Müller

“ Müller had the grace to detect one of the foremost perils of a busy man in this day of insane hurry. He saw that if we are to feed others we must be fed; and that even public and united exercises of praise and prayer can never supply that food which is dealt out to the believer only in the closet—the shut-in place with its closed door and open window, where he meets God alone. ”

“ Many, who like Wilhelm Müller had labored to reanimate German popular feeling; who like him had left the university to sacrifice as common soldiers their life and life's happiness to the freedom of the Fatherland, and who then saw how the terror felt by the scarcely rescued princes of their deliverers, and the fear of foreign nations of a united and strong Germany, joined hand in hand to destroy the precious seed sown in blood and tears,—could not always suppress their gloomy anger at such faint-hearted, weak-minded policy. ”

“ Müller but little, but knew his positive convictions and uncompromising loyalty to them, might suspect that he would have little forbearance with even minor errors, and would not bend himself from his stern attitude of inflexibility to accommodate himself to those who were ensnared by them. But those who knew him better, saw that he held fast the form of sound words with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Like Paul, ever ready to be made all things to all men that by all means he might save some, in his whole character and conduct nothing shone more radiantly beautiful, than Love. ”

“ Let him try, Madame Duphôt--that's all--let him try!"
And with this, Müller, in a towering rage, led the way upstairs, muttering volleys of the most extraordinary and eccentric oaths of his own invention, and leaving the little old portière grinning maliciously in the hall.
"But can't you pay him?" said I.
"Whether I can, or can't, it seems I must," he replied, kicking open the door of his studio as viciously as if it were the corporeal frame of Monsieur Richard. "The only question is--how? At the present moment, I haven't five francs in the till." ”

“ Müller was sincere enough in his abhorrence of the woman who had resisted and then insulted him. The fanatical practices of the Pietists had inflamed his mind, and he really believed God had chosen him to humble the wanton. Old Frau von Grävenitz had talked freely of the favours and honours showered upon her daughter at Stuttgart, and Müller's mad physical jealousy was aroused, for he at once realised that Wilhelmine had become Eberhard Ludwig's mistress. This, together with his fierce fanatical Pietism, had sufficed to turn the man's brain. ”

“ One could see that it was the work of a young painter, who had yet much to learn, and something of the Academy to forget.
"Well," said Müller, still sitting ruefully on the floor, "what do you think of it? Am I rightly served? Shall I send for a big pail of whitewash, and blot it all out?"
"Not for the world!"
"What shall I do, then?"
"Do better."
"But, if I have done my best already?"
"Still do better; and when you have done that, do better again. So genius toils higher and ever higher, and like the climber of the glacier, plants his foot where only his hand clung the moment before." ”

“ My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run. Soldiers pass by me, I hear their voices without understanding. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supply, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.
Müller stands in front of the hut and waits for me. I give him the boots. ”

“ I was promoted to it after a time, for good conduct, you know, and that sort of thing. But--but I began differently--I began by wearing the prison dress, and working in the quarries."
"My good fellow," said Müller, gently, "I half suspected this--I am not surprised; and I respect you for having redeemed that past in the way you have redeemed it."
"Thank you, M'sieur Müller; but you see, redeemed or unredeemed, I'd rather be lying at the bottom of the Seine than have it rise up against me now,"
"We are men of honor," said Müller, "and your secret is safe with us." ”

“ George Müller considered nothing too small to be a subject of prayer, because nothing is too small to be the subject of God's care. If He numbers our hairs, and notes a sparrow's fall, and clothes the grass in the field, nothing about His children is beneath His tender thought. In every emergency, his one resort was to carry his want to his Father. When, in 1858, a legacy of five hundred pounds was, after fourteen months in chancery, still unpaid, the Lord was besought to cause this money soon to be placed in his hands ”

“ George Müller was such an argument and example incarnated in human flesh. Here was a man of like passions as we are and tempted in all points like as we are, but who believed God and was established by believing; who prayed earnestly that he might live a life and do a work which should be a convincing proof that God hears prayer and that it is safe to trust Him at all times; and who has furnished just such a witness as he desired. Like Enoch, he truly walked with God, and had abundant testimony borne to him that he pleased God. ”

“ I looked at Müller to see if he had suddenly gone out of his senses. Mam'selle Marie, however, was infinitely amused.
"Fi donc! monsieur," she said. "You have no fish. I heard the other gentleman say so."
"The other gentleman, mam'selle," replied Müller, "is an Englishman, and troubled with the spleen. You must not mind anything he says."
Troubled with the spleen! I believe myself to be as even-tempered and as ready to fall in with a joke as most men; but I should have liked at that moment to punch Franz Müller's head. ”

“ Johannes Müller had the great and splendid gift of never lying on the shoulders of his pupils with an Alpine weight of authority. It was a secret of his personality that we admire but can hardly express in words to-day. Everybody learned from him what a great individuality is. He exerted a kind of moral suggestion in teaching men to be free, great, enlightened, and true. His pupils have worked at the development of his ideas with absolute freedom. ”

“ All credit is due to him for instilling the principles of fine lines and graceful forms into the minds of the young potters. But it was Müller by day and by night, with long vigils, often all night, at the ovens with his workmen whom he was training to control the caprice of the furnace, who seized the situation and gladly profited by experience in his uphill struggle to establish his factory in the face of all difficulties. Müller had the genius of "moulding men in plastic circumstance." Nor was Luplau the swan he is sometimes thought to have been. ”

