United States or Eswatini ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I fought for thee well, When the savage rushed forth like the demons from hell In peace or in war I have stood by thy side My country, for thee I have lived, would have died! But I am cast off, my career now is run, And I wander abroad like the prodigal son Where the wild savage roves, and the broad prairies spread, The fallen despised will again go ahead."
One of the most celebrated, certainly one of the most spectacular, duels of history took place in the park at Saint Germain-en-Laye. Gui Chabot de Jarnac lived a prodigal and profligate life at the expense it was said of the favours of the Duchesse d'Étampes.
Instead of gorgeous packets crowded with a gay and prodigal throng of travelers for pleasure, we now find most often one dingy, puffing steamboat, probably with no passenger accommodations at all, but which pushes before her from Pittsburg to New Orleans more than a score of flatbottomed, square-nosed scows, aggregating perhaps more than an acre of surface, and heavy laden with coal.
This fact of human mutability, this inherent changeableness in man, is the key to many of the darkest chapters of the world's history. The prodigal, the traitor, the vow-breaker, these have ever been far more fruitful sources of anguish and misery than the life-long rebel and law-breaker.
"Ah!" he added after a while, "my dear boy dearer to me than you can tell the truth is, I covet for you the unutterable blessing of a youth given to GOD. What that is, some know, and many a man converted late in life has imagined with heart-wrung envy: an Augustine, already numbered with the Saints, a Prodigal robed and decked with more than pardon, haunted yet by dark shadows of the past, the husks and the swine.
They, as before, whatever the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons did, remained immune from thoughts other than those they were accustomed to. All their lives they had seen, year by year, the amazing recurrent spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had made it invisible to them. They were as blind to it, as unconscious of it, as Domenico's dog asleep in the sun.
Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon.
And what was he to do when it was spent? If want would drive him home, the sooner he came to it the better! We pity the prodigal with his swine, but then first a ray of hope begins to break through the darkness of his fate. To do nothing was nearly unendurable, and she saw nothing to do. She could only wait, and it took all the patience and submission she could find.
Over this part of the road is no peace; but continue, and, little by little, peace comes. We say that we must find Christ; but where, and how, shall we find this Mighty Lord, Who comes out from the Father to meet the Prodigal? Must we study in ecclesiastical colleges, travel to distant lands, visit holy places, kneel on celebrated sacred ground, kiss stones, attend ceremonies, look at bones? No!
As the prodigal attempted to keep body and soul together by the most desperate and loathsome expedients, rather than throw himself on his father's compassion; so an alienated human soul, conscious of having wantonly offended a good God, and therefore hating deeply the Holy One, will bear and do the will of the wicked one to the utmost extremity of misery rather than come home a beggar, and be indebted for all to a father's love.
Word Of The Day