Rutherford Waddell, M.A., D.D., Minister of St. Andrew's Church, Dunedin 1879-1919 : memoir and addresses

Waddell, Rutherford, A.H. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1932

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Title: Rutherford Waddell, M.A., D.D., Minister of St. Andrew's Church, Dunedin 1879-1919 : memoir and addresses

Author: Waddell, Rutherford

Published: A.H. Reed, Dunedin, N.Z., 1932

RUTHERFORD WADDELL

M.A., D.D

MEMOIR AND ADDRESSES

Ruther

RUTHERFORD WADDELL

M.A., D.D.

MINISTER OF ST. ANDREWS CHURCH, DUNEDIN

1879 - 1919

MEMOIR AND ADDRESSES

Edited by

Professor of New Theological Hall

Knox College, Dunedtn

Foreword by JAMES GIBB, D.D.

A. H. REED

DUNEDIN and WELLINGTON

33 J.lly St. 182 W.k.fi.ld Si

1 932

fj. COLLIE, d tu.»i m :,.i u.ii

COULLS SOMERVILLE WILKIE LIMITED

PRINTERS

DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN NEW ZEALAND

5

Foreword

VV HEX requested to write a foreword to this book about one of the dearest friends and finest men I have ever known, I gladly consented. Our friendship stretched back for close on half a century. For eighteen years in Dunedin we were inseparables. Since then, though we did not very often meet face to face, long letters were exchanged at frequent intervals, and this right on to the end. My memory of him as a young man is flooded with a sense of light and liberty and joy. His last letter, written a few weeks before he was called hence, is more impressive than even his radiant youth. Though with the poet he could say :

“The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colour from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality,”

he breathed a spirit of serenity, hope, and a gladness that the best was yet to be.

Rutherford Waddell

What a man he was ! Love, say some, is blind and cannot see the shortcomings in the object of its affection. Love, say others and more truly, is vision and sees what is hidden from the indifferent spectator. Doubtless Waddell, like all other men, had the defects of his qualities, but I could never see them. Did not Carlyle somewhere say of Edward Irving : “ I never wish to know a better man.” And something like this I can say of our dear, departed friend.

Gifted by Nature with a mind unusually keen, Dr. Waddell was throughout all the years an eager student of literature and life. His method was not that of the scholar strictly so called. He was too much of the poet for that. Though he wrote no verses, he had the poet’s insight into truth. Books, if of real worth, opened their souls to him and what he saw he could make others see, for he had notable powers of expression. From the platform and especially the pulpit he poured forth the riches of his culture and experience in addresses that linger yet in the memories of men and women who heard them long years ago. But for the increasing infirmity of his deafness which, when he ceased to hear the sound of his own voice,

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Foreword

impaired his articulation, he would have been the preacher par excellence of New Zealand. And to those familiar with his enunciation there was none like him.

The story of his facile pen and manifold labours for the social and spiritual uplift of his fellows will be told in the pages of the book that follows, and cannot be recited here. But there is one phase of his outlook on human affairs with which I was familiar and which is not, I think, generally recognised. Dr. Waddell was not a theoretic socialist or pacifist, but he had the liveliest kind of sympathy with the practical aims of both. His detestation of war and militarism was deep and intense. Twelve years ago, when doing my best to open the eyes of the Church and the community to the horror and wickedness of war, and taking steps to initiate a League of Nations Union in this country, I received a letter from him in which he took his stand witli me down to the last particular. At the time it was like a draught of clear hill water to a thirsty soul. We are all, or almost all, converted now to saner and more Christian views of war than our fathers or we ourselves used to hold. Dr. Waddell needed no conversion.

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Rutherford Waddell

The work he accomplished was great in quantity and not less remarkable in quality, but it may be truly said that he himself was greater still. He abounded in all the virtues of the Christian character both active and passive. His courage was high. As was said of Principal John Cairns : "He squared up persistently at the devil and all his works." A manly man he was in the full sense of the term ; but it was his patience, magnanimity, and sympathy with others that moved one most to admiration. He suffered, as has been said, from an aural dullness which eventually rendered him incapable of hearing the human voice or the manifold voices of nature. But no one ever heard him utter a word of complaint. The nearest he ever came to it in my experience was when once he said with a sigh : "I would like to hear again the singing of the birds and the shouting of the wind." If he grieved he kept his grief locked in the secret chambers of his heart. And so with all the trials of life of which he had his full share, indeed a larger share than comes to most men. He bore these ills with a quietness of spirit that made one marvel. The saving salt of humour had been liberally vouchsafed him and that helped. But there was a deeper

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Foreword

explanation. Of every new trial he could say with Walter Smith, a poet to whom he was at one time greatly attached : “ Tis but another thread in the mixed web of Father love ” —a thread woven into the texture of his life bv the hand of God.

His magnanimity was as pronounced as his patience. Surely there never was a man more free from vanity and exaggerated selfesteem. If he compared himself with others it was to overestimate their powers and belittle his own. He valued indeed the esteem of his friends, but from flattery he shrank with unfeigned aversion. He was clothed with the garments of a beautiful humility. And, free from brooding over himself, his heart had leisure to think of others for whose difficulties and trials he had an overflowing sympathy. His eyes revealed the kindness of his heart. They used to say in St. Andrew's of his visits to the bedside of the sick that though conversation was difficult his look was a benediction. We term such virtues as these passive, but more than most others they test the stuff of which a man is made.

The life of Dr. Waddell stands as a glowing testimony to the reality of the Christian faith.

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Rutherford Waddell

He lived under the spell of Christ. To apply such a term to a man’s feeling for Christ may not be quite orthodox ; and our friend’s theology, especially in his later years, was strongly conservative. The too common disparagement of Paulinism found no favour in his sight. He would with Dr. Glover have said that the Sermon on the Mount, apart from the salvation accomplished for us by Christ on the Cross, might well drive a man to despair. The Man of Nazareth was the Christ for him. Yet few men have ever surrendered themselves more whole-heartedly to the fascination of the life lived in the days of the Galilean spring. Its story held him all through and inspired him with a passion to serve. “The light of all his seeing was,” as was said of A. B. Davidson of New College, “a light that never was on sea or land, save in the life which is, as he believed, the light of all worlds.”

When the tidings went round that he had passed on, many men and women were profoundly moved. He was a very aged man and his days could not be much prolonged, but he had been so long with us that we came to feel as if he must continue to live on indefinitely. And he was always so buoyant

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Foreword

and young at heart : he seemed to have the gift of perennial youth. In his last letter to me he said how well he felt and spoke of the work he was doing and proposed to do. And when the call came it was to many of us as if an ancient landmark had been removed. He died as he would have wished to die after a brief illness. There was "no moaning of the bar when he put out to sea." He is now in the safe keeping of the gracious Lord in Whom with his whole heart he trusted, and Whom he served with an entire devotion. There we leave him.

“At some far day we’ll meet again, We shall have much to say.”

James Gibb

II

Preface

This volume has been prepared at the request of St. Andrew’s Session and Deacons’ Court as portion of their memorial to Dr. Waddell. Its purpose is to preserve a short selection of the characteristic utterances of one who exercised a unique influence on the spiritual life of New Zealand, and to give such an outline of his life and work as will waken grateful memories in the hearts of those who knew him, and may enable those who knew him not to understand in some measure the manner of man he was.

In the choice of his own utterances the foremost place had to be given to his sermons, because he was first and foremost a preacher and the spiritual interest coloured all the felicitous output of his pen. So to publish anything professing to be representative of him and fail to give his pulpit utterances the chief place would be to be untrue to him and to practise a deception on his friends. Certainly even with the happiest selection by the committee in charge of this volume there will be something sadly lacking in the sermons chosen. Old members of St. Andrew's, as the dominant convictions and characteristic phrases of long ago are brought afresh to their

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Rutherford Waddell

memories, may hear again the familiar voice and recall the thrill of spiritual passion that made his sermons different from all others that they ever heard. But for strangers even their grace and vigour of expression will fail sadly of making them what they were to the congregations who heard them preached.

At the request of friends some of his prayers and one or two of his children’s addresses have been included. By the courtes}' of the publishers of the Dunedin “Evening Star,’’ two of the many hundreds of articles which he contributed to that journal have been included. In the memoir several extracts from his writings are quoted in the endeavour to give some adequate impression of his wide sympathies and varied interests. The committee would fain have printed one or two of his wide range of lectures on English literature, but space forbade.

Despite Dr. Waddell's fixed belief in purification by fire, hundreds of sermons remain in manuscript or type. Unhappily many could not be used owing to the necessity of filling up gaps for which the preacher trusted to his memory ; and only one, reprinted from the "Outlook," has had the benefit of his own revision. An apology is due to some friends who examined a large number, but whose recommendations could not be given the consideration I would have liked to give them owing to the necessity of early publication

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Preface

and the difficulty of adequate revision. The sermons chosen are good ; but we dare not claim that they are his best.

We owe a special debt to Mr. G. F. Inglis, B. A., of Auckland, who has given us access to a fine selection of typed addresses taken down by him with reverential care while a member in St. Andrew’s. Willing help in the supply of materials for this memoir has come from many quarters, but nearly all with confession of the same disability, lack of clear outline, the sense of something intangible when they seek to put in words the gracious memories that remain in their hearts. Perhaps, while not forgetting others, I may be permitted to express my indebtedness to my old friend of St. Andrew’s days, Mr. J. G. Patterson, who gave me ready access to an invaluable store of notes and press reports and helped me by most judicious selection, to Mr. A. C. Cameron, secretary of the Memorial Volume committee, for his constant and watchful help, and to the publisher and printers, whose close personal interest and care have made their work an integral part of our tribute to the memory of Dr. Waddell.

