And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold“““““ water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.
—Matthew 10:42
5801 Boy Called “Carrot Top”
A young English boy was called “Carrot Top” by other students and given “little chance of success” by some teachers. He ranked third lowest in class: grade averages for English was 95%, history 85%, mathematics 50%, Latin 30%.
His teacher’s report reads: “The boy is certainly no scholar and has repeated his grade twice. He has also a stubborn streak and is sometimes rebellious in nature. He seems to have little or no understanding of his schoolwork, except in a most mechanical way. At times, he seems almost perverse in his ability to learn. He has not made the most of his opportunities.”
Later, the lad settled down to serious study and soon the world began to hear about Winston Churchill.
5802 Da Vinci’s Bad Start
If Leonardo were alive today, he would be called the product of a broken home. He was an illegitimate child who never saw his mother. His father later married a sixteen-year-old girl. For twelve years, he was brought up first by his grandmother, then by two aunts. After that, he went to live with his father and stepmother. Because of his father’s legal profession, Leonardo was considered better than the village children, so he was never allowed to play with them. His early life, therefore, was very unsettled, and he never knew what it was to enjoy the fun associated with childhood.
With that bad start, we would expect that Leonardo would have become a dull, sullen boy with strong anti-social attitudes. But Leonardo had one trait of character that saved him from this fate. He had an active curiosity. As soon as he was old enough to walk, he would hike all over the countryside, with his eyes, ears, and mind wide open. The open fields, the woods, the birds and animals surrounding the Florentine village of Vinci fascinated him.
There was no limit to his interests. Plants, fossils, stars, and all other aspects of nature interested him. In fact, he observed everything so carefully that he became an authority on dozens of scientific and artistic subjects. Today, it amazes us how one man could have possessed so many remarkable talents.
Leonardo could have gained fame in several different professions. He was a “Wright brother” in the field of aeronautics. He was also the Thomas Edison of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was a leading astronomer, geologist, engineer, botanist, and anatomist, as well as a famous author, illustrator, and psychologist. Perhaps some reader is saying, “But I know Leonardo de Vinci only as the renowned painter of the well-known and intriguing “Mona Lisa”—that Florentine mystery lady with the most discussed smile in history.”
This is the story of the boy with the bad start! He became one of the most remarkable and famous men of all time!
—George H. Clement
5803 Billy Graham’s First Sermon
Billy Graham preached his first sermon—an unplanned one at that—in a jail. He had just graduated from high school, and he and Grady Wilson were spending the summer as Fuller Brush salesmen. When Jimmie Johnson, an evangelist friend, told the youths he was going to hold a service in a nearby jail, they wanted to go along. It was the first time inside a jail for Billy and Grady. Jimmie Johnson conducted the brief service and calmly announced that Billy would give his testimony. Billy was taken by surprise but rose to the occasion. Neither the Fuller Brush people nor the occupants of the jail on that hot summer afternoon had any idea that the tall youth was launching a preaching ministry that would take him around the world to preach to millions of people.
5804 Moody’s Frustrated Beginnings
Moody had no more than a 5th-6th-grade education and did poorly even at that. When he attended his first Sunday school class he thumbed through Genesis looking for John. When applying to join Mt. Vernon Congregational Church, he was rejected because of utter ignorance of Christian teaching. His friends thought that seldom did anyone seem more unlikely to fill any sphere of public or extended usefulness. But God can take what seems small and insignificant and use it greatly, if it is given over completely to Him.
5805 Sold For Roll Of Tobacco
Many years ago a company of slaves were sold by auction in a Nigerian market place, and a poor little boy was placed on the auction block. He had such a miserable appearance that the slave buyers laughed at the suggestion to bid for him, and he was bought for a roll of tobacco. He walked to the coast with a gang of slaves and was put in the hold of a ship bound for America. But the ship was captured by the British, who took the slaves to Freetown and set them at liberty. The little boy was put in the charge of missionaries.
Many years later in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in the presence of church dignitaries and statesmen and nobles there was consecrated the first bishop of Nigeria. It was the little boy who was sold for a roll of tobacco, Bishop Samuel Crowter, who did a wonderful work for God in Nigeria, where his name is still revered as a true hero of the Lord Jesus.
—J. S. Hall
5806 A Moravian’s “Failure”
A Moravian missionary named George Smith went to Africa. He had been there only a short time and had only one convert, a poor woman, when he was driven from the country. He died shortly afterward, on his knees, praying for Africa. He was considered a failure.
But a company of men stumbled onto the place where he had prayed and found a copy of the Bible he had left. Presently they met the one poor woman who was his convert.
A hundred years later his mission counted more than 13,000 living converts who had sprung from the ministry of George Smith.
—A. J. Gordon
5807 Of Banana Trees And Readers
When John Williams, the martyr missionary of Eromanga, went to the South Sea Islands, he took with him a single banana tree from an English nobleman’s conservatory. And now, from that single banana-tree, bananas are to be found throughout whole groups of islands.
Before the Negro slaves in the West Indies were emancipated a regiment of British soldiers was stationed near one of the plantations. A soldier offered to teach a slave to read, on condition that he would teach a second, and that second a third, and so on. This he faithfully carried out, though severely flogged by the master of the plantation. Being sent to another plantation, he repeated the same thing there, and when at length liberty was proclaimed throughout the islands, and the Bible Society offered a New Testament to every Negro who could read, the number taught through this slave’s instrumentality was no less than 600.
