Isaiah 33:23 Your tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail… Do you know that the three great poets of the world were totally blind? Homer, Ossian, John Milton. Do you know that Mr. Prescott, who wrote that enchanting book The Conquest of Mexico, never saw Mexico, could not even see the paper on which he was writing? A framework across the sheet, between which up and down went his pen immortal. Do you know that Gambassio, the sculptor, could not see the marble before him, or the chisel with which he cut it into shapes bewitching? Do you know that Alexander Pope, whose poems will last as long as the English language, was so much of an invalid that he had to be sewed up every morning m rough canvas in order to stand on his feet at all? Do you know that Stuart, the celebrated painter, did much of his wonderful work under the shadow of the dungeon where he had been unjustly imprisoned for debt? Do you know that Demosthenes by almost superhuman exertion first had to conquer the lisp of his own speech before he conquered assemblages with his eloquence? Do you know that Bacon struggled up through innumerable sicknesses, and that Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott went limping on club-foot through all their life, and that many of the great poets, and painters, and orators, and historians, and heroes of the world had something to keep them back, and pull them down, and impede their way, and cripple their physical or their intellectual movement, and yet that they pushed on and pushed up until they reached the spoils of worldly success, and amid the huzzas of nations and centuries "the lame took the prey"? You know that a vast multitude of these men started under the disadvantage of obscure parentage. Columbus, the son of the weaver; Ferguson, the astronomer, the son of the shepherd. America the prey of the one, worlds on worlds the prey of the other. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail: then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey. |
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