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Observe —

I. ON WHAT A SMALL TENURE GREAT RESULTS HANG. The ropemaker had no idea how much depended on the strength of his workmanship. How if that rope had broken and the apostolic life had been dashed out? On that one rope how much depended! So it has been ever and again. What ship of many thousand tons ever had so important a personage as once was in a small boat of papyrus on the Nile? How if some crocodile had crunched it? The parsonage at Epworth took fire, and seven of the children were safe, but the eighth was in the consuming building. How much depended on that ladder of peasant shoulders ask the millions of Methodists on both sides the sea, ask the hundreds of thousands of people who have already joined their founder. An English vessel put in at Pitcairn Island, and found right amid the surroundings of cannibalism and squalor a Christian colony with schools and churches. Where did it come from? Missionaries had never landed there. Sixty years before a vessel on the sea was in disaster, and a sailor, finding that he could save nothing else, went to a trunk and took out the Bible which his mother gave him, and swam ashore with the book between his teeth. That book was read and re-read until the heathen were evangelised. There are no insignificances in our lives. The minutiae make up the magnitude. If you make a rope make it stout, for you do not know how much may depend upon your workmanship.

II. UNRECOGNISED SERVICE. Who are those people holding that rope? Who tied it to the basket? Who steadied the apostle as he stepped in? Their names have not come to us, and yet the work they did eclipses all that was done that day in Damascus and the round world over. Are there not unrecognised influences at work in your life? Is there not a cord reaching from some American, Scottish, or Irish, or English home, some cord of influence that has held you right when you would have gone astray, or pulled you back when you had made a crooked track? It may be a rope thirty years long, three thousand miles long, and the hands may have gone out of mortal sight; but they held the rope! One of the glad excitements of heaven will be to hunt up those people who did good work on earth but never got any credit for it. If others do not make us acquainted with them God will take us through. Come, let us go around and look at the circuit of brilliant thrones. Why, those people must have done something very wonderful on earth. "Who art thou, mighty one of heaven?" Answer: "I was by choice the unmarried daughter that stayed at home to take care of father and mother in their old days." "Is that all?" "That is all." Pass along. "Who art thou?" "I was for thirty years an invalid. I wrote letters of condolence to those whom I thought were worse off than I. I sometimes was well enough to make a garment for the poor family on the back lane." "Is that all?" "That is all." Pass further along. "Who art thou?" "I was a mother who brought up a large family of children for God. Some of them are Christian mechanics, some are Christian merchants, some are Christian wives." "Is that all? .... That is all." Pass along a little further. "Who art thou?" "I had a Sabbath school class on earth, and I had them on my heart until they all came into the kingdom of God, and now I am waiting for them." "Is that all?" "That is all." Pass a little further along the circuit of thrones. "Who art thou, mighty one of heaven?" "In time of bitter persecution I owned a house in Damascus, and the balcony reached over the wall, and a minister who preached Christ was pursued, and I hid him away from the assassins, and when I could no more seclude him I told him to fly for his life, and in a basket this maltreated one was let down over the wall, and I was one who helped hold the rope."

III. HENCEFORTH CONSIDER NOTHING UNIMPORTANT THAT YOU ARE CALLED TO DO, IF IT BE ONLY TO HOLD A ROPE. A Cunard steamer had splendid equipment, but in putting up a stove in the pilot house a nail was driven too near the compass. The ship's officer, deceived by that distracted compass, put the ship two hundred miles off the right course. One night the man on the look-out shouted, "Land, ho! "within a few rods of demolition on Nantucket shoals. A sixpenny nail came near wrecking a Cunarder. Small ropes hold great destinies. In 1871 a minister in Boston sat by his table writing. He could not get the right word, and he put his hands behind his head and tilted back the chair, trying to recall that word, when the ceiling fell and crushed the desk over which a moment before he had been leaning. A missionary in Jamaica was kept by the light of an insect called a candle fly from stepping off a precipice a hundred feet. F.W. Robertson declared that he was brought into the ministry through a train of circumstances started by the barking of a dog. If the wind had blown one way the Spanish Inquisition would have been established in England. Nothing unimportant in your life or mine. Place six noughts on the right side of the figure "1," and you have a million. Place our nothingness on the right side, and you have augmentation illimitable; but be sure you are on the right side.

(T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.).

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KJV: If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities.

WEB: If I must boast, I will boast of the things that concern my weakness.