Read "House Beautiful" by Charlotte Maria Tucker online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
WE look on a dry and withered thing, killed by the worm, shrivelled by the heat. Not so appeared the plant when its broad leaves, full of life and beauty, afforded a cool green shade to the prophet Jonah. The gourd formed a kind of bower, under the shadow of which the weary could rest, and was thus a beautiful emblem of that charity which "covereth a multitude of sins."
It was a worm at the root which destroyed it; and when we read in the sacred story how, with Jonah himself, charity was so dried up and withered that God's mercy to thousands could afford him pain instead of joy, we naturally ask,-What was the worm at the root with him? If we search a little under the surface, we shall find that the worm was "pride; " and that, not only with Jonah, but too often with ourselves, hidden pride eats the life out of charity, and leaves but a dry, sapless skeleton, worthless in the sight of God and His angels.