to step out, look at it in its window
a minute--possibly take a look too at the other window--and they would
be good.
If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and would take a
step up to The Window, and take one firm look at it in The Window--see
it lying there, its twenty years' evil, its twenty days', its twenty
minutes' evil, all branching up out of it--he would be good.
When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other and really
see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do right automatically.
Wild horses cannot drag a man away from doing right if he sees what the
right is.
A little while ago in a New England city where the grade crossings had
just been abolished, and where the railroad wound its way on a huge
yellow sandbank through the most beautiful part of the town, a
prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a letter to the President of
the Company suggesting that the railroad (for a comparatively small
sum, which he mentioned) plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs. A
letter came the next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do
it. He might quite justifiably have been indignant and flung himself
into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would have been
the regular and conventional thing to do under the circumstances. But it
occurred to him instead, being a man of a curious and practical mind,
that possibly he did not know how to express himself to railroad
presidents, and that his letter had not said what he meant. He thought
he would try again, and see what would happen if he expressed himself
more fully and adequately. He took for it this second time a box seven
feet long. The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture by a
landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look when planted with
trees and with shrubs, and the other a photograph--a long panorama of
the same embankment as it then stood with its two great broadsides of
yellowness trailing through the city. The box containing the rolls was
sent without comment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the
bottom of the pictures.
A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for his
suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made into a park at
once.
If God had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues, and had
furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if all a man had to
do at any particular time of temptation was to take out just th
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