1931 - Annual Convention

              S E V E N T E E N T H A N N U A L C O N V E N T I ON 71
To the Christian mind the new- born babe is a being created to the image
and likeness of the Eternal God. W i t h i n it is a spark of the Creator himself
from whose hands it has just come. The child is destined to live forever in
an eternity of infinite happiness and love or separated from its God in a
place of punishment. No need for wonder then that the fond mother builds
a i r y castles of what her boy is going to be and what he will achieve when
grown to manhood he mixes with his fellowmen on the great stage of life.
He may become a n y t h i n g a man has become. He may do anything a man
has ever done. It is idle to pretext lack of talent, lack of opportunity, or any
other so- called obstacle that may stand in the way of success. The annals
of history are replete with the names of men who have done noble deeds in the
face of what to others appeared to be insurmountable obstacles. Permit me
to quote just a few examples :
We all k n ow of that little Shepherd Lad who tended his flocks on the
hillsides at Beth'ehem and who was too young and too inexperienced to
accompany his brothers to battle with the Philistines. However, he was sent
w i t h supplies and found the Hebrew army in terror before the giant Goliath.
L i t t l e David was equal to the occasion and when in answer to his entreaties
he was allowed to match himself with the giant he slew h im and so delivered
his people. This was the same youth who became the greatest K i n g of
Israel and who w i t h no other teacher than the starry heavens above and the
book of nature spread out around him as he tended his flock, composed those
beautiful psalms in honor of the Creator which have remained even to our
day as the most sublime expression of man's supplication and adoration of
God. These psalms for well- nigh forty centuries have ascended day and
night to the Almighty in the worship of the Jewish people, and ever since
the advent of Christ have been chanted the world over by Jew and Gentile
alike. Then there was that little Grecian tongue- tied lad who for long months
was unable to lisp even the simplest monosyllable in response to his patient
mother's efforts to make him speak. The neighbors pitied the poor mother
and lamented the fate that had befallen her son. But the child did speak
after many superhuman efforts and history boasts of him as the most wonder­ful
orator the w o r l d has ever known. This was the great Demosthenes whose
a b i l i t y to sway an audience has never been excelled even to our day and
whose eloquence was more feared than the whole Grecian army, Julius
Caesar the greatest conqueror of ancient times; the legal mind that gave to
the world the Roman l a w ; the general who extended the Roman Empire to
the limits of the then known w o r l d ; was in youth an epileptic whose life
seemed hardly worth the l i v i n g and whom his p i t y i n g friends thought it a
waste of time to educate for any fit purpose. Napoleon Bonaparte, who saved
the French people from the suicidal orgy of blood which history calls the
F r e n c h Revolution, and who conquered nearly every nation of Continental
Europe, came as a little peasant lad to St, Cyr to begin his military studies.
The F r e n c h students looked on him with scorn for his language was imperfect
and his clothes and manners that of a rustic, but it is doubtful if any man
was ever loved and with a love bordering on worship by the French nation
and his conquering regiments as this same Naooleon. We have the testimony
of Sir W a l t e r Scott himself that in his school days he was the despair of his
teachers and the pity of his classmates who considered him a dunce and
dubbed him such. In our own day Thomas Edison, who has made more
valuable discoveries than perhaps any other l i v i n g A m e r i c a n , was only tolerated
at sch:> o\ Not one of his teachers was able to discover in him any spark of
even ordinary intelligence and hardly thought it worth their while to bother
w i t h him. but allowed h im to spend his time as best he could in the back r ow
of the little country school. These are but a few examples which I have
culled from history to prove that obstacles are not insurmountable; rather