Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 13 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

BUT FEW NOW KNOW about log meeting houses in all this central west, yet they were common in the opening of the country. Won­derful meetings have been held in them. Heaven will be richer for the work wrought in these rude places of worship. Grand characters were forged there. There were sound conversions. There were vigorous gospel sermons. The stal­warts of the last generation were spiritually born there, where “the old-time religion” we now sing about was in the full bloom of its glory. What if they had no gothic architecture, chancel win­dows, or carpeted aisles? They had what is infinitely better, actual sal­vation that saved. What if they had no fine turnouts and cushioned pews? They had the fine array of the saints, which was so well pleasing to God. Ah! good old days of simplicity and faith that took hold of God!

The plat of ground on which the church stood was not large. The build­ing was in [continue reading…]

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 3 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

THERE ARE OTHER FACTORS than nature around us whose environments have large part in molding and shaping all young life. Parental influence is both pre- and post-natal. Doubtless there are hereditary tendencies in our nature which largely affect us; but greater, perhaps, are the early home life influences. I remember Bishop William Taylor² told us, when speaking of the children born in Africa, that they were not born heathen, though born on heathen soil, and that if they were taken before they had learned the ways of their people, they were no more heathen than our children. This makes but little place for hereditary influence, and places the more weighty bulk of evidence in favor of early life and teachings.

Traveling in review the byways of my early life, I notice there is much in hereditary and early family life that has helped to make me what I am, though it was not until later years I came to any [continue reading…]

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 4 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

COUNTRY AND HOME have their universal impress on the race. Among other well-defined environments that help largely to make us what we are is the home church and its life and in­flu­ence. As the years move me away from life’s first sights, sounds, and im­pres­sions, the old church crops out more and more like the rocks on my na­tive hills.

The old log church was a very primitive affair. It was not a quarter of a mile from the old home, up a little incline to the top of the ridge, and through a strip of old-time forest which the axe had but little marred. The bur­ial of my grandfather was the first gathering of the people ever held at the place. There in the deep, dark woods they laid him to rest, when as yet the trees had kept their silent and solemn guard for long centuries. When I came to know the place, a nice plat of ground had all been nicely cleared off, fenced, sown in grass, and planted with some shrubbery, and was already marked with a number of [continue reading…]

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 2 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

IT IS HARDLY FAIR to refer all the meaning there is in these words of inspiration to the mineral treasures hid in the hills, or their wealth of timber or pasture, or in their springs, or rugged fastnesses, na­ture’s strong fortifications. “Our fathers worshiped in this moun­tain,” said Jesus.² Always in the heights of the hills has there been a sug­ges­tive­ness in the minds of the races, that as heaven was “on high,” so the heights were nearer to God. It is true also that re­markable events, some of them the most momentous that humanity knows, occurr­ed on these same heights. The second cradling of the race was on Mt. Ararat.³ The Law for God’s whole world was a mountaintop revelation.⁴ Mount Mor­iah was the scene of Abraham’s greatest trial,⁵ and the heaven-ap­point­ed place [continue reading…]

Copyright © 2007¹

Chapter 1 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

The above words of the poet Hood² tell with simplicity and ever fresh­ness just a few things which draw after them memories ev­ery heart weaves into its own life story. The following from our own Bryant³ no less touch the deep memories of life’s first years.

I stand upon my native hill again,
Broad, round, and green, that, in the southern sky
With garniture of waving grass and grain,
Orchards and beechen forests, basking lie;
While deep the sunless glens are scooped between,
Where brawl o’er shallow beds the streams unseen.⁴

One cannot well escape [continue reading…]

Copyright © 2007¹

Introduction to the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

There are days when the tides of life seem turned back, and we obey the divine injunction, “Remember the days of old.”² It is not that we have willed to do so, or had so planned it. These days just come. They have their own times and seasons. We know not their day and hour. We cannot produce them at will. They drift in on us as a “sweet refrain,” setting aside the present or so molding it and suffusing it with a softened, mellowed light that life is ever afterward different, owing to the new meaning brought in. We pay little attention to these memories. We may not even cherish the occasion or give the suggested thought any special attention.

Perhaps these seasons belong more to middle and post-meridian life than to youth, and yet I remember they began with me early. After the win­ter school closed and the long vacation followed, and I saw not the happy faces any more, I remember how fondly, and yet with a cherished sadness, the hours of remembrance would come on me and make me almost live over the lost hours. Later, when school life, [continue reading…]

Public Domain (with exceptions)¹

Isaiah Reid

Have you not gone oftentimes to the post office or waited anxiously for the postman, and failed to get the letter you anticipated? Your heart could not quit its sighing for hours. Perhaps this has lengthened out into weeks, till hope dropped exhausted, and the heart grew dazed and dead. Unexpected, undesired silence is awful. We can bear many other grievances better than silence where we expected speech. “She would not speak to me!” My! How the very thought wrenches the heart strings! How the very feet drag along the way, and the hands forget their skill²—so quickly does the physical respond to the spiritual.

