If you want to show kindness to a person, show it to him while you are living. I heard a man say that he didn't want people to throw bouquets to him after he was dead, and say, "There, smell them." Now, this is the time for action. I have got so tired and sick of this splitting hairs over theology. Man, let us go out and get the fallen up. Lift them up toward God and heaven. We want a practical kind of Christianity. Criticising the Sermon Very often a man will hear a hundred good things in a sermon, but there may be one thing that strikes him as a little out of place, and he will go home and sit down at the table and talk right out before his children and magnify that one wrong thing, and not say a word about the hundred good things that were said. That is what people do who criticise. A Reminiscence I remember blaming my mother for sending me to church on the Sabbath. On one occasion the preacher had to send some one into the gallery to wake me up. I thought it was hard to have to work in the field all the week, and then be obliged to go to church and hear a sermon I didn't understand. I thought I wouldn't go to church any more when I got away from home; but I had got so in the habit of going that I couldn't stay away. After one or two Sabbaths, back again to the house of God I went. There I first found Christ, and I have often said since: "Mother, I thank you for making me go to the house of God when I didn't want to go." Transplanting the Lily "It is easy to go when the time comes. There are no ropes thrown out to pull us ashore; there are no ladders let down to pull us up. Christ comes and takes us by the hand, and says: "'You have had enough of this. Come up higher!' "Do you hurt a lily when you pluck it? Is there any rudeness when Jesus touches the cheek, and the red rose of health whitens into the lily of immortal purity and gladness?"--Talmage. Election How many men fold their arms and say: "If I am one of the elect, I will be saved, and if I ain't, I won't. No use of your bothering about it." Why don't some of these merchants say: "If God is going to make me a successful merchant in Chicago, I will be one whether I like it or not, and if He isn't I won't." If you are sick, and a doctor prescribes for you, don't take the medicine--throw it out the door. It does not matter, for if God has decreed you are going to die, you will; if He hasn't, you will get better. If you use that argument you may as well not walk home from this tabernacle. If God has said you'll get home, you'll get home--you'll fly through the air. I have an idea that the Lord Jesus saw how men were going to stumble over this doctrine, so after He had been thirty or forty years in heaven He came down and spoke to John. One Lord's day in Patmos, He said to him: "Write these things to the churches."