it like? Sugar and bananas, and bananas and sugar, and then more sugar. And that monkey had the worst case of rickets that I believed could be possible in any animal. If you would turn a napkin and turn it like that you would have the shape of the legs of that monkey. The bones did not become solid, and the soft bone yielded and went off in various directions. And it would break your heart to think that even a monkey could suffer as that animal did. What was happening? Just the same thing as is happening over and over again in Mongolia. They don’t have the vitamins that are necessary. They don’t know about the proper vitamins and few mothers ever, in some of those districts of Mongolia, are able to stand on their feet after they have had the fourth or fifth child, because that has taken the lime out of their bodies. Consequently, a great number of the women are crippled and bed-ridden, and they cannot raise the child in some districts without the mother nursing it for four or five years.
And yet when you come back and think of that terrible tragedy that nine out of ten of the children born have rickets, we find that we have a problem that is universal. Here for example is a woman who lives in your community. I think I could take you to a dozen in Cleveland who are bed-ridden and with generally the same story. After the first, second or third child we find arthritis or other disease setting in until those women cannot stand because they have borrowed and borrowed from their systems to such a great extent.
A short time ago I went to City Hospital to see a boy who was terribly deformed and I said to the mother, “How many children have you?” She said, “Ten.” I said, “How long have you been married,” and she answered, “Thirteen years.” I then said, “Which child is this?” “The seventh,” she said.
I was lecturing in Michigan City a few months ago and one of the dentists present told the story of things that were happening in that community, one of which was the following:
A woman came in, a young woman, because she was suffering with toothache and the dentist said to her, “My gracious, woman, what have you been doing? Pretty nearly every tooth in your head is decayed down to your gum.” “Don’t you know me?” she asked. “I am the little girl you said four years ago had the most perfect set of teeth you ever saw. I have three children and I expect another.” The dentist said, “Why are you doing this?” She said, “Because of my religion, but the Lord will take care of us.”
And here we have an animal with its head drawn over to the side. Note how this animal is affected. We must come to recognize this as God’s world, not our world. Now where do we get our nourishment from? Well, largely from animals. You all know what a bird is like, how a duck lays eggs. A duck has to stay home and stay on that egg if she is going to have any young ones. The animal made considerable progress. So this animal built a vest pocket and put the egg in it and carried the egg right along. That is all very well while having the egg. How about feeding the animal? It developed a system of a little hole in the vest pocket so that the young one just had to draw on those holes and the juice would come out, and that is the same as you and I rooted the milk out of our mothers.
You will see a lot of different forms of life, but the chemical composition of milk in all is always the same, although different in concentration. I used to wonder how a little rabbit could raise eight or ten rabbits up to a size a third or fourth as big as these on just the little bit of nourishment they could get from the little breasts. But their milk is stronger than that of our mothers.
We have a problem that while they furnish the milk the calcium that would make bones so that the nerves and the blood could function, the bones have another purpose, namely, for a purpose of supplying lime and calcium to fight infection, or help us to digest a beef steak, and if we have not taken enough calcium out of our food we go and borrow some out of the bank; but there is a limit to what you can draw out of the bank, and there is a limit to what you can borrow out of your own body. Every time mother has occasion to borrow to make the bones for an embryo, and if she is borrowing from the bank and has borrowed before she will borrow again and again, and so mother borrows and pays the bill out of her body. You remember the old story, “A tooth for every child.” The people often thought that the structure actually went out of the tooth of the mother and went into the child. The mother is borrowing and borrowing from her own skeleton, and at the time that she is borrowing her teeth will decay, and at the time a child is born, faster than she can make bones and teeth. The teeth will not have the proper structure and they will decay; and the decay is just as natural and simple as that, and all that is necessary is for the mother to get the proper supply of calcium out of her food.
Supposing your car would not go. It needed more power. Would you expect to get power by pouring gasoline into the engine? You must have a battery to make your gasoline ignite.
After a lecture I gave not long ago a man came to me and said, “We have just had a cow’s hips break down.” I said, “How many times a day are you milking her?” He said, “Three times a day.” I then asked, “How long have you been doing this?” He answered, “Just six more weeks and we will have been doing it for two years.” I told him he would have to stop doing this and give the cow certain vitamins to build up her skeleton. He said, “We have to keep on milking her. We have to get that prize.”
