Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian WorkerGolden, M. (Meletios)
Religion
Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker
Golden, M. (Meletios)
Golden, M. (Meletios)
clothing store and purchased an outfit of working-man's clothes. The
next day was Sunday and I spent the day in my room, praying that God
would sustain me in my new career. At night I had very little sleep,
making my plans for the future, or building my castles in the air, and
early Monday morning I was at the stable before 5 a. m. Soon the little
man appeared and after the customary ceremony in taking my name and
address, he led the way into the inner part of the stable in front of a
huge heap of horse manure. There, he says, you just shovel that out of
the window, and handing to me a big fork, for the operation, he
disappeared.
There are certain happenings in our lives indelibly written in our
memory, which cannot be effaced by the stream of time, and one week's
experience in this stable was sufficient to engrave the deepest lines in
my heart of sympathy and mercy for sinful, suffering humanity. It has
been said in the old Greek mythology that the greatest achievement of
Hercules was when he undertook to clean the stable of the king Augeus
at Argos. But should Hercules lived in this stable for one week, I doubt
that his name would ever appear in the list of demigods.
[Illustration: REV. M. GOLDEN
Captain of the Salvation Army]
It is beyond the limits of self respect to even attempt a brief account
of all that took place in that stable, but sufficient to say that I went
in there one individual and by Saturday I came out ten thousand strong.
And I had to put up in St. Louis one more week in a bath house, with
much work and expense to get back into my one individual, and hasten my
wandering steps towards Chicago, with a stop-over at Springfield,
Illinois, where I had references to meet a gentleman, professor of the
Greek language in one of the colleges there. When I arrived at the house
of the dear professor, he, began to speak to me from a book, in an
exameter homerean tone, and I understood about as much as the faithful
who goes to church and the priest reads the mass in Latin. At
Springfield I lost my satchel and with it my Greek documents, which
might have been very interesting to the reader, yet, I hope in my next
publication to have reproductions of those documents from the original,
which I can easily obtain from Athens.
Chicago is my next stop. The Babylon of the West. Last week of January,
1904, the weather 12 degrees below zero. All the idles of Chicago hired
by the city hall could not keep control of the snow on the streets. I
located myself in a furnished room on Wabash Avenue, and bought a paper
to find a job, but my experience in the stable at St. Louis, took away
from me all the courage to select any kind of work from the paper, yet I
was very anxious to settle for a while in Chicago, in that third
cosmopolitan city of the world, London and New York being respectively
first and second.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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