108 Sermon Illustrations on Integrity

Portrait-painting was the deliberate choice of Sir Godfrey Kneller because it was profitable. It was said of him: “Where he offered one picture to fame, he sacrificed twenty to lucre.” He said of himself: “Painters of history make the dead live, and do not begin to live themselves till they are dead; I paint the living and they enable me to live.” And in this he succeeded, for he painted ten sovereigns, and among other celebrities, Marlborough, Newton and Dryden. He was rewarded, too, by poems written in his honor by Pope, Addison, Steele and others. King William got him to paint the beauties of Hampton Court. (Text.)

A man might as well hoist a ladder in a village at noonday and try to steal the town clock without being observed as to expect to carry off literary ware in our time and not be found out. The newspaper editor, scissors in hand and mucilage on the table, sits up to his chin in exchanges from the four winds of heaven. Beside that, all the world is traveling now. Fares are so cheap and transportation so rapid that before every preacher, and before every lecturer, and before every religious exhorter, there may sit persons from the most unexpected quarter, and if they heard three years ago something delivered in New Orleans which you delivered in Brooklyn, the discovery will be reported. Quote from all books you can lay your hands on. Quote from all directions. It is a compliment to have breadth of reading to be able to quote. But be sure to announce it as a quotation. Ah! how many are making a mistake in this thing; it is a mistake that a man can not afford to make. Four commas upside down--two at the beginning of the paragraph, two at the close of the paragraph--will save many a man’s integrity and usefulness.

— T. DE WITT TALMAGE

A promise may sometimes be binding on the conscience even when not made in specific terms:

M. Fallieres was presiding at a banquet at Agen, when a piece of money dropt from his waistcoat pocket to the floor. His neighbor said: “I think you have let fall a 2f. piece.” But he replied, “Let it be; that will be a lucky find for the waiter,” and he called the latter, whispering to him to look out for a 2f. piece, which he would find somewhere under his seat on the floor. Toward the end of dinner M. Fallieres was seen by his neighbor to be feeling with a preoccupied air in his waistcoat pockets. As he rose he looked round, fancied he was not observed, and gently let a 2f. piece slide down to the floor. His neighbor, who had noticed the strange proceeding, asked M. Fallieres afterward if he would tell him what it meant. “The fact is,” Mr. Fallieres answered, “that I remembered that I keep only coppers in my left-hand pocket, from which the piece dropt that you supposed was 2f., whereas it must have been only 2 sous. So I took out of my right pocket, in which I keep my silver, another coin, which that time really was a 2f. piece, and dropt it for the waiter to find. I did not want to disappoint the man after telling him, you see.” (Text.)

After the Civil War many offers of places of honor and fame came to Gen. Robert E. Lee. He refused them all, says Thomas Nelson Page, in his biography of the soldier. The only position which he finally did accept was the presidency of Washington College, with a small salary.

On one of these occasions Lee was approached with the tender of the presidency of an insurance company at a salary of $50,000 a year. He declined it, saying that it was work with which he was not familiar.

“But, general,” said the representative of the insurance company, “you will not be expected to do any work. What we wish is the use of your name.”

“Don’t you think,” said General Lee, “that if my name is worth $50,000 a year, I ought to be very careful about taking care of it?” (Text.)--_The Youth’s Companion._