LITTLE THINGS BY Charles Robert Morrison

Said Professor Swing: "It is most pitiful that we all see the greatest
duties of the world, only in the solemn hour when we are leaving it. We
are willingly blind to the great things around us, and as the prodigal
son, when he had found the desert world, looked back, and for the first
time saw the sweetness of his father's house--so we wander away in our
vanity and folly, and at last, from a bed of bodily disease and spiritual
husks and rags, look back and see the matchless charms of an age and a
land to which we are bidding farewell. This is not Nature's fault or plan.
It is her revenge. She gives us a glimpse of the glory we declined to
pursue and accept."
The prophet Isaiah looked with sad heart and deep emotion upon the
sorrows of a people who had been patiently taught and earnestly
pleaded with, but who had persistently refused to hear and heed his
words of instruction. It was no satisfaction to him, or to any godly man,
to note the coming of the calamity he had been privileged to foretell. It
only increased his grief to behold the misery of a people who heard a
warning voice, had been instructed in right doing--yet had received too
late the lesson to profit thereby--at least too late to turn aside the
predicted evil. These sad facts of history cry aloud their warnings to all
the future. They are bits of instruction for those who, passing that way,
may, if wise, profit thereby.
So the grief-stricken prophet--recalling his words of warning,
remembering their rejection, and marking the disastrous effects of
disobedience and arrogance--breaks forth into the language of regret,
saying: "Oh, that you had heeded my commandments! Then your peace
would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of
the sea!"
The statesman, also, is a seer. He stands upon a loftier eminence than
that occupied by the people, and from that standpoint is an observer of
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