American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Sunday schools -- United States -- Periodicals
She said: “Those women are my sisters, and their work is my work from
this time forward until my death.” Again she says: “I consider the W.
C. T. U. one of the grandest instrumentalities for good the world has
ever known.”
Can you tell why I have selected Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith to stand in
this list of Remarkable Women?
/*
FAYE HUNTINGTON.
*/
OUR ALPHABET OF GREAT MEN.
V.—VINCENT, REV. JOHN H., D. D.
[Illustration: I] HAVE written down the name of the “great man” which
I have chosen to stand in this Alphabet, and here I pause as I reflect
that to many of you his face and form and speech are familiar. You
have seen him upon the platform and upon the avenues of Chautauqua and
Framingham, and in other places. Some of you have welcomed him at your
own homes; his smiles and his talks are among the things which will
be always, so long as you live, a pleasant memory. What can I tell
you about him that you do not already know? Yet I am not willing that
another name should take the place of this, and therefore we will talk
a little together of this friend of the young people, and idol of the
older people.
Dr. Vincent’s early home was in the Sunny South. “In the land of orange
blossoms and magnolia groves,” he first saw the light. Six years of his
life were spent in the home of the flowers; then the family came North
and settled in Pennsylvania. Like the mothers of many of our great
men, John H. Vincent’s mother might fill a worthy place in our list of
Remarkable Women.
She is described as “patient, amiable, living as though she belonged
to heaven rather than earth. Often at the twilight hour, especially on
Sundays, she would take her children to her own room, and there sweetly
and tenderly tell them about the life to come, and point out their
faults and spiritual needs.”
Mrs. Bolton in her sketch of Dr. Vincent published two or three years
since, gives some amusing incidents of the childhood of our Great Man.
I quote from memory, but I think it is she who tells the story of
the boy of six years gathering the children of the neighborhood, and
after getting them quiet by threatening them with the lash of a whip,
he would preach to them. And so far did his zeal carry him, that upon
one occasion he tore into several parts a small red-covered hymn book,
which he valued as the gift of his pastor, and distributed the pieces
through his audience, doubtless thinking it highly important that all
should be supplied with hymn books. Whether they all sang together
from the different parts of the book given them, we are not informed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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