—Irish Congregational
5808 Small Beginnings (1)
COLUMBUS was the son of a weaver, and a weaver himself. CERVANTES was a common soldier. HOMER was the son of a small farmer. MOLIERE was the son of a cutler. TERENCE was a slave. OLIVER CROMWELL was the son of a London brewer. HOWARD was an apprentice to a grocer. FRANKLIN was a journeyman printer, and son of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. DR. THOMAS, Bishop of Worcester, was the son of a linen-draper.
DANIEL DEFOE was a hostler, and son of a butcher. WHITEFIELD was the son of an innkeeper at Gloucester. VIRGIL was the son of a porter. HORACE was the son of a shopkeeper. SHAKESPEARE was the son of a woodstapler. MILTON was the son of a money-scrivener. ROBERT BURNS was a ploughman in Ayrshire.
MOHAMMED, called the prophet, was a driver of asses. MOHAMET ALI was a barber. MADAME BERNADOTTE was a washerwoman of Paris. NAPOLEON, descendant of an obscure family of Corsica, was a major when he married Josephine, the daughter of a tobacconist Creole of Martiniaue. GEN. ESCARTERO was a vestry clerk. BOLIVAR was a druggist.
VASCO DA GAMA was a sailor. JOHN JACOB ASTOR once sold apples in the streets of New York. CATHERINE, Empress of Russia, was a camp-grisette. CINCINNATUS was ploughing in his vineyard when the dictatorship of Rome was offered him. ELIHU BURRITT was a blacksmith.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN was a rail-splitter. GEN. GRANT was a tanner. COM. VANDERBILT was a ferryman. DANIEL DREW was a poor widow’s son. SENATOR WILSON was a cobbler. GEN. BANKS says that he graduated at a university which had a waterwheel at the bottom, and a bell on the top.
5809 Small Beginnings (2)
GLADSTONE gave no evidence of unusual ability as a boy. NAPOLEON stood forty-second in his class at the military academy; but who ever heard of the other forty-one? PATRICK HENRY was a lazy boy, uninterested in study; he failed at business, at farming, and again in business; then he tried law, and American history tells the rest of the story.
DARWIN, the scientist, could never master any language; his father accused him of being interested only in dogs, shooting, and rat-catching, and said he would be a disgrace to the family. HENRY WARD BEECHER, as a boy, was a “poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance and a bashful reticence which people took for stolid stupidity.” BOOKER T. WASHINGTON was born a slave, had an early life of most unusual struggle, and became one of the most valued educators of his time. GRANT had a dismal time as a tanner and a farmer, and found himself in distinguished military service.
5810 Small Beginnings (3)
MICHAEL FARADAY, the greatest philosopher of his time, started from a blacksmith’s anvil. SHAKESPEARE held horses at the door of a London theater before he held the attention of all ages. The path of life opened for ROBERT BURNS in a ploughboy’s furrow. GEORGE PEABODY endowed a library in the village where once he had saved wood. The shoemaker’s last would have been the most appropriate coat-of-arms for WILLIAM CAREY, the missionary.
HERSCHEL played in a brass band before God called him up to listen to the music of the spheres and the orchestra of the morning stars. A barbershop was the starting place of COPERNICUS, the astronomer, and JEREMY TAYLOR, the ecclesiast. A mason’s trowel was the weapon with which HUGH MILLER, the geologist, began to fight the battle of life. In 1869 H. J. HEINZ planted a small plot of horseradish. He and two women and a boy grated and bottled the root. J. L. KRAFT was a grocery clerk who started with a capital of 65 dollars to peddle cheese from a one-horse wagon. COCA-COLA was first made in the kitchen of an old home adjoining Mr. Pemberton’s Drug Store. CHARLES W. POST made the first Postum in a barn.
5811 Small Beginning (4)
JAY GOULD started out to conquer the world, with fifty cents, and left $70,000,000. MORGAN, the great banker, was a clerk in a country store. CORNELIUS VANDERBILT took cabbages and turnips to the New York market in a little sailing craft. STEWART, the merchant-prince of his day, began his business career on a capital of $3,000. P. D. ARMOUR ran away from home when he was seventeen and walked to California.
PULLMAN was a clerk in a store. MARK TWAIN as a boy was thrown on the world to sink or swim, and he did not only swim, but commanded a Mississippi River steamboat. GEORGE W. CHILDS was an errand boy in a bookstore. JOHN WANAMAKER was the son of a brickmaker. JOHN G. WHITTIER was the son of a small farmer. LELAND STANDFORD was another farmer’s boy. SIR JOHN MCDONALD, Canada’s greatest statesman, was the son of a plain Scottish storekeeper.
—Saturday Evening Post
5812 A Spring So Small
Away among the Alleghenies there is a spring, so small that a single ox could drain it dry on a summer day. It steals its unobtrusive way among the hills, till it spreads out into the beautiful Ohio: thence it stretches away a thousand miles, leaving on its banks more than a hundred villages and cities, and many thousand cultivated farms, and bearing on its bosom more than half a thousand steamboats. Then joining the Mississippi, it stretches away some twelve hundred miles or more, until it falls into the great ocean.
5813 The Amazon’s Start
The mighty Amazon begins as a mere, icy trickle from an Andes glacier.
As the Amazon surges across the torrid wilderness, hundreds of tributaries pour their waters into it. Torrential rains swell the flood. Now the Amazon is no longer a river; it is, instead, a moving inland sea that drains nearly half of South America.
So great is the river’s power that even when it reaches the Atlantic the Amazon refuses to die. It floods the ocean with fresh, muddy water for up to 100 miles offshore.
—David Reed
See also: Antichrist ; Progress ; Small Things.