Willingly as a tribute of gratitude, reluctantly as unable just at the time when the call has come to give the attention to it that it demands and deserves, I consented to take charge of the biographical appreciation. The misgivings with which I approached the task

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Rutherford Waddell

were increased almost to the point of paralysis by the casual reading of two sentences in the St. Andrew's Jubilee Souvenir :

" The day will come when someone shall write more fully an appreciation of Dr. Waddell and his work in Dunedin. May that duty fall into capable and sympathetic hands."

These words brought home to me with fresh and almost painful emphasis what old St. Andrew's members expect from one who would attempt to portray the minister they loved so well. I fear that, when I have done my best, they will be deeply disappointed, though they may be generous in their judgments as his lifelong example taught them to be. But let me assure them that my one bond of union with them is a common memory and a common gratitude. In the preparation of this book the past has lived for me again, and the words of the late Principal Salmond of Aberdeen, written in somewhat similar circumstances of one of the great religious teachers of Scotland, have come repeatedly to my mind :

"My work is at an end. During its course the mist has often been in my eyes. The sense of loss has been revived. A voice has spoken to me out of the past. A face that was darkened has seemed to be turned upon me again with its old light."

J. Collie

East Taieri,

September, 1932.

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Contents

Page

Foreword by Dr. Gibb 5

Preface 13

Rutherford Waddell, Memoir and Appreciation I—Early Years and Religious Background 21

II—College Days and Shaping Forces 31

III The Years of His Ministry 47

IV— Dr. Waddell as a Preacher 70

V—Social, Educational, and Missionary Interests 92

Vl—Lecturer and Essayist 112

VII—Under the Open Sky 129

VIII—The Man We Knew 140

IX —The Closing Years 157

Addresses —

As An Eagle Stirreth Up Her Nest 171

Peter at the Fire 186

The Iron Gates of Life 196

Till the Stars Appeared 210

Children’s Addresses—

Snowdrops 227

The Rain and My Word 234

Prayers 240

Essays—

The Tides of Life 245

The Doctor 254

Letters —Selected Extracts 267

Index 299

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List of Illustrations

Rutherford Waddell, m.a., d.d. ... Frontispiece

Dr. Waddell in 1907 ... Facing page 48

In His Study ... ... Facing page 128

The Lure of the Trout ... Facing page 128

In St. Andrew's Pulpit, 1917 Facing page 168

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Dunedin, N.Z. ... Facing page 168

His Boyhood Home, Ireland Facing page 224

The Suburban Balcony, "Dreamthorpe," Broad Bay, Dunedin, N.Z. Facing page 224

In Retirement at " Dreamthorpe" Facing page 272

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RUTHERFORD WADDELL

Memoir and Appreciation

CHAPTER I

Early Years and Religious Background.

“ My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthroned or rulers of the earth; But higher far my proud pretensions rise,— The son of parents passed into the skies.”

We have been unable to get, in the time at our disposal, the exact date of Dr. Waddell's birth. He was born either in 1849 or 1850 in the village of Glenarm in Antrim. His birthplace held memories of the shattered remnants of the Spanish Armada, and was within easy reach of the traditional scenes of St. Patrick's early life. In an account of his last visit to the home of his childhood, written in 1928, he speaks with a wistful regret of the simplicity of life in Northern Ireland as he knew it long ago. He was a son of the manse, his father being the Rev. Hugh Waddell. His mother was a sister of that charmer of our boyhood, Captain Mayne Reid. And if literature claimed a share in his inheritance, no less did religion ; for his well-known Christian name was no aimless choice of his parents. The family claimed connection with the famous Samuel Rutherford.

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Rutherford Waddell

Left motherless at an early age, he was brought up by an aunt to whom he never ceased to record a meed of gratitude for her faith and faithfulness. I have heard him refer in the pulpit to the lasting impression that her earnest piety made on him. She even prefaced punishment with praver that it might be for his good. A smile went round the congregation as he remarked characteristically that he did not at the time appreciate the prayer as he should have done. '"I was at the other end of the stick."

His memories of his school days were not altogether happy. In an article on "The Scenes of Childhood " he writes :

" I went to see my old schoolhouse. It still stands just as it was. And all the nightmare of that miserable time came back again to me. Going to school now is a picnic compared with what it was then. Mine was a country school consisting of one room and one all-supreme dominie. He was a man of hot, hasty, ungovernable temper. He had only one arm His face was like a harvest moon when the setting sun fired it with his beams. We helpless mortals read the history of the day in it when school began. . . . His chief instrument of punishment was a ruler about two feet long and a couple of inches broad. With this he would slap the hands and whack the backs and that other part of a boy's anatomy that Nature comfortably padded for sitting on. When he was in a rage, which was frequently, he was not careful where he would strike.

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Early Years and Religious Background

Yet I never knew a parent to lodge a complaint against his cruelty. He himself would be sorry after his burst of rage was over, and would sometimes take the boy or girl on his knee and pet them, especially if their parents were well-to-do in the district. He would tell the victims that it hurt him as much as it hurt them, but, as one of them put it, it does not hurt you in the same place. . . The natural result of his cruelty was to give me a hatred of all that a school ought to stand for. I was constantly devising ways and means to dodge attendance. I had ‘ school sickness ’ once a week, played truant another, prayed that it might rain every day till after school time, and trusted Providence to send along something that would be an excuse to stay at home. Then in school I was so afraid of doing anything wrong that I hesitated about doing anything even right. I was so crushed by his cruelty that I lost all originality and initiative. That was the only remainder I brought out of the wrecks of that wretched time. And I have been battling against it all my life ever since. The only thing of merit that survived was a love of reading, especially poetry; but that was not because of school experiences, but in spite of them.”

This record of his unhappy school experiences helps us to understand better his interest in later days in kindergarten work, and his insistence, when addressing Sunday School teachers or others whose work had to do with the young, on the indelible impressions of childhood.

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Rutherford Waddell

He left school when he was about fourteen and spent about four years in the drapery business. The hours were long and the pay was small ; but compared with school it was heaven.

The story of his religious development belongs partly to this chapter and partly to the next. The most self-revealing of his published booklets is "My Pathway to Christ," which is based on a sermon preached on the thirty-seventh anniversary of his settlement in Dunedin. In it he gives the story of the awakening of religious interest in his heart. Though not worse than other boys, he was not markedly religious. In his article on the "The Scenes of Childhood " he says :

"In my time the pews had apparently been constructed to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts. And when to this was added the length and dreariness of the service it will readily be understood that the Church had not much attraction for us boys. . . . The only consolation left to us children was that of the little girl who had been to Church for the first time. Her father was preaching. On the way home, greatly venturing, he asked her how she liked his sermon. She replied: 'Oh. father, you preached awful long, but I bored it 'cause I loved you, and I knew when we came home I would get a good dinner.' This last was the most sustaining feature of the diet of worship left for the contemplation of us young folks."

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Early Years and Religious Background

No doubt his life was unconsciously moulded by the strongly evangelical piety of the society in which he was brought up. The “fundamentals ” were unquestioned verities in the intellectual atmosphere of his childhood. And when he was nine or ten years of age the great revival of 1859 swept the north of Ireland, transforming for the time the whole life of the people. In the booklet referred to he makes no mention of this revival as one of the factors in his spiritual development. So we may assume that it had no immediate effect on him. But we must recognize it as part of the religious background whose influence remained with him till his dying hour. In conversation and in other ways he freely acknowledged this influence. The tune of “Martyrdom ” never lost its hold over his heart as he had heard it sounding through his native land in those days of the right hand of The Most High. And possibly its influence on him was even greater than he knew. That great evangelical tradition formed the staple of his faith through all the liberalising influences of literature, and, indeed, did much to shape his judgments of literature. No matter how earnestly and honestly a man strives to reach individual conviction he can never escape his debt to his upbringing and his spiritual background. Our deepest convictions come from the atmosphere of our childhood. We can never altogether outgrow the high traditions and

Rutherford Waddell

faith that moulded our early years. It is strange for us to think that the most vital preacher of our experience, whose words hardly yet seem to have ceased sounding in our ears, owed the dominant notes of his message to men to that great movement of more than 70 years ago. And yet we can hardly doubt that it was so.

But on his own showing faith did not come to him directly as the result of any revivalist movement. It came to him later, not as an emotional experience, but as an earnest and reasoned conviction. There were, however, times of deepened impression on his pathway to Christ. One day he heard a strange preacher in a country church. All that the preacher said was forgotten, but the impression of his intense earnestness remained.

" He led me to ask seriously, what was the meaning of life? What was I doing with mine? What was to be the future and the final end of it all ? I suppose the fullness of time had come. It comes, once at least, to everybody. It had come to me; and I was at the parting of the ways. That is one thing that stands out prominently in my memory."

