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The
Kiss of a
Prince Dr. Sidlow Baxter told the story of an event in 1934,
recorded in a British magazine and later in the New
York Times. He recounted the story of young Prince
Edward and a visit he made to a small hospital where
36 hopelessly injured and disfigured veterans of the
First World War were tended. He stopped at each cot,
shook hands with each veteran, and spoke words of
encouragement. He was conducted to the exit but
observed that he had only met 29 men. At that point
he questioned those present, “I understood you had
36 patients here. I have only seen 29.”
The head nurse explained that the other seven were so
shockingly disfigured that for the sake of his own feelings, he had not been taken to see them. The
prince insisted that he must see them. He spoke to each of them and thanked them for the great
sacrifice they had made and assured each that it would never be forgotten.

Then he turned to the head nurse and said, “There are only six men. Where is the seventh?” He was
informed that no one was allowed to see him. Blind, maimed, dismembered, the most hideously
disfigured of them all, he was isolated in a room where he would never leave alive. The nurse said
to the prince, “Please don’t ask to see him.” But the prince insisted. The nurse reluctantly led him
into a darkened room. The royal visitor stood there with white face and drawn lips, looking down
at what had once been a fine man but now was a horror. Then the tears broke out, and the prince
bent down and reverently kissed the cheeks of the broken war hero. 1
There is one who has stooped far, far lower, to kiss a far, far worse ugliness—not the physical
disfigurement of a broken hero whose brokenness called forth reverent gratitude but the leprous,
evil ugliness of corrupt sinners and hard rebels against infinite love!
Submitted by Bill Prater
1 J. Sidlow Baxter, Awake, My Heart: Daily Devotional Studies for the Year (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1994), 369.

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