The cold lips in [continue reading…]

Copyright © 2007¹

chapter 10 from the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

A Mother’s Day Tribute²

Mother had a catechism which was called The Child’s Catechism. She used it for teaching us before we could read. She asked questions, and answered them either according to the book or with her own “Notes” and personal explanations and illustrations. The first question in the book was “Who created you?” The answer was in a monosyllable, “God.”

I have never been able to get away from that teaching. It was in harmony with the Lord’s Prayer she taught me a little later, beginning with the same Person, only the name was changed to “Our Father.” From that day I always believed that God was my Father in the creation sense, and that He was the Creator of all souls, and ruler of this world. I could never believe that I was a “child of the devil.” In sin I acted like a child of the devil, and was on his side, but all this while I was a prodigal from home. While in sin, and I read from the Bible, “All souls [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

by
Isaiah Reid

If you want a happy New Year,
be up to date!²

The word for the closing and opening years should be “Up to Date.” We need not sit down in tears over the past which is gone. We had better be on our feet for a move forward. We must some way bring our past up to date, settled, canceled, cleared up to the present, or we will not have a fair start for the New Year. The sooner we actually get our whole past under the blood, certainly, and surely, and have witness to the same, the sooner we will be ready for our tomorrow. We need to be paid up to date and prayed up, and forgiven up, and cleansed up to date, and consecrated up to the [continue reading…]

Copyright 2007, 2019 by Jim Kerwin¹

A chapter from the book
Sunnyside Papers: Inspirational Sketches
from God’s “Book of Nature”
by
Isaiah Reid

Bountiful, yes — and thankful!²

It is November.³ We have had an old-time Iowa fall. The charming weather has been just like a northern Florida winter, save the softness and balminess of the air. But doubtless for Iowa, the atmosphere we have had is better for us than that in Florida would have been. What is all right for one part of the country is not always the best thing for the other. Certainly, our fall has charmed everyone; and could it last, no one would care to go to California or to [continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

Chapter 5 of Soul-Help Papers
by
Isaiah Reid

“The inside joy shines out
with attractive power.”⁴

What does this mean? This: the seeing power is in us, not in that which is to be seen. Like a coal miner, I carry the light I see by. Wanting a book the other evening, I carried a lamp into the dark room and by the lamp found the book. The light I found the book by was not in the book, but with me; though the book had light in it. Our lamp of comprehension gives the admeasurement⁵ of our view. “In thy light shall we see light.”⁶ “And cannot see afar off,” says the Word.⁷ Why? Some did. “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”⁸ Christ’s “beam pulling”⁹ furnishes the answer. The “evil eye” cannot see what other eyes see. Many have eyes, but not all see. There is a man in Southern Iowa who can’t see any good in holiness. But his wife and daughter see in it what they would not give in exchange for a whole world. Why? All have good natural eyes. All have a very good degree of intelligence. All know the rudiments of salvation.

[continue reading…]

Public Domain¹

Chapter 6 of Soul-Help Papers
by
Isaiah Reid

“What pains He has taken to secure us
from anxious fretting, forethought and worry!
Just one day at a time.”²

“As thy day, so shall thy strength be.” Not as my day or the day of someone else. Not as yesterday. Not as tomorrow. Each day for itself. Each individual for himself. Life is not a repetition, nor a return to its past self. Life is a continuity, and yet ever new—coming out of the past, and yet always going on into a future unlike that which has been. Life’s “now-ness” is a perpetual characteristic which forever keeps it from being tired of itself. [continue reading…]

by
Rev. Isaiah Reid

Copyright © 2007¹

“This flower trumpet also tells of transformed life.”²

Daffodil days are here again. There are season days that come but once a year. Especially are these marked in springtime and autumn. Such days are peculiarly illustrated. The finest designs and engravings are put in Nature’s Almanac during these weeks. They may vary some at times, but are as regular in their marking of the seasons as the stars. We can mark months and years by God’s floral designs. The Daffodils and Easter are almost synchronous. This year they came two days before Easter. Though not first in the list of blooms, yet they lift their trumpets as if to proclaim the special gladness of the hour. They seem born to announce something special. Other flowers have their story, but what came these to announce? Nothing but the best things, for they are so pure and so royally adorned in the richest of gold, surrounded by their white perianth lifted high above their linear leaves of green. Out of the black mold,³ into rich green, then a corolla of white out of which is lifted the golden trumpet. And, as if this were not enough, fragrance is added, as if this trumpet was both an instrument of announcement and a censer waving in a temple service, dispensing incense with every passing whisper of the winds. [continue reading…]