And not only was the earnestness of that unnamed preacher one deciding factor in bringing his youthful hearer to faith in Christ. It left its permanent mark on his thought and preaching. In an appreciative review of a small volume of sermons published by a New

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Early Years and Religious Background

Zealand minister over twenty years ago his one criticism was on the lack of the note of passion or direct appeal in them. He has told us more than once of a North of Ireland elder's criticism of a dry preacher: "It will be a long time before that man makes the de'il swat, onyway." And we may add his own comment :

" It seems to me now that it does not so much matter comparatively what you say as how you say it; and if you impress people as not having- much interest in your subject they will take you at your word, and not have much interest in it either."

And the passionate insistent note was never absent from his own preaching. An old fellow-student told me recently that in the 'nineties a young business man in Dunedin said to him, "I can't go with you to St. Andrew's any more. Waddell's preaching is getting too insistent for me."

Another life-changing influence in those critical days of youth was the example of an older brother to whom he looked up with a kind of hero-worship. As we read the description of that brother and his influence, we inevitablv reach a conclusion little intended by the writer. In the high and loyal earnestness of Christian life, combined with an almost carefree buoyancy of nature ever ready for fun, and then in the giving up of a business career to devote his life to mission work we

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feel that the doctor was, unconsciously, in the story of his brother, giving us the likeness of himself. Looking back after half a century’s intercourse with many brave and loyal Christian men he still thought of that brother as on the whole the bravest and best man he ever knew.

The deepening of such influences as these and the serious questionings to which they gave rise resulted in his deciding to give up business and study for the ministry. We shall see in the next chapter how he satisfied himself as to the truth of the Christian faith. At this stage it would seem that he assumed its truth. No question about that would enter his mind in the surroundings and religious atmosphere of his youth. What concerned him was his own disloyalty to it. He felt, and never ceased to feel, the shame of the wasted years. With a poignancy of regret with which we can sympathize, but which, in his case, we would hesitate to endorse, he referred more than once in sermons and addresses to those wasted golden years of youth. Most frequently in his appeals for faith in Christ and obedience to Him it was not the danger of delay, but the disloyalty and shame of it that were the burden of his message. The reading again of some of these sorrow-laden references to an irrevocable past makes me better able to understand what memories crossed his mind and brought a

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Early Years and Religious Background

shadow of sudden pain to his eyes when, once in conversation with him, I referred to Rossetti's "Lost Days." In changed tones he said, "Oh, that is an awful sonnet."

Surelv there is something humbling for all of us in the thought of one whose life for over sixty years was so intense and full, reproachfully applying to himself these tremendous lines :

" The lost days of my life, until to-day, What were they, could I see them on the street Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat Sown once for food, but trodden into clay? Or golden coins squandered and still to pay? Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet? Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway? I do not see them here; but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see, Each one a murdered self, with low last breath, ‘ I am thyself,—what hast thou done to me ?’ ‘And I,—and I—thyself,’ (lo! each one saith,) ‘ And thou thyself to all eternity ’! ”

It seems strange to us who knew him so well as he worked at the limit of his strength through the crowded years of a great ministry that he should feel so deeply the loss of years in which the absence of the high seriousness of manhood is seldom hardly judged. But so it was. And perhaps the untiring labours of later days find part of their explanation here. Possibly the nature of his Christian decision had something to do with this way

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of looking at the past. That decision was due to a deepening conviction that Christ was the rightful Lord and Master of his life, Whom he must obey in all things. At first there does not seem to have been much of the sense of forgiveness or any marked emotional experience. Obedience, full and complete, was for him the main part of faith ; and that made him think with constant regret of what he regarded as the wasted and useless years. In the next chapter we shall see how his faith in Christ had to find confirmation in the face of insistent questionings and be made more truly his own than before. But in its earlier and in its more firmly grounded form alike it found expression in a true and unreserved determination to follow Christ as Master wherever He might lead. There are those who will question if this be evangelical faith at all. But it was at any rate a very real faith. It was a life-attitude deliberately chosen and nobly maintained through long years. In its tested form it was a reasoned faith. But it was also the faith of a heart sensitive and responsive to the Divine greatness of Christ. In later years there was a deepening sense of debt, the recognition of something done for us without which all our strivings would be in vain. But here he definitely enters on that pathway which leads to fuller understanding of what is given to men in the Gospel.

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CHAPTER II

College Days and Shaping Forces

Christ! I am Christ's! and let the name suffice you

Ay. for me, too, He greatly hath sufficed:

Lo with no winning words I would entice you,

Paul has no honour and no friend but Christ.

Rutherford Waddell's decision to study for the ministry meant the facing of a hard struggle financially. If he was not the D.D. in Dunedin who was mentioned by a correspondent in the "Otago Daily Times" as having lived on 3s. 6d. a week during his college course he confessed that it might quite truly have been he. But he soon found that he had a harder struggle to face, a struggle with the questionings raised by a new world of thought. His student days were spent in Belfast. One of his fellow-students was Sir Joseph Larmor, the celebrated mathematician, who, however, must have been considerably his junior, and who certainly did not imbue him with any enthusiasm for mathematics. Friends who knew him in those far-off days make clear that he chose his own pathway

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then in study, just as he did in most things in after years. In the university he was chiefly spoken of for his knowledge of English literature ; and in the theological college he received more enlightenment from George Eliot than he ever did from Hodge. Hodge’s “Systematic Theology,” for long the most impressive exposition of the confessional theology, was then a comparatively recent publication ; but it stood firmly by old positions. It formed the staple of theological teaching in Belfast ; and most faithfully was it rammed down the throats of students by that militantly orthodox professor, Dr. Robert Watts. But, as a Dunedin friend of Dr. Waddell who studied under the same professor says, “ I imagine that in the case of our friend it didn’t go very far down.” In my student days the Doctor comprehensively summed up his opinions in the words, “Oh, Hodge is a humbug,” —dangerous talk, some may think from an idolised minister to an impressionable student. Though in later years he took a keen interest in scientific and philosophic thought, it was mainly with reference to their bearing on faith. In analytical studies as such he never had much interest.

But if his attention to many of the prescribed courses of study was decidedly perfunctory, his search for truth was eager and constant Before he had been long at college

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College Days and Shaping Forces

he had to face definitely the issue between faith and unbelief. In “My Pathway to Christ ” he savs :

" When I went to Belfast to begin my student career I soon found myself up against great mental and religious problems. They were staggering to me, a callow, uninstructed youth from the country. I do not think that faith has ever had so great a fight for its existence as when I was a student, some forty-five years ago. The great scientific era was just opening out. The materialistic philosophy of Hegel, Darwin's doctrine of Evolution, the Agnosticism of Huxley and Herbert Spencer —these are not now things to frighten young men, but they were real and startling to us then. I remember that in one of those years the British Association met in Belfast. Professor Tyndall was the president. I recall how he fluttered the theological and religious dovecotes by those memorable words with which he closed his inaugural address. The words have stuck to me ever since. After tracing the evolution of things up from the atom he said, ' Prolonging my gaze into the infinite azure of the past, I seem to discern in matter the promise and the potency of life.' Huxley, at the same meeting, sought to show that animals were automata, and, according to the science of the time, as man was only a higher animal it was impossible for him to be anything other than he was. . . . Spencer was labouring elaborately to show that God was unknowable, that we had not the faculties necessary to apprehend Him. Darwin, with persevering and punctilious exactitude, was

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tracing out the common elements in human nature and the lower creation, and showing how we were evolved from it. The Ark of God seemed to many to be toppling into the dust. These were terrible men from the scientific and philosophic Ashdods of that day."

It gives us a slight surprise to find Dr. Waddell classing Hegel as a materialist. But he was no doubt thinking of the ultimate tendency of Hegelianism in its left wing development. He goes on to speak of other adverse influences such as biblical criticism of a negative order and new conceptions of the magnitude of the universe :

" And so I was forced to reconsider my simple faith and measure it against these drear and deadly issues. Here was Christ. He made certain claims. He promised certain things. Could we believe Him? That was the question of questions."

It is somewhat significant as to the course of his religious development that he makes no mention of his theological teachers. The stress is laid on the intellectual difficulties with which students nourished in a strict orthodoxy found themselves confronted when they entered on their university life. Possibly in the professorial mind of that day there was no helpful comprehension of students' difficulties. And certainly Dr. Waddell was quite frank in his opinion that he always got more

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College Days and Shaping Forces

help from heretical writers than from the exponents of orthodoxy. There was more vital thought in them and less of accepted opinions. It is of the deepest interest to read how this young student faced for himself the vital issue with which he was confronted. No mention is made of any friend who guided him. He tells us how he sought to find out for himself the truth about Christ. He placed before himself what he considered the only possible explanations that could be offered of Christ and His claims, and found one alone satisfying, that which He Himself gave. Perhaps some of the alternatives as he put them to himself were a trifle crude, as that He was either more than man, or He was, as the Pharisees said, a madman. That emphatic alternative was a recurring note in his preaching in later days. But the root of the matter was there. He must know the truth about Christ. And he would be satisfied with no explanation that failed to do justice to the facts as he saw them. No doubt the statement given in "My Pathway to Christ " is coloured by the light of fuller experience. The issues probably stand out more clearlv defined than they would in the torturing struggle of his student days. But we can trust it as giving substantially the line he took.

