A Pillar of Fire

1900

A school boy at a prize examination furnished the following biography of the patriarch Abraham: "He was the father of Lot, and had two wives. One was called Ishmale and the other Hagar. He kept one at home and he turned the other into the desert, where she became a pillar of salt in the daytime and a pillar of fire by night."

Cyrus Townsend Brady tells an amusing story in his "Recollections of a Missionary in the Great West" of a little boy he knew on the frontier, who belonged to a family who had trained him to believe in the deep-water form of baptism and was experimenting with the household cat and a bucket of water. The animal evidently did not believe in immersion, for she resisted, bit and scratched until finally the little boy, with his hands covered with scratches and with tears in his eyes, gave up the effort to effect the regeneration of the cat. "Dog-gone you!" he cried, "Go and be an Episcopal cat if you want to!"


1893

"Do you ever pray for the coming of the millennium, madam?" "Not much." "Why not?" "My husband is a professor in a college for the training of missionaries. When the millennium is here there will be no need of missionaries and my husband will have no occupation."