“ In a word, Müller owed the success of his career to the perfect poise of his intellect and the admirable critical faculty that guided him in the thorny path of knowledge at a time when there were so few landmarks of real scientific significance to show the investigator what the probable course and progress of real science must be. ”

“ The whole after-life of George Müller proved that God had for him an entirely different plan, which He was not ready yet to reveal, and which His servant was not yet prepared to see or follow. If any man's life ever was a plan of God, surely this life was; and the Lord's distinct, emphatic leading, when made known, was not in this direction. He had purposed for George Müller a larger field than the Indies, and a wider witness than even the gospel message to heathen peoples. He was 'not suffered' to go into 'Bithynia' because 'Macedonia' was waiting for his ministry. ”

“ The passion of George Müller's soul was to know fully the secrets of prevailing with God and with man. George Whitefield's life drove home the truth that God alone could create in him a holy earnestness to win souls and qualify him for such divine work by imparting a compassion for the lost that should become an absorbing passion for their salvation. And—let this be carefully marked as another secret of this life of service—he now began himself to read the word of God upon his knees, and often found for hours great blessing in such meditation and prayer over a single psalm or chapter. ”

“ George Müller proved for himself and for all others who will receive his witness that, to those who are willing to take God at His word and to yield self to His will, He is "the same yesterday and to-day and forever": that the days of divine intervention and deliverance are past only to those with whom the days of faith and obedience are past—in a word, that believing prayer works still the wonders which our fathers told of in the days of old. ”

“ Müller is certainly one of the great names of nineteenth century science. When many another that seems now as well, or perhaps even better known, shall have been lost, his will endure, for his original researches represent the primal step in the great movement that has made possible the advances in nineteenth century medicine. He was honored by his contemporaries, venerated by the men of science who succeeded him ”

“ His utterances on the occasion of the Greek war of liberation prove that, in spite of his reactionary ardour, he had too much sense to believe, like Adam Müller and the rest, in the principle of legitimacy and the divine right of kings as revealed truths. He had written to Müller in 1818: "You are the only man in Germany of whom I say: He writes divinely when he chooses; and nothing in our audacious days astonishes and exasperates me more than the audacity of those who dare to measure themselves with you.... Your system is a completed, rounded whole. ”

“ I keep my hands free; I write openly; I am no hidden reviler of the French, but a public worshipper of all that is sublime. For this reason I have placed here, side by side, the busts of the two greatest men to whom the last century has given birth. And now, great heroes! shine upon me in the radiance which a man whom the people have honored with the name of the German Tacitus, has kindled for you! Shed your lustre on the city, and tell the Germans that Johannes von Müller does homage to genius, regardless of nationality or birth! ”

“ George Müller was a flagrant sinner against common honesty and decency, and his whole early career was a revolt, not against God only, but against his own moral sense. If Saul was a hardened transgressor, how callous must have been George Müller!
He was a native of Prussia, born at Kroppenstaedt, near Halberstadt, September 27, 1805. Less than five years later his parents removed to Heimersleben, some four miles off, where his father was made collector of the excise, again removing about eleven years later to Schoenebeck, near Magdeburg, where he had obtained another appointment. ”

“ Müller was not the only self-denying giver, though he may lead the host. His true yoke-fellows often turned the crisis by their own offerings, which though small were costly! Instrumentally they were used of God to relieve existing want by their gifts, for out of the abundance of their deep poverty abounded the riches of their liberality. The money they gave was sometimes like the widow's two mites—all their living ”

“ George Müller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual horizon. His God was, as he often said, his business partner. He seems to have been for Müller little more than a sort of supernatural clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and others in Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other enterprises, but unpossessed of [pg 471] any of those vaster and wilder and more ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has invested him. ”

“ To carry out conviction into action is sometimes a costly sacrifice; but whatever Mr. Müller's fidelity to conviction cost in one way, he had stupendous results of his life-work to contemplate, even while he lived. Let any one look at the above figures and facts, and remember that here was one poor man who, dependent on the help of God only in answer to prayer, could look back over threescore years and see how he had built five large orphan houses and taken into his family over ten thousand orphans, expending, for their good, within twelve thousand pounds of a round million. ”

“ No schoolboy ever more eagerly longed for “breaking-up” day, than did Müller for the termination of his nine month’s compulsory abode at Hildesheim. It came at last, and he and Edith and their children were free to quit the scene of strife and weariness, and to return to Munich and to Spiegel. On making up the accounts of the year, Müller found that, out of the whole princely revenue of the estates, he had but a thousand florins left. ”

“ The year 1780, the date when the first opening of the retail business took place, was the turning-point in the history of the factory. Müller was acclaimed as a genius by his countrymen. It was proposed that a statue should be erected to his honour—and this in his lifetime. A wave of enthusiasm found an outlet in Latin poems to "the man who had done so much for his king and country." It is exceptional to find such contemporary honour bestowed on a potter. Rarely is a man a prophet in his own country. But happily Müller lived to wear the laurel wreath. ”

“ The journey from Munich to Hildesheim was, for Franz and Edith, a series of enchanting dreams. There was but one drawback to their joy; Spiegel had refused to accompany them. “No more drudgery, no more lessons!” Müller had enthusiastically exclaimed, when a letter from Master Gottlieb, expressing a hope of the continuance of the Hildesheim patronage, and enclosing a copy of the will, tied with blue ribbons, confirmed the intimation of good fortune he had already gleaned from a newspaper paragraph. “The world belongs to us; we are kings of the earth! ”