He tells us that, at that time, he felt a strong attraction for Unitarianism. The high

33

Rutherford Waddell

character and fine literary quality of great Unitarian leaders made a strong appeal to him. But lie felt then, as he continued to feel, that there was a fatal lack of power in Unitarian preaching and that the explanation of that lack was an inadequate conception of Christ. In his own approach to Christ he, even at that early age, recognized clearly that from the very nature of the case he must not come to Christ in the spirit of a critic but with a heart sensitive to all that was greatest and most holy in Him, and that he must be prepared to put to the test the condition of obedience which He laid down. The result was victory and peace. He entered into what was for him all his life an assured and reasonable faith. Looking back on that time he said :

" All that is easy enough to understand now, but it was not an easy thing for students in my day to cleave their way through all these bogs and fogs to solid ground. I did not get there at once —far from it; it was a long process. But at last I reached it. I came to the fourth possibility—namely, that Christ was to be believed absolutely; and there was only one thing left, to give myself wholly to Him in entire faith and unquestioning obedience. .

. . Many a question I have had to lay aside. But I had satisfied myself of this, that I had prima facie evidence quite enough to enahle me to give over to Christ the passion of my heart and the utmost labour of my hands. And this I did. ... I resolved to try to do

36

College Days and Shaping Forces

what He commanded, not because 1 might think it to be prudent or even rational, but just because He willed it, and He was Master and I was His servant. And so there has come into my life in the last two score years especially an entirely new and ever-increasing weight of evidence of the reality of Christ. It is the evidence of personal experience.”

And he goes on to tell how in countless ways the faithfulness of Christ was proved to his heart in satisfying and humbling experience of His goodness as he sought to trust and serve Him wholly.

The fruits of that struggle remained to enrich his ministry in the Gospel. It is the secret of much of the great influence he exerted in after days as a preacher and teacher of Christian truth. He understood the difficulties of men, especially young men, in days when old beliefs are shaken, and was able to make luminous to them the central certainty of Christ. To this period, too, we may trace his life-long concern about views likely to ensnare the mind of youth. No teacher of our time had a keener eye for old foes in new dress or a mind more alive to the subtletv and danger of their approach.

But those who knew Dr. Waddell will feel that the foregoing sketch of his spiritual history, true though it may be, does not explain his unique influence as a preacher. There were richer elements and wider interests in him than it can give anv account of. In

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Rutherford Waddell

some measure such a criticism would be just. We have seen how he came to make the faith of his fathers more truly his own. And that faith remained to the end the glowing centre of all his teaching on life and its duties. But there was another great moulding influence in his preparation as a helper of men's faith, and that was his knowledge of English literature. With his love of literature and his unflagging interest in interpreting and popularising it I shall deal at a later stage. For the present what we have to consider is its influence in the forming of his own faith and in his preparation as a preacher. In the former respect I think it was relatively slight. In the latter it was vital and incalculable. At one time I was, like many others, inclined to think that, in the flux of religious beliefs, he found his pathway to faith through the great poets and teachers of his own day. But his own definite testimony, and the whole tone of his preaching and writing, rule that idea out. His faith was in all essentials the faith in which he was brought up, accepted loyally when he was satisfied that nothing that was true in modern thought was in any real contradiction to it. But in his preparation as a preacher it was far otherwise. As a thinker he was at once markedly independent and richly and frankly dependent on others. No preacher levied wider toll on the best writings of his time or made the thoughts of

38

College Days and Shaping Forces

others more vitally his own, though none more definitely chose his own way for the satisfying of his mind and furthering of his plans. And we may say that both this freedom and this enrichment came from the wider outlook which his love of English literature gave him.

In a centenary article on George Eliot, published in 1919, he tells how at the end of his first session in college a preacher of saintly character, high ability, and fine literary taste lent him a certain book. Of this old friend and this incident he says :

" He was one of those to whom knowledge ' had unrolled her ample page rich with the spoils of time.' He was a student himself, a lover of books. And what is better, not only a buyer but a lender of them as well. He took an interest in youth, for though his own brown hair was sprent with grey his heart never knew age. It kept young to the end and beat in sympathy with young souls anywhere. He might have ranked with Stevenson as an ' eternal boy.' . . . The student in question has had many experiences in the long years that have passed since then; but none of them, or even all of them put together, have had more influence in his life than the friendship of this minister. He talked with him. not at him or over him. He lent him many books, for students' purses of fifty years ago were a much slenderer affair than those of modern times. Some of us think sometimes when we see how comparatively cheap are the great classics of literature nowadays that we

39

Rutherford Waddell

were born half a century too early. Yet we wonder sometimes if the new copies are cherished with such joy as that which filled the breast of the impecunious student of half a century ago, when he carried home to his dingy lodgings some tattered treasure he had discovered among the flotsam and jetsam of a second-hand bookstall.

" One day our student brought from his friend's library a novel. The minister, when giving it to him, said few words; but they were very impressive. The student carried' home the book, and retired to the garden with it. He had read many novels, but they had been for the most part stories of the open air—battles, sieges, fortunes of life on the prairies, of the hunting of Indians, bears, and buffaloes. He was told that this was a different kind of story. He approached it with curious rather than eager expectation."

It was on a glorious summer day that he sat under the shade of an apple tree to read the newly-borrowed book. In the light of memory he describes the beauty of that day with its summer sounds and scents and sunshine, and comments on how hard it is to settle down to a book on such a day.

" It is not surprising, therefore, that our student opened the book without any great expectation of getting far into it; but it turned out quite otherwise. The fascination of the written page became far greater than the orchestration of Nature herself. He lost consciousness of the music and magic of the summer hours in

4°

College Days and Shaping Forces

the ever-deepening attraction of the novel. Heread on and on—glad, sad, astonished, enthralled. When lie ended the book, which he did a day or two later, another world had opened upon him. It was a turning point in his life. There had dawned upon him a new conception of duty, of strength, of sorrow, of sin, of service, and of salvation.

" That book was ' Adam Bede.' The student was he who now. after nearly half a century's lapse, writes these words. That was his first introduction to George Eliot's works. How much of mental and moral insight he owes to them he will not now say. But he will venture to record his gratitude to the man who first introduced him to them. Blessed are they who in life's morning chance upon such a friendship as came to him in the person of that minister."

Such was his introduction to a writer whose thought had an immeasurable influence in the widening and enriching of his mind, one whom a countryman of his own has described as "the most gifted woman whose hand has ever held the pencil of romance." He came later to see her limits as well as her greatness. I have heard him criticised for quoting so freely in the pulpit one who, as has been said, "did at the critical point of her career what the whole bulk of her teaching condemns with such majestic sternness." But the Doctor knew what he was doing. He knew that her weakness was in her loss of religious faith and that her greatness was due to her inheritance.

4'

Rutherford Waddell

He writes :

" The mistake that George Eliot makes is that which so many others make also—she thinks that you can hold the ethics of the Christian creed when you have thrown away its supernatural sanctions and dynamic. This is as impossible as to preserve the bloom and life of the flower when you have sundered it from the root. It is an interesting study to see the substitutes for the Christian doctrine which George Eliot thinks will be equivalent to the abandoned dynamic.

" Well, substitutes, indeed, we may find; but equivalents? That is another question, and the real question. And we fear that it will be found in the end of the day that men and women will fight no bloody battles for truth and duty and virtue when the great central figure of Christianity has been dissolved into a phantom, and man is expressed in terms of matter and force only."

But of her greatness he had no doubt ; and he knew how much he owed to this profound delineator of the aspirations, the frailties, and the entanglements of our bewildered human nature. His own thoughts would give constant response to the words of R. H. Hutton, "With a quicker pulse of life, with a richer happier faith, I could hardly conceive the limit to her power." Her gift of vivid description, her grave and pungent humour, her searching analysis of human motives, her wealth of weighty moral teaching opened up a new world for the eager-minded

4 2

College Days and Shaping Forces

young Irish student and contributed to the permanent enrichment of his life.

And let it be said, too, that, if the spell of the great novelist was so immediate and so potent, it is a sure proof that the appreciative mind was already there.

The story of his fight for faith at this time also throws light on his life-long devotion to Tennyson, whose great poem, dealing with the bearings of modern thought on faith in eternal life in music that has become part of the English tongue, was given to the world in the year of his birth.

“ To every mood the lyre of life he strung, And notes of death fell deathless from his tongue.”

The names of George Eliot and of Tennyson show us the place that literature held in his preparation as a preacher. Through it he was given both a matchless grace of utterance and a deep awareness of human aspirations and needs. The first of these two benefits is easily understood. As Dr. John Brown tells us, "Good writing, like good breeding, comes from keeping good company." In this connection we are reminded of the wise words of the late W. H. Page when he speaks of "the forgotten necessity that a man who proposes to write anything worth while should steep himself in the great English literature in order to have the genius of the race as a basis of his stvle and a corrective of his

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Rutherford Waddell

thought. No foreign literature, not even the classics, will answer quite the same purpose. It a man do not have his own race behind him he will not write truly for his race ; he cannot say a lasting word or lay hold on a permanent tendency."

These words lead us to see how literature brought him into contact with the life to which his message was to be addressed. He knew men better, and his faith in Scripture as the profoundest reading of the heart of man was made surer by his sympathetic knowledge of literature. On this point I cannot do better than quote a letter which I received from his old friend Dr. Currie of Dunedin :

" He had the advantage of me in his reading and always had. Apart from his greater ability and greater spiritual insight his reading of our great poets and of our great novelists cleared his mind of not a little humbug and gave him a theology close to Nature and to experience, that with his gifts as a preacher made his pulpit expositions and appeals things of life. It was the insight of these men the Church needed and still needs —their insight, their broadmindedness, their firm hold of the great relevant spiritual realities. They deal with God and Nature and life and immortality, with our loves and hates, our hopes and fears, and so, close to facts, they led. and 1 lead, men like Waddell out of the theologising and hairsplitting of the older creed makers. You may not agree, hut it is my firm conviction that

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College Days and Shaping Forces

the Doctor, apart from his wide and loving reading of the poets and the novelists would never have been the man he became. They gave him, or helped to give him. an insight into the prophets and the Gospels and the mystics that was far beyond men quite his equal in intellect and general ability."

