when he landed. It was my job to help him. The dear old fellow was just in
time to see his boy die—and afterwards he came and laid his head on my
shoulder and he sobbed. And I wept too. He was seventy.

Presently he said, “It will be hard to go home and tell mother that her
only boy has gone, but I’ve got a message for her. ’Father,’ my boy said,
’tell mother I am not afraid to die. I have found Jesus. Tell mother
that.’”

There are some people who think you are not doing Christian work unless
you have a hymn-book in one hand and a Bible in the other and are singing,
“Come to Jesus.” I am glad I haven’t to live with that kind of people. I
call them the Lord’s Awkward Squad.

If you take “firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly,” out to the front with you,
by the time you get to thirdly the boys will be in the trenches. I never
take an old sermon out with me to France. I write my prescription after
I’ve seen my patients.

I was talking to a thousand boys one day. “Boys,” I said, “how many of you
have written to your mother this week?”

Now, that’s a proper question. I wonder what would happen if the preacher
stopped in his sermon next Sunday morning and said, “Have you paid your
debts this week?” “In what sort of a temper did you come down to breakfast
this morning?”

If a man’s religion does not get into every detail of his life he may
profess to be a saint, but he’s a fraud. Religion ought to permeate life
and make it beautiful—as lovely as a breath of perfume from the garden of