(4) The ingratitude of those we strive to help is a common cause of weariness. Ingratitude is as common as it is detestable. Almost all nations have voiced their sense of the sin of ingratitude in striking proverbs. " Eat the present, and break the dish," says the Arabic proverb. The Spanish says, " Bring up a raven, and it will peck out your eyes." " Put a snake in your bosom, and when it is warm it will sting you," says the English proverb. The world is ungrateful. It lives on God's bounty, and yet refuses to own His power or to accept His love. "Where are the nine ? " asked Christ ; and there is a tone of indescribable sadness in His question. We have all felt the deadening influence of ingratitude. Our warm sympathy has flowed out in words and deeds of helpfulness, and that sympathy has been so chilled by the ingratitude and unworthiness of those we helped that it has
* Aubrey L. Moore.
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flowed back to paralyse our hearts. But we must do good from higher motives than to secure the gratitude of those benefited. We must do it for its own sake and for Christ's sake. He laid down His life for us when we were unthankful. Thank God, there are some who are grateful. We have seen the tear of gratitude tremble in the eye, and when it was wiped away we have seen the light of hope sparkle there. A word of kindness has banished from some weary heart and sorrowful home weeks of sadness, and has opened a future of hopefulness. Do not become morose. Do not say that gratitude is a forgotten virtue. A cynic is almost ae bad as an ingrate. Indeed, cynicism and ingratitude are kin to each other. In many cases your words and deeds of well-doing are bearing precious fruit in the changed homes and the redeemed lives of men, women, and children, who shall rise up to call you blessed.
^ Gratitude, however, is sometimes felt and expressed, as the following incident illustrates. " When I first learnt to know her she had a little cottage on a high road, the great Bath road of many tramps. It had been the lodge of an abandoned manor house, and was, of course, close to the gateway. There she tamed her tramp men, and made them friends. Every man who came had a table and chair under shelter ; the plainest, simplest food ; materials for mending his clothes, tea or cocoa to drink, her smile, her wonderful eyes upon his, her open heart and word. Never a thing was stolen from her doors, her wide windows; never a penny did she give ; but many a man begged leave to chop wood for her, to dig in her garden — some little thing to show what she had done for him." ^
(5) Another temptation to weariness arises from the apparent want of success attending our labours. It is but natural that we should look for some results from our efforts and, within certain limits, this feeling is not only natural, but lawful and right. We should be apt to sink altogether if we had reason to believe that we were labouring in vain, and spending our strength for naught ; and hence it very seldom happens that the Lord leaves His servants without some tokens of success. But still there are times when these tokens are so poor and scanty that we are ready to say with the disciples, " We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing." But we should never forget that the 1 "W. S. Palmer, in Michael Fairless : Her Life and Writings, 6,
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Word of the Lord will not return unto Him void — that it shall accomplish the thing which He pleaseth, and prosper in the end whereto He sends it. And what is true of the preaching of the Word, is true of every other way in which we seek to promote our Master's work. If we are guided by His counsel and actuated by His Spirit, we cannot fail to be successful, whether we see it or not. No good word is ever wasted, no good deed is ever lost.
^ Publicans and sinners, when we read about them in the New Testament, are poetical; but publicans and sinners, when we meet them in the present century, are very prosaic people, there is nothing poetical about them at all ; and we get tired of trying to do anything for them. We start out in life with an impression that everybody wants to be better, that the ignorant want to learn, that the vicious people want to be virtuous, that the idle people want to work. But we do not undertake to do good work on that notion more than a week before we find that we are mistaken. The tramp comes to us, and is very sure that he wants work; give him some work, and he has not worked twenty-four hours when he wants some other job. The drinking man we get hold of, and we are sure that he wants to reform, and he is sure that he wants to reform. We get him up out of the gutter, and in a week we go out, and he is down in the gutter again, and we say, " It's no use ; it is too hard work." ^