No doubt in emphasizing the place that the study of literature had in his preparation as a preacher of the Gospel we are anticipating to some extent. The fulness of that result came only with the years. But even in his student days this was the way by which truth became living for his mind, and he was given a voice with which to speak to his fellow-men.

Some ten years or more after this period, while on holiday, he wrote giving some of his impressions of great preachers whom he heard on his travels. Of Phillips Brooks he said :

" Dr. Brooks has a singular combination of breadth and intensity. He holds with all his soul the great facts of Christianity—holds them with the force and fervour of the narrowest evangelical; but he gives them forth from the alembic of a mind of the richest culture and a nature all open to every influence of both worlds. . . . This is the sort of preaching the age wants. It will listen to it. Dr. Brooks is a witness. He has won the allegiance of all shades of religious opinion. There is a humanity and divinity, a breadth and inspiration, in all that he says and is, that make him a preacher listened to by every class."

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Rutherford Waddell

To a similar result his evangelical inheritance and his constant devotion to the best in literature brought the subject of this memoir. And when he penned that warm appreciation of the great American preacher it was

“ Perchance as finding there unconsciously Some image of himself.”

4 6

CHAPTER 111

The Years of His Ministry.

"IN LABOURS MOKE ABUNDANT "

"If, in the paths of the world,

Stones might have wounded thy feet,

Toil or dejection have tried

Thy spirit, of that we saw

Nothing—to us thou wast still

Cheerful, and helpful, and firm.

Therefore to thee it was given

Many to save with thyself ;

And, at the end of thy day,

O faithful shepherd ! to come,

Bringing thy sheep in thy hand."

It will be news to Dr. Waddell's New Zealand friends that before coming out to this country he preached as a candidate for a church in the North of Ireland and was rejected because of his impressive evangelical gift. Someone suggested that he must have been preaching one of Spurgeon's sermons. At that time he had never even read Spurgeon. And when he did hear him preach some ten years later he was in no way im-

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Rutherford Waddell

pressed by him. In view of this amusing, if rather disconcerting, episode, it is interesting to read his own comments on Spurgeon :

"Of course everybody and his wife goes to hear Spurgeon, and I went with them. But I would not go again. Mr. Spurgeon is a marvellous man, marvellous in what he does, and still more marvellous wherein his great strength lieth. Certainly to one hearing him only once, as I did, it remains a mystery. There was nothing above the most commonplace in his utterances ; but the vast crowd that rilled the tabernacle evidently thought otherwise."

It is, however, easier to get an idea into a certain type of Irishman's head than to get it out again ; and the congregation of Six Road Ends would have nothing to do with the aspiring licentiate. Rev. R. McCully, who relates the incident, aptly remarks that we New Zealanders may well exclaim 0 beata culpa of that congregation's blunder fiftyseven years ago.

Moved by the desire of seeing new lands Mr. Waddell, accompanied by Mrs. Waddell, came out to New Zealand, arriving at Lyttelton by the "Piako "in May, 1877. In a letter written in 1914 he says :

"I came out to Canterbury under the auspices of the Canterbury Presbyterian Association, an association that planted Presbyterianism wide and deep throughout that province. Dr. Elmslie was then the minister of St. Paul's. Just after my arrival he took ill, fortunately for me as it

4 8

Dr Wacdell in 1907

The Years of His Ministry

afterwards turned out I was put in to supply the pulpit. I was there for some three months. It was my first experience in a ministerial charge. The work of the large congregation taxed my energies to the utmost. I had no sermon material past me. All had to be written up to date. Then there was the other work— Bible classes, prayer-meeting, visiting, etc. It all looks easy enough now. but then it was mighty difficult."

He used to write out his sermons three times and occasionally five or six times. This could hardly have been due to nervous anxiety to please, for he was never greatly troubled either with nervousness or desire of commendation. He seems to have taken any little contretemps as coolly in those early days as in the days of his fully assured position in St. Andrew's. He told me once that when supplying St. Paul's he gave out a chapter in Kcclesiastes as the reading for the day. "I noticed that the people looked a little puzzled as I was reading, and the words seemed a little strange to myself. I looked at the top of the page and found that it was one of those old pulpit bibles with the Apocrypha in them, and that I was reading Ecclesiasticus. I just read on and let them think that they had not found the place." Possibly a present-day congregation would not be in any way puzzled by the mistake. Most probably this laborious care in preparation was due to his constant striving towards perfection of expression.

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Rutherford Waddell

On September 25th of that year he was inducted to the Lincoln-Prebbleton charge. Did the preacher at his induction service have any premonition of the battle-note that was to mark much of his ministry when he took as his text for that day the words, "I came not to send peace, but a sword " ?

In 1878 Rev. John Gow of St. Andrew's Church, Dunedin, on account of advancing years resigned his charge to take a smaller place with a more genial climate. The vacant congregation thought of sending to Scotland for a minister, but arranged to have the pulpit supplied month by month for a time by New Zealand ministers. The advice of the late Dr. Elmslie, among others, was asked in this connexion ; and he suggested that Mr. Waddell should be invited to preach for a month. He agreed to do so ; and the congregation was so immediately impressed by him that it dropped all thought of sending Home for a minister. A writer in the Dunedin "Evening Star " of April 23rd last, a week after the Doctor's death, gathers up his boyhood memories of that far-off time. He says :

"I well remember the meeting on the footpath outside the Church door in Melville Street, where excited groups of earnest men and women discussed the sermon, and it was there and then decided he would do for St. Andrew's, and nobody else need apply. It was a happy choice on both sides. No man ever had a more loyal or devoted set of adherents, and no Church a more faithful pastor."

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The Years of His Ministry

The call was duly sent and accepted, and on April iSth, 1879, Mr. Waddell was inducted to the pastorate of the Church with which his name will be forever associated. Sometimes a congregation captured as St. Andrew's was by outstanding pulpit gifts is on the way to swift and bitter disillusionment. But it was not so in this case. The most enthusiastic signatory of that call in 1879 could hardly have imagined how memorable and fruitful was to be the ministry which it was to inaugurate. There have been ministries as long as his in the history of our Church ; but there has been none of equal length marked by such sustained and splendid preaching gifts or by an intenser passion for the transforming of all social life bv the spirit of the Gospel. It is at once humbling and inspiring to think of the length and never-failing quality of the service that he rendered to the Church and to the whole communitv in Dunedin from the date of his induction to the day of his death. Fortv vears of a ministry crowded with vivid and uplifting interests, followed bv thirteen vears of retirement rich in the utterance of garnered wisdom and ripened helpfulness. We can hardly realize what that record means in volume and variety of work. It gives us some idea of the length of Dr. Waddell's work in Dunedin when we reflect that when he was inducted th Settlement was onlv thirtv-one years old. The

5i

Rutherford Waddell

great flood, which is now ancient history, swept the valle\'s of Otago only seven months before his arrival. Railway communication with Invercargill had been completed only three months before. It was two years later before the population of Dunedin reached 24,000. At that time with its suburbs it was about half as large again as the Wanganui or Invercargill of to-day.

Even at that early stage St. Andrew's was an important congregation. When Mr. Gow retired there were 332 members on its roll, though during the nine months' vacancy the number had decreased to 284. The vitalizing touch of the new minister was felt at once in all the organizations of the church. Subsequent chapters of this volume will have as their aim some estimate, however imperfect, of special aspects of the manysided service that he rendered through long years to the city of his adoption. The aim of this chapter is, by brief reference to the outstanding facts of his ministry, to give some idea of the volume of work achieved and the mental and spiritual strain which it involved.

At his first evening service he took as his text the words —

"Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the Gospel according to the power of God."

He could hardly have chosen a text more descriptive of the ministry he was that day

52

The Years of His Ministry

beginning both in its consecrated purpose and in its high faith in the strengthening power of God. Faithfully to the end lie fulfilled the ideal he then set before himself. The story of his forty years’ ministry in St. Andrew’s is one of intense and many-sided activity. His preaching, his lecturing on literary and social subjects, his leadership in congregational, educational, and social movements made him one of the most vital forces in the community. He carried into practice a saying that was often on his lips about giving to the cause we serve —“the passion of our hearts and the utmost labour of our hands.”

All his years in St. Andrew's were a living ministry to the souls of men, effective in appeal and rich in enduring results, because his heart's blood was in it. Sir Robertson Nicoll tells us that our best work, the work which tells most on the lives of others, is that which is done in the upper limit of our powers:

"It is a vital truth that work carried beyond the boundary of the natural strength is the work that makes its mark in the world. A man has made no mark, and asks himself why. It is because he has not paid the price of making his mark."

