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TWO PRIME MINISTERS.

BY JOHN ZAHND.

T MATTERS NOT how a man gets his education, so he gets it with honor, and becomes truly educated. Having gotten it, the manner of its application to the great principles of life depends on the man. We present here two pictures of two very human lives.

Picture No. 1 has a far-away perspective indeed. It is so very far back on the sky-line of history that it seems almost the romance of legend. It is not, however. It is a real drama of life. It is a shepherd scene in the Orient.

The towering Lebanon mountains framed in the northland. the west are the far-away peaks of blue Gilboa's range. To the east, lesser billowing ranges, with many broken gaps and peaks, hide the great sea. Far away to the south is Sinai and the desert. In the center is a most wonderful valley, threaded by a silvery river flowing from the snow-crowned heights of the north barriers of mountains. Several lake expansions accentuate the beauty of the scene, which in that far-off time was sylvan and pastural.

In one particularly beautiful valley dwells an old sheik or patriarch. He has twelve sons. One is a lad of some sixteen summers. His father loves him as the son of his old age. This doting love is misunderstood by his brothers, and brings jealousy and a train of evils. The boy is a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions; not a bad sign, but he talks too much.

One day the father sends him on a mission of loving service to his shepherd brothers. Cruelly they bind him and sell him as a slave into Egypt, and then lie to the sorrow-stricken father. The boy comes into the household of one of the king's generals. He makes good. Though a slave, he soon rises to the position of superintendent of the estate. After nearly twelve years of loyal service, on a most dastardly charge he is unjustly thrown into prison. Here he is soon made a "trusty" and acts as deputy warden of the jail. He holds this enforced job for two years, when knowledge of his character and wisdom is brought to the king. He is raised from the dungeon cell to the throne. He is made Prime Minister of the greatest realm of antiquity, and holds this office for upwards of forty years.

It is a simple, wonderful story, filled with intensely human interest and pathos. It is a drama, a romance, an idyl, all in one. Joseph, the towering personality of the picture, compels our reverence and study.

As a child of the desert, in that far-off time, he was schooled in the open. Syrian skies smiled down on him. The flowers and mountains and stars talked to him, singing birds and rippling fountains brought messages for him. Amid the grandeurs and the silences and the beauties of that simple life in those old, old days, this rare spirit unfolded. Little wonder he saw visions and dreamed dreams. The divine was enthroned in his personality; and power, wisdom, possession, kingship-all were his. He came into his own

because his faith claimed it. He never doubted his ability. relied on self. He was loyal to the highest within him. He was always prepared for the next thing. He was a radiating center of influence. He gained the heights because the heights were in

himself.

Now across a gap of four thousand years, look at another picture. It is a modest English home, of taste, refinement, and literary culture; there are several children, one a pale, curly-headed little fellow, is named Benjamin, after his grandfather. This grandfather years before had fled from the persecuting tyranny of Spain to the quiet refuge of English liberty. The boy attended a private school, "browsed" in his father's library, and was an omnivorous reader of history, politics, biography, and literature.

His father mapped out a business career for him. The son turned to travel in Europe, took up law, studied diplomacy, men, events, history in the making, social science, and economics. He wrote tracts, essays, and fiction, embodying his own ideas of the sciences of law and government. He believed a business career was more than mere "trade and get rich." He looked upon all earnest work in whatever field as business. He set no narrow bounds to a man's life. He believed in the infinity of human power. He was but ten years old when Napoleon met his defeat at the hands of the "Iron Duke" on the field of Waterloo. At the age of thirty he entered politics and took his seat in the English Commons. In his maiden speech he was rudely laughed down by the members. With a haughty retort of defiance and prophecy he said, "I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me, and when I rise in the assembly hereafter, a dropped pin shall be heard." In his confidential letters to his sister about this period he said: "My motto is: Forte Nihil Difficule [To the strong, nothing is difficult]. I will succeed."

In 1835 Lord Melbourne asked: "What is your ambition in entering politics?" "To be prime minister, my Lord," was the prompt reply. With clear-sighted vision he scanned the political heavens and became convinced that a new alignment of parties must be made. Labor was struggling for its rights. He allied himself with the movement. He stood for opinions. He was a political philosopher profoundly inspired. He shaped his opinions and then created a party which should hold them. He courted opposition and smiled at contempt. He would sustain himself in great truths.

