next.




THE WHISPERING GALLERY


If you ever go to London, one of the many buildings which will be
pointed out to you will be Saint Paul's Cathedral, which is capped by a
wonderful dome. And if you ask the guide, he will show you in that dome
a strange room known as the "Whispering Gallery." In this gallery your
lowest whisper can be heard on the other side of the room, a great
distance away. It would be hard to tell secrets in a room like that.

But there is a still more wonderful whispering gallery than that. It is
the one which each one of us carries about in his own soul. In that
gallery even things we _think_, whether we say them or not, are heard by
God, our Creator. No thought escapes Him. "In Him we live, and move, and
have our being." If we "take the wings of the morning, and fly to the
uttermost parts of the earth," even there God is still.

This would be a very terrible thing to realize if all our thoughts were
evil thoughts, unkind and unlovely. For then we should be like the man
who, when he was young, ill-treated his old father and mother. When he
grew up, this young man became very wealthy, and he used to carry candy
in his pocket as he walked in the parks to give to the children, because
he wanted their love. But the children would take his candy, then
scamper away like frightened squirrels, because something inside seemed
to tell them that the man was not really kind at heart. Older people