Soon after his arrival the Session was strengthened and the Deacons' Court completely reorganised in preparation for a forward move. By the end of 1880 the debt on

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Rutherford Waddell

the church property had been reduced, partly with the help of an overdue Synod grant, from £2,125 t° £B5O. In 1880 a Ladies’ Association was formed. In connexion with it and whth the Young Men’s Class, Mr. Waddell began those studies in English literature which developed into the public lectures which were so widely popular in later years. The minister was responsible for the starting of a Cricket Club to get in touch with the youths of the congregation. If ever there was a living and advancing church it was St. Andrew’s under his ministry. It led the way in the employing of a deaconess to get in touch with necessitous cases in the neighbourhood of the church and to be the uniting link in all the women’s organizations, in assuming responsibility for the support of its own missionaries in the foreign field, and in the adoption of modern Sunday School methods. And in all these developments the minister was the leader. He was constitutionally unfitted to be a child of the status quo. His mind was ever exploring new possibilities : and for him visions existed only to be realized. No doubt his deafness, which became an increasing disability as the years went on, saved him from many activities, such as presbyterial and committee work, which so often take up the time and dissipate the thought of city ministers. But the burden of all public moral interests pressed unceas-

65

The Years of His Ministry

ingly upon him. No preacher in the land kept heart and mind in closer touch with the great problems of social life. He was ever alive to the changing tides of thought on spiritual questions, and gave laborious thought in his pulpit preparation to the meeting of difficulties of faith. It is proof of the strain which he imposed on himself in the work of the ministry that three times during these forty years he had to take long leave of absence for the restoration of his health. The first of these occasions was after he had been seven years in Dunedin. We read that on the state of his health becoming known to the office-bearers,

“They at once cordially granted him an extended leave of absence in order that he might visit the Homeland. All arrangements were soon complete, and he left Dunedin with the praise of all men in his ears and with the prayers of the congregation for his speedy restoration and return.”

The protracted illness of Mrs. Waddell also made it imperative for him to ask for leave.

The annual church social in May, 1886, was made the occasion of a farewell to him before he set out on his holiday, and striking testimony was borne to the influence of his work during the preceding seven years.

Rev. A. Cameron said that it was well that they should learn to do without Mr. Waddell for a little as they were growing into the way of depending too much on him.

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Rutherford Waddell

Dr. Salmond, who had just been transferred from the position of professor of theology in the Theological College to that of professor of mental and moral philosophy in the University of Otago, gave happy expression to his appreciation of Mr. Waddell.

"He hoped that when Mr. Waddell went Home he would not like Home, and that Home would not like him. He hoped he would be shockingly unpopular, and that people would say if that was the sort of ministers we had in New Zealand we had better keep them. In that case they would see Mr. Waddell back ; and they wanted him back. He had a power in Dunedin that was quite unique, and had been doing a work and exercising an influence which no one else could do."

In his own speech we catch a note of deep perplexity and almost of foreboding. In an earlier communication to his office-bearers he said that he had thought of resignation, but decided finally to ask for leave in the hope that Mrs. Waddell might yet get the mastery of the rheumatism that had laid so cruel a grip on her. He now said that he found it hard to see his course for the future ; but, rather than leave Dunedin for good, he would come back and try if he could make it his permanent home. There was also in his speech a reference to those who were critical of his utterances :

"He thought he had been misunderstood by some people, but probably that was his own fault. He did not believe in the distinction between

56

The Years of His Ministry

things secular and sacred. Sunday was not the only day for religion. All work was sacred. He had taken a larger view of literature than most of the other pastors in Dunedin because lie held that all literature that contained truth was God's revelation."

This last statement reminds us of the fact that for a good many years Mr. Waddell was regarded with suspicion in many quarters. His own congregation was enthusiastically loyal. Even conservative members, for whom literature had no appeal, felt the charm of his character and the evangelic power of his preaching. But men sound in the faith, who knew him only from without, were distinctly suspicious of him. He used to say :

"It was Elmslie who sent me to Dunedin and put a radical in the pulpit of St. Andrew's."

Those who actually heard him preach were often astonished at his orthodoxy. One ministerial friend writes of the only time he heard him preach : —-

"His text was 'Toiling in Rowing,' and the emphasis he put on the place of Christ in our theology and our life, and the passion of the preacher, gained my unstinted admiration, and I told him so ; and I quite remember his answer, And so you think I am not so great a heretic after all.'

Probably an Irishman, without any aggravation of the offence, was a dangerous innovation in the staid Dunedin Presbytery of the 'eighties. And a minister who gave so much

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Rutherford Waddell

time to literature, and, still worse, one who took such an uncomfortable interest in social reforms, might be justly regarded with suspicion. The troubler of those who are at ease in Zion is always apt to be a little unpopular. The old Scotch woman who, at the close of a public meeting was overheard speaking about “that nesty little body Waddell” (with the accent on the first syllable), would no doubt have a good few sympathisers at one period. He said more than once that his first real friend in the Dunedin Presbytery was Dr. Gibb. The pathos of this remark lies in the fact that he was seven years a member of the Dunedin Presbytery before Dr. Gibb came to the Colony. On his return from furlough he was soon involved in the fiercest battle of his career. But before many years had passed he occupied as unchallenged a place in the admiration of his brethren as he had for long done in the loyalty of his congregation.

During this first holiday Rev. D. Dutton, afterwards so well known as minister of Caversham and Chaplain to the Forces in two wars, filled Mr. Waddell’s place, and it is worthy of note that Dr. Waddell’s last public utterance in Dunedin was his address at the funeral service of his old friend, just eight months before his own death.

Mr. Waddell’s trip to America and Britain was no idle man’s holiday. Naturally he heard all the great preachers he could. (His

5§

The Years of His Ministry

deafness was not then so bad as to prevent him from hearing sermons with the aid of his ear-trumpet.) He visited the Mormon temple and heard Mormon preachers with little edification. He visited the Chinese quarter in San Francisco under police protection. He investigated labour problems and made enquiry into educational matters. In his letters to the "Star" and the St. Andrew's "Church Monthly " we find the piquant observations of an acute and keenly interested mind. An American correspondent to one of the Dunedin papers at this time refers thus to Mr. Waddell's visit : -

Mr. Waddell is a genial gentleman. He moves carefully, and keeps his eyes wide open, all the more because of defective ears. His inquiries are pushed toward the living questions that affect our common Christian civilisation—temperance, education, and good government. Such men as he are an honour to any country.''

Mrs. Waddell was unhappily unable to come back to New Zealand with him ; and her increasing suffering through succeeding years laid a heavy burden on his heart.

In 1888 and 1889 came the battle over sweating conditions in Dunedin which will be described in a later chapter. In 1894 the Synod added to his already arduous labours by deciding to publish a new Church weekly, "The Christian Outlook," and appointing him editor. He was a strong believer in the

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Rutherford Waddell

value of a good church paper, and threw himself with enthusiasm into his new work. The literary quality and vigorous moral tone of the new paper soon made it widely and favourably known.

Possibly the time between his first and second trips Home was the intensest period of his life's work. He was unremitting in the duties of a busy pastorate. The quality of his pulpit work was at its highest. Every year he gave courses of lectures on literature to enthusiastic audiences. For part of the period in question he was engaged in a struggle for better industrial conditions that made an immeasurable demand on his time and strength, and for the remainder of it he bore most of the responsibility and undertook most of the labour in the difficult task of establishing a religious paper. The strain of all this was too much for even his tireless energy, and the inevitable breakdown came. In his reply to a note of sympathy which I sent to him he said :

"For some time I have been running a race with a shadow and was beginning to think it was the shadow feared of man."

It was very hard, I believe, at this time to convince him that internal cancer had not laid its grip on him. His finely sensitive imagination at times tended to make him dwell on such possibilities ; and in this case

6o

The Years of His Ministry

the symptoms of the fell disease were simulated by nervous indigestion. It was a struggle for his friends to revive the will to live in his heart, as he was sure his time had come. Tonic friends like Dr. Gibb and Rev. A. Don did much to help his medical adviser in restoring him to something of his natural buoyancy of soul. But another long holiday was an imperative necessity. I think that it was on the eve of this holiday that an elder dropped into his study one evening and told the Doctor that the Session wished him to take a holiday. He also handed him a cheque to help him on his way. The Doctor glanced at the cheque as he thanked his visitor for the goodwill the people were showing and thought that it was for £2B. A little later in the evening he took it up again and found that it was for £2BO. Next day he hurried to see the elder and find out if there were not some mistake. Needless to say he was soon reassured on that point.

Two events towards the close of this period deserve special mention. The first came to him with the shock of a bewildering surprise. The second was the realization of one of his dreams. Early in 1897 his friends were deeply gratified by the news that his old University had conferred on him the honorary degree of D.D. I have still in my possession the letter which he wrote in reply to my congratulations :

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Rutherford Waddell

"The news I was somewhat prepared for, having heard from Porter of Mornington that the train had been laid. Unfortunately it was laid without any consultation whatever with me, and I knew nothing in the world about it till the matter had all been settled. Had I known in time I would certainly have stopped it. It is the last thing in the world I either desired or expected. In fact even now I can hardly think of it as other than ludicrous. It was only with great pressure of friends whose opinions I valued that I was induced to consent. I had not the slightest wish for it. But one cannot fly altogether in the face of others whose good opinion you value. So I suppose I must submit but very reluctantly. However that need not hinder my acknowledging your very kind letter of congratulation. It is couched in terms that make it very acceptable. . . . Nothing very new here. lam trying to knock Browning into shape, or at least my ideas of him, for next winter's lectures. It is tough work.''

To some of us, greatly though we appreciated the honour bestowed on him, there was at first something repellently strange in his new title. But that soon wore off ; and he lived to be "The Doctor" par excellence.