He became a power in parliament. Three times he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. After thirty-five years of untiring service and patient waiting, his dream was realized. In 1868 he became Prime Minister of the British Empire, for the first time. Then again he held the premiership for six years from 1874 to 1880. During this time he was made a peer of the realm, the Earl of Beaconsfield being his lordly title. He made Queen Victoria, on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, Empress of India. Russia was

balked in her ambitious designs on a southward march to empire in Asia, and was sternly halted on the Dardanelles by the Treaty of Berlin. A master business stroke gained for England the control of the Suez Canal, by the purchase of twenty million dollars of the stock. But the great man's work was nearly done. For a short time he was leader of the House of Lords. He died in April, 1881, at the ripe age of seventy-seven. The world uncovered at his bier. Not since the death of Wellington was there such an outburst of love and sorrow. A few days after his burial, Queen Victoria, with tears flowing down her cheeks, placed with her own hands a beautiful wreath of immortelles on his grave.

He was a great man who scaled the heights of fortune and won the battle of life against great odds which seemed to be irresistible; and who at the gloomiest moments of his career, never lost heart or hope. So we have before us two lads who became kings in all the term implies. Both were from that old, high-souled race, to which the world owes so much-the Hebrew. Each in his place made world history. Each exemplified to a marked degree ability, reliability, endurance, and action. Why did these two boys become each in his time prime minister of a great empire? Was it chance, or a chain of fortuitous circumstances which accounted for this development?

I put it this way: "You, the ego, possess all the positive faculties and qualities." It is the old, ever new, persistent, insistent question of development. Joseph, the clean young man of ancient Egypt, and Disraeli, the clean young man of modern England, each let God, the divine, in them have right of way in his life.

Editor's Corner

AUTUMN LEAVES is published monthly for the youth of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Herald Publishing House, Lamoni, Iowa.

ELBERT A. SMITH, Editor, Lamoni, Iowa.

How often have we waking heard
The singing of the morning bird,
The murmur of the prairie breeze
Among the green and leafy trees.
The day, like youth, is strangely stirred
With life, vitality, and hope,
To climb the rugged hillside slope
And wander where it please.

And from the tree or from the wall
We hear the robin redbreast call:

The day is beginning to break,
To flutter and sigh and to wake;

To flutter and sigh

Where the tree-tops high

Have whispered their words on the winds to the sky
And down to the river and lake.

The hours that seem not overlong,
Go flitting by with jest and song,
With merrymaking and with play,
Until, like life, the summer day

Begins to murmur and grow strong.

The brain grows strong, the heart grows numb,
The air resounds with whir and hum,

And youth is far away.

From out the cooler woodland shade

The brown thrush cries o'er hill and glade:

The noon sun is scorching and high,

Is scorching the leaves brown and dry.
The air seems to fill

On meadow and hill

With heat like a furnace, to glow, and stand still;
The flowers to wither and die.

The slant sun strikes the window-pane

And makes it glow a ruddy stain.

The wind, as some poor thing distressed,
Goes sadly sighing to its rest;

The day, like life, begins to wane,

The air is damp with dew, as tears;
But now the afterglow appears,

A glory in the west;

And from the wheat and from the corn
The whistle of the quail is borne:

The dew is beginning to fall,

"More wet" with its healing for all.

To fall and to shine

On the trembling vine

And leaves, till the flowers cease to wither and pine,—
The night damp is thick on the wall.

THE MINISTER WHO WAS DIFFERENT.

CHAPTER 6.

(Synopsis of preceding chapters: Sidney Luther is an eloquent and able minister, in charge of the Walnut Street Church in the city of P. His study of the Bible leads him to teach some things that are not in harmony with his church creed. Two "pillars" of the church call upon him to remonstrate. He is out and they are met by the minister's wife. They claim that they have the right to say what he shall preach because they pay his salary. The wife tells them that they can not hire her husband to preach anything, that he can not be bought and sold. At the Sunday night service Luther decides to resign his pastorate. He is comforted by Mr. McBernie, an aged Scotchman, who assures him that the Lord will take care of him. McBernie visits the Walnut Street Church some months later and finds a new man in the pulpit. He hears a sermon on "dry bones" and decides that the sermon is quite like the subject. He meets a man in blue overalls and learns that it is Sidney Luther, now engaged in manual labor as a tanner. Luther continues his search for truth and light. He becomes nominally connected with a more liberal church. He is surprised to receive a letter from McBernie who urges him to come to Mentone and engage in church work. He accepts the proposition and moves to Mentone where he becomes very successful as a minister. McBernie's son, Donald, returns from college. He meets the minister's sister and acquires a taste for religion. Luther encounters the elders of the

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