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How small things and great things are closely related is illustrated in 10,000 incidents in the lives of the famous characters of history. Jesus demonstrated his insight into human character and preached a great sermon on the spiritual universality of God to a lone despised Samaritan woman of ill repute.
Abraham Lincoln wrote in his greatest address on scraps of paper on his way to Gettysburg. He thought it of small import and devoted but a few minutes to its delivery. But it electrified the world, and is now considered one of the greatest orations of man.
In his early ministry, Henry Ward Beecher had an appointment to preach in a country church. A snowstorm kept everyone away except one man. Dr. Beecher said when he saw his audience he was on the point of suggesting to the man that they defer the meeting to another time, when all at once he felt the inner urge to deliver his sermon just as he had planned, which he did. He afterward learned that his single auditor was converted, became himself a minister, and did extensive work as a missionary in Africa.
Dr. Morgan, the imminent English divine, gave a lecture in a certain town. A mangy unkempt man sat near the door, sour and grouchy. He had soured on the world. A few years after this Dr. Morgan visited that town and the same man met him joyously and exclaimed, “God bless you. You saved me from being a runt.”
Paul wrote, “Do all things as unto the Lord.”
Emerson says that if a woman would do her mopping divinely, all the world would make the mop a sign of glory.
The wise old Latin philosopher, Seneca, used to tell those who came to him with a bad luck story that trouble was a one-story house, but that worrying about trouble added another story to it.
And Jesus said, “And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to the measure of his life?”
Is man possessed of an undeveloped third eye, functioning through the soul? Physiology hints that the pineal gland at the center of the brain may be an atrophied eye. Jesus said, “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” It has always been interpreted that he referred to the eye of the mind, single to one purpose. But that the spiritual soul develops a spiritual eye persists in sacred and legendary literature.
Plato wrote, “I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which, by the right direction, is re-illumined, and is more precious by far than 10,000 bodily eyes.”
In the Upanishads, one of the sacred scriptures of the Hindus, it is written, “Thou canst not behold me with thy two outer eyes. I have given thee an eye divine.”
Certain of the mystics of the Orient are said to have developed a single soul eye that they have the power to project like a telescope in the ether and see plainly whatever they concentrate upon, whether on the earth or in the heavens. Jesus could see the thoughts of those with whom he talked.
Transcribed by Paula Schneider on June 25, 2018.