The second event referred to was the appointment at the close of 1900 of a deaconess to work among the poor and to guide the work among the young. This was a new departure in local presbyterianism ; but happilv the experiment was triumphantly successful. Sister Christabel, who began work in the following March, more than justified the expectation of minister and office-bearers.

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Dr. Waddell resumed work in St. Andrew’s in April, 1902. He was much restored in health, and was able to carry on his work in the congregation as efficiently as ever. But it is doubtful if his powers ever quite regained their former vigour, or at any rate, their former resiliency. He had a fuller knowledge and richer experience to work on. In years he was hardly past his prime. But he could no longer afford to be as prodigal of his strength as he had been. He was unable to resume the full editorship of the “Outlook” to the deep regret of the whole Church, and had to keep within narrower limits his courses of lectures on literature. But his work was always work to the limit of his strength, no matter what outlets for it might be closed. The years following his return were marked by the intensified missionary interest of the Church, in which he was of course the leading spirit. His pulpit preparation had to keep pace with an appreciative expectation that made an increasing demand on his strength.

Towards the close of 1912 his health again caused concern to his friends. So urgent was the need for rest and change that the jubilee celebrations of the congregation were postponed to allow him to go for a prolonged trip to the Homeland. He left in February, 1913, and was away for a year. On his return he carried on his work in St. Andrew’s for over five years more. They were years of stress

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and shadow. The Great War filled almost the whole of them, and near their close the most virulent epidemic that has ever visited our shores caused greater grief and desolation for the time than even the war. During that trying period there was an unceasing strain on the Doctor with his deep sensitiveness to world woes and his acute personal sympathies. He was in constant touch with the stricken. He maintained a large correspondence with St. Andrew's men at the front, and arranged with the Session that the church should keep in touch with them all. But the inevitable evening hour of his great ministry was drawing on. Increasing deafness, and, with it, increasing difficulty in clear enunciation, were making his task harder, especially in establishing contact with new hearers. And so in August, 1919, on the verge of three score years and ten, he resigned from the charge which he had served with unremitting faithfulness for the long period of over forty years.

On December nth, 1919, a farewell was given him in St. Andrew's Bible School Hall, at which warm testimony was given by leading citizens to the value of his work both as a minister and as a citizen. Professor Davies said :

"The outstanding feature of this ministry was not so much the length as the character of it. During those forty years Dr. Waddell had carried

6 4

The Years of His Ministry

himself with grace and dignity and had endeared himself to generations of people. . . . His literary gifts too were quite exceptional, and it was probable that through his ministry and his writings he had spoken to a larger congregation than any other minister in Australasia. Dr. Waddell had exercised a profound influence on the other ministers of the Church, and had served the Church magnificently in that respect. The\- would no doubt find it difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone to take the place of one whose friendship had taken so big a place in their lives, but at the same time his influence and character would ever be to them an inspiration. He had worn the crown of religion with grace and dignity and untarnished, and he would continue to wear it until it was exchanged for one that was immortal."

Mr. M. Cohen of the "Evening Star" spoke of Dr. Waddell's enthusiastic and successful support of the kindergarten and technical schools movements. Rev. William Saunders, a close associate of the Doctor in religious, literary, and social interests, said that he was a living denial of the charge that the Church did not interest itself sufficiently in the troubles of Labour and the perplexities of Capital, and went on to speak of his magnificent charitv to all.

Sir George Fenwick, managing director of the "Otago Daily Times," who had stood by his side in the anti-sweating campaign of thirty years before, spoke cordially of his great work "in improving the conditions of our city."

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The Chief Justice, Sir Robert Stout, was unable to be present, but wrote a letter from which the following extracts may be quoted:-

"The Doctor has ever been on the side of humanity, as distinguished from class, sect, or party : to him the world was his country and all men and women his fellow-citizens. His desire for human welfare was ever manifest. In the past, during the struggle for better wages, for the elimination of sweating, and for the uplift of those to whom existence itself was a struggle, he was ever to the fore. He spared neither time nor trouble to render assistance when it was most needed, and his efforts were founded on strong commonsense and a full knowledge of the surroundings of every question in which he was interested. In his struggle for the uplifting of our social life he did not neglect the potent effect of education. By his voice and pen he educated the community, and led them to higher ideals and to a nobler life. Benjamin Franklin once said that what was needed for social development in the United States of America was a Bible and newspapers in every home, and a good scholar in every district. Two of these requirements Dr. Waddell has himself supplied by his writing to the Press, and by his lectures, sermons, and ministrations. . . Although he may not be aware of his own influence, I think I may unhesitatingly declare that I know of no one who has excelled him in this respect. . . . He may go down to the end of his days assured that his life has not been in vain, and that hundreds whom he neither knew nor heard of have, by his precepts and example, been led into the ways in which good citizens should walk. . . . May he still continue to live

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among us for many wars to come as an example of what a good citizen and a great teacher should be."

In a finely written and discriminating leading article the "Star" of the following evening said :

"It will be long before the fragrant memory of Dr. YVaddell's charming personality and great influence as pastor, journalist, and humanitarian 1 >asses away from the scene of his manifold activities. The people of Dunedin, of all classes and creeds, are justly proud of him. . What the loss means to the congregation of St. Andrew's Church, to whom he ministered for forty years with unclouded acceptability, it is not for us to attempt to describe, but imaginative sympathy may enable us to form some idea of the nature of the void. We know that the relationship between Dr. Waddell and his congregation was of quite exceptional closeness and mutual understanding, and can well believe that young and old alike are touched almost with dismay in facing the fact that it has come to a close. . . .

"We have paid our imperfect tribute to the pastor, the preacher, the man of letters, the literary interpreter, the refined scholar. It only remains to be said that greater than all these is the man himself, the friend, the Christian gentleman. There is nothing weak about him. His tender humanity is mingled with much shrewdness of perception, and even, if need were, with some sternness of judgment ; and he has a healthy distrust of mere sentimentalism. But his sympathies are as generous as they are searching, and small is the number of people or projects

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beyond their pale. He has a very fine courtesy, and his infirmity, with its trying disabilities and deprivations, has no souring effect upon his disposition or temper. Probably, indeed, it does but help to build up his character to the beautiful elevation in which his friends glory. And that is the note upon which we shall end this tribute. For the building of character is, to his mind, the prime object of existence ; and all his preaching, all his writing, all his manifold intellectual activity have been directed, obviously or by implication, to this paramount end. As the shadows begin to fall on the path of his earthly pilgrimage, he must carry with him into his thoroughly-deserved leisure the happy consciousness of having made many, many lives better and brighter and happier."

Mr. Walter Gow, Mr. A. Burn, Mrs. \V. R. Cameron, and Mrs. D. H. Rogers spoke on behalf of the congregation, and presented Dr. Waddell with an engrossed minute of Session and a cheque for two hundred guineas. In his reply Dr. Waddell thanked the congregation for all that they had been to him through all the years of his ministry. He expressed his surprise at the eulogies uttered there and at the letters he had received from men like the Primate, Dean Fitchett, Archdeacon Curzon-Siggers, and Bishop Geary, "all of which made him wonder who he was."

'He was not going away finally from Dunedin or St. Andrew's. He intended living at Broad Bay, pottering around a little in the garden, dreaming a little, thinking a little, and perhaps writing a little, and so ripen for the grave."

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I have quoted more fully the opinions of others than a strict critic of biography might approve ; but my aim has been to show how deep and wide was the influence of the subject of this memoir. The beliefs and outlook of the various speakers and writers quoted may be detected in their respective emphases ; but this only makes their concurrent testimony the more impressive. A great Christian ministry had closed that night, and forty years of wider service and confessedly inspired by Christian faith ; and here men of varying belief and viewpoint gave unsought confirmation of the Doctor's farewell words, that

'"now he withdrew from the work he loved so well believing that so far as he knew he had earned the ill-will of no one."

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CHAPTER IV

Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

For necessity is laid upon me ; for woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel."

The impassioned argument was simple truth Half-wondering at its own melodious tongue."

When we look back upon the unique ministry of Dr. Waddell we can best appreciate its influence if we think in turn of its various phases. I use this expression advisedly, for all his eager interests were for him but phases of his ministry, ways in which he served his generation according to the will of God. His interest in literature was largelv due to its intimate bearing on the great problems of human life. In essays on the most occasional subjects he did not hesitate in making the moral and religious interest supreme, with more definite reference to Christ as the light and power of life than we find in many a sermon. In one letter he savs: —

"I would often have liked to have given a more definite religious turn to them. But then I was writing for a secular newspaper and did not like to contravene its principles."

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

Whatever else lie was, he was first and foremost a preacher, and no appreciation would be just to him or satisfying to those who knew him in his St. Andrew's days that failed to convey some adequate impression of his power in the pulpit. Preaching he regarded as his life vocation. When, after his retirement, it was said to him that he would be able to exercise a larger ministry by his pen, his reply was, "But I love preaching." His preparation for this great work of his life is an example to over-readv pulpiteers in its laborious thoroughness. No doubt the gift of style ran in the blood of his family. He was the nephew of Mayne Reid. A niece and a nephew have both earned distinction in the realm of letters. He could speak ex tempore with ease and attractive grace. But he never vielded to the fatal temptation of facile speech. Until his style was formed and the pressure of ministerial work became too great for such detailed preparation he wrote out his sermons in full, and sometimes in earlier days three or four times. In his early Dunedin ministry he used to read eight hours a day. He had books and envelopes for extracts and illustrations carefully classified. And it was to this careful preparation and hard practice that he attributed his fluency and power of expression. He was always keenly alive to the necessity of writing if one is to avoid ruts in thought and repetition in

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words. His gift of style, his instinct for the inevitable word, was the reward, not only of good literary company, but of long practice and high faithfulness.