That is no worse than the slavery of womanhood all over this land and every other land. It makes me hang my head in shame to think of the curse we are putting on womanhood. Just one pregnancy after another. Just borrowing and borrowing; and our great religions of the past have been the authority for more mothers to submit, just as hosts and hosts of mothers are going down today.
Here is a cow who has given birth to a calf who cannot stand up. That was a normal cow and a healthy cow. She had plenty of food but that cow was lacking in one element. That lack of that vitamin had made it impossible for her to supply that need, and this little calf is entirely prostrate and died within a few hours, just as a lot of babies do. Do you realize that only thirty years ago the habits of our civilization required that eight babies would have to be born to perpetuate the father and mother? This then dropped down to seven. It is down now to three. This would show that some progress has been made.
Now that carries with it tremendous responsibility. The thing that is happening to this calf is easily explained. Here is a cow fed precisely the same ration but there was added a little cod liver oil, and she has milk enough for the both; and that thing that is going on right there is one of the most thrilling things in all our modern events.
A few weeks ago in one of our hospitals here in the city, all of the babies in that maternity ward were examined to find the best baby in the hospital. It so happened that the baby that got the prize got it because he was the best nourished child, the best sleeper and the most cheerful when he was awake; and I might state that that child was the only one of the forty where the mother had been on a consistent ration.
That thing that we are talking about is spark, and that thing that the child needed and we older people need in order that we may get along without burning our own furniture.
Here we have four chickens that are similar except that this chicken had ample energy, the spark, and these chickens had to get the radiant energy through Cleveland smoke on a diet that was not rich enough. Here is the change in the bones from rubbing on these vitamins. These are three chickens of the same age and the difference in them is this. The old hen picked up the food that she could find around on the ground, and these other two had a slightly modernized diet; just like our modern diets are refined, these chickens had refined diets and they did not have to go out in the sunshine. They had the food brought to them. The difference between those chickens is the difference between the radiant energy they got. How about the hen? Why, she not only got them up early in the morning but she taught them how to get beetles, and each little bug had these vitamins in, but these other chickens had to eat the same food every day that was brought to them.
These chickens have not grown for the reason that you and I have not grown. It is a question of these vitamins. These boys and girls have been given a box of chocolate and are doing just what the monkey did.
You will notice carefully the difference in the shape of the bones in these two pictures. Those chickens are the same age.
At eleven years and five months this boy still had his baby teeth, and at eleven years and eight months we find that the boy’s teeth have grown to this extent. And in that short period of only three months’ time that boy grew eleven-twelfths of an inch. He had scarcely grown in four years before. He wanted to go to school and he liked vegetables. Today that boy is in a military academy and well at the top of his class.
I will give you this closing story. A little incident happened over in one of our cities of the West. It was a little hamlet with a little cottage down by the railroad tracks, and just so the little children grew up, like these children, without perfect bones. There was a little deformed child living in this cottage, and that little child was treated by the parents as though it was a curse of God; but there was something about that child that was different from animal life. It was something that makes children to be like God meant a boy and girl to be. That child lay in bed and received no attention. She would beckon to the trains as they passed, waving her little hand back and forth, and as those trainmen saw that one hand waving before that window it prayed upon them so that they said to one another, “Have you seen that little hand?” That child asked for matches and when she heard a train coming at night she would light a match and wave that match. The trainmen could not understand it. Every train that would go by in the day would see that hand, and every train in the night would see that light, and they talked about it in their meetings and they appointed a committee to go and investigate.
If you could have gone two years ago last Christmas to that hamlet you would have seen the great Continental Express from the West that stops just to take on water and fuel halt in this little hamlet, not at the station, but in front of this little cottage; and the committee of the national board of railroad conductors got off and brought to that little child blankets and equipment to bring comfort to her little physical body, for they cared. And the train moved on.
In a little while the great Transcontinental Express stopped on the siding by that same little cottage, and a committee of railroad firemen and engineers brought to that little girl a pocket-book of $700.00 to pay the expense to take her where she could get medical attention so that her life could be made what it was to be. Have you seen the hand in the window? The child life of this community is beckoning, and you are the one that can see and you are the ones in this church to see.
May God speed you and help you in your work and help you to help the child.