ONE day, when I was a boy, my uncle invited me with some other young friends to have tea and spend the evening at his house.
During the evening we were asked to partake of fruit and figs. Now, I was very fond of figs; nothing was a greater treat to me. Well, while we were enjoying these good things, someone said,
“I should not be much surprised if the dust on these figs is alive with insects.”
This seemed to me impossible, as I had never seen anything of the kind on figs before. I knew that rotten cheese, bad meat, and stagnant water had insects; but figs, the nicest of all things to my taste, could not, I thought, be like that.
“Let us see,” said my uncle; and he brought his microscope from the next room, and soon had it adjusted on the table. He then took some dust from a fig, put it on a slip of glass, and placed it under the microscope.
After looking for a minute or two, he said,
“Come and look for yourselves.”
I ran to the table, and looked through the tube, and saw two or three insects that looked like tiny fat pigs. They seemed to be turning over and eating the best of the food.
Seeing us look so disappointed when we found that the sweet figs had such insects crawling over them, my uncle said,
“Why, what has the glass done?”
We knew that the glass had done nothing, except to open our eyes to the actual state of the figs.
“Surely it is better to know the truth, than be deceived, though I fear by your looks, that you wish you had not seen the insects, so that you might enjoy the figs more,” my uncle said.
I have never forgotten that evening, nor the microscope and what it taught us, and I sometimes think whether the Bible is not a kind of microscope for us now, because it shows us the truth about everything; it reveals the true state of our hearts, and the true state of the world in which we live.
One of the things that the Bible tells is, that by nature, our hearts are “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Then it tells us the other side of the truth; how we may be cleansed from all our sins and evil ways; how we may be made fit for the presence of God in heaven through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
ML 05/17/1925