We have seen in earlier chapters the origins of his power as a preacher in his dominant religious convictions and in the wide and sympathetic knowledge of literature that gave him his unrivalled felicity of expression. He had a message that appealed to heart and conscience. But it was always given worthy expression. Great truths formed the staple of his preaching ; but they were clothed in raiment of glowing words. The sardonic comment of Carlyle on a popular preacher whom he was induced to hear could not be levelled against Dr. Waddell, "If that man had anything to say, he could say it." But none the less would he agree with Henry Van Dyke, "An idea arrives without effort ; a form can onlv be wrought out bv patient labour."

The memorial minute of the Dunedin Presbytery submitted by Professor Hewitson makes the following reference to his preaching :

"Dr. Waddell was pre-eminently a preacher of the Word of God. For this work he was fitted Inunremitting cultivation of his powers of thought and expression, an emotional nature, strong, controlled, and refined, that glowed with the movement of his thought, and by a spirit surrendered to God in a daily sacrifice of love and

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

trust, a trust tried through years by the discipline of sorrow and darkness, the steadily increasing privations of deafness, and of speech that to a public audience grew more and more inarticulate. He bore his sorrows with silence, patience, and courage. He turned his loss to gain. Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. He preached what he felt, what he smartingly did feel, and, also, what he joyfully knew."

The "Evening Star," in the appreciation to which reference has been made in the preceding chapter, after speaking of his build as rather frail and his voice as unequal to great efforts, goes on to say :

—, —. "Yet, in spite of these deficiencies, his delivery was impressive, with the dignity that springs from obvious sincerity of conviction, while as regards the matter and style of his discourses it would be difficult to speak in terms of excessive eulogy. Noble and lofty indeed was the standard of pulpit eloquence maintained Sunday after Sunday, year after year, by the pastor of St. Andrew's. The literary note was always present, but always as the handmaid, so to speak, of religious doctrine and evangelical fervour. Every sermon, every sentence, bore the unmistakable marks of intellectual refinement and literary culture ; but there was no artifice, no superior pose, no mere showiness of anv kind. Simplicity—thoughtful, powerful, poetical simplicity —was, we should say, the salient note of Ur. \Y addell's preaching."

Botli these fine appreciations, it is true, were written by men who seldom heard Dr. Waddell preach ; but they will be endorsed

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by hundreds who heard him regularly. It was in the pulpit that the deepest convictions of his heart found expression. On his utterances from it were focussed the great moral and spiritual interests that inspired all his other forms of expression. It was there that we knew him in the full power of his personality. Many of us who belonged to his congregation were New Zealanders, and so were unable to make any comparisons between him and the great preachers of other lands. But those of us who still remain feel that Dr. Waddell in the full tide of his St. Andrew's ministry was the finest preacher we ever knew or can ever hope to know. We think with sad, yet grateful, memories of the slight, graceful figure, so sure and spontaneous in dramatic gesture, of the voice, difficult for strangers to catch, yet vibrant with meaning for those familiar with it, and of the rare union of literary grace and spiritual passion that combined to make his ministry such a compelling power in our lives. Our thoughts go back to the crowded congregations, drawn from all parts of the city by a common interest in the preacher and his way of presenting the truth, and to the expectant stillness that pervaded the church as the preacher, dark-haired and slightly built, with no gown to hamper his movements, walked quietly round the choir seats to the open platform with simple rail and reading-desk

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

that formed his pulpit. There was always something simply plain and reverential in his approach to public worship. As far as I can judge he made no study of liturgies. But everything in the opening part of the service, simple though it was, suggested worship and helped towards it. There was a devoutness in his whole religious outlook that impressed itself on his conduct of a service without any conscious effort on his part. One who knew him well speaks in similar terms of the close of the service :

"An ever-memorable part of the service was his stepping to his left from the pulpit to the platform rail and raising one hand. With the first word of his prayer the prophet became the priest and the congregation was led into the very Presence while he talked with God."

Of Phillips Brooks he uses words that might well be applied to himself :

"The spirit of the minister tells on his church. His congregation was the most devotional that I saw anywhere."

But it was in the sermon that the interest of the congregation centred. Whatever the subject might be, whether or not his hearers agreed with all that was said, here was a living message. His heart was in all he said, and the thrill of reality communicated itself irresistibly to the hearts of his hearers. Much has been said about his style. But it was so effective just because it was so spontaneous.

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There was no sign of literary artifice in his sermons. They were well expressed simply because his literary company and the faithful self-discipline of years made it impossible that they should be otherwise. What strikes us most as we read them is their impassioned directness of utterance. The urgency of the message forbade involved expression. The sentences were meant to get home. Thev were short, direct, pregnant with the whole force of personality. If, as has been said, preaching be the imparting of truth through personality, Dr. Waddell was a preacher of the truest kind. His thought must at times have been difficult for many of his hearers. In an age of scientific ascendancy and theological transition, he grappled resolutely with the difficulties that perplexed earnest and thoughtful minds. He alwavs sought to save the growing mind from teachings that might have to be unlearned later, and to give it light that would grow more and more satisfying as the years went on. For manv an inquiring mind he helped to bridge the gulf between the old and the new, and in matters of faith to fix the thoughts on essential things. But the preaching that will meet such a situation is apt to be "caviare to the general." And it was only the preacher's high note of personal conviction that levelled all intellectual distinctions, the fire in his heart that winged his words.

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

His power of appeal was extraordinary. The writer of early memories in the "Star" whom I have already quoted says :

Whatever he wanted for the church he had simply to ask for and it was there, no matter what the amount, and he was able to announce from the pulpit the following Sunday that the sum required had been voluntarily subscribed by the congregation."

But let envious brethren remember this, that he never lectured, or scolded, or demanded. He enlisted the loyal interest of the congregation in the causes he had at heart. He made them see for themselves what was needed. As one of my oldest friends in the congregation said to me, "He simply made you feel that you must give."

And akin to his power of appeal was his power of dramatic presentation. The telling of any story, grave or humorous, held the congregation spellbound. Professor Hewitson at the memorial service in St. Andrew's on May ist when speaking of this quality in him aptly quoted the Arab proverb that the orator converts ears into eyes. And he showed the same power in quotation. An old fellow-student of my own remembered all his days the breathless silence of the congregation as the Doctor at the close of the sermon repeated the hymn : —■

“Behold a stranger at the door! He gently knocks, has knocked before.”

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Humour in the pulpit is a difficult subject. It should never be attempted. And Dr. Waddell never attempted it. It came out because it was the natural expression of himself. There was a wholesome unity in his life. He was simply himself in all he said and did. In his letters of 1886, during his first trip Home, we get some of his views on this subject, as on others, from his comments on the preachers he heard. Writing of Beecher he says :

Thc human heart was but a pipe, upon which he could play almost any tune he wished. His audience the day I heard him alternately laughed and wept. Beecher, perhaps more than most has the credit of sending his fist through that sham solemnity which has for so long done duty for sanctity and reverence. But he is also the creator of that other sham which is even worse —the clerical joker, who leaves defilement on everything he touches. America is cursed with these, from the vulgarity of Talmage down to the buffoonery of her coarsest revivalist. But Beecher's humour is part of his religion. It grows out of him as naturally and usefully as the wings out of a bird."

In this quotation we have the line which he approved and by which he walked. His humour was always spontaneous, always apposite, and never hurtful to the spirit of worship. Sometimes his asides could be very telling. One night he was reading a passage from Dr. Alexander Whyte about people who became increasingly slack in church atten-

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

dance as wealth and fashionable connexions increased with them. It was a most pointed and effective quotation. Just at the part where many would begin to feel how closely home it was getting, he glanced up from the paper, remarked parenthetically, “This of course refers to Edinburgh,” and read on. Possibly the shot was just a little too fast for some of his hearers.

Dr. Waddell could hardly be called a doctrinal preacher, and he made no pretence of being an ex< gete. If he had to discuss the meaning of a text he spoke almost as a layman would, using some such expression as "commentators tell us." And as often as not he might take the interpretation that fitted in best with the truth he was urging at the moment. Occasionally, indeed, his sermon might have no logical connexion with the text. A friendly student going home from church one Sunday remarked, "That was a fine sermon when he got it hitched on to the text." I remember hearing a wonderfully impressive sermon on the suffering that sin lays on the heart of God. It was one of a course on the Prophets, and the text was in Hosea : "Thev shall sorrow a little for the burden of the king of princes." The interpretation was as fanciful as the sermon was profoundly true. And yet was his use of the text any worse than that of scores of preachers who used to preach edifying sermons on

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"Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty," or "Where the tree falleth, there shall it be " ? For this easy freedom he justified himself as only an Irishman could. "The Bible is my quarter-acre freehold, not my leasehold. I can use it as I like " —a somewhat dangerous attitude for most, but never likely to be abused by one as loyal in heart as Dr. Waddell. If a great truth possessed his heart he was sure to find some great suggestive word of Scripture to serve as a keynote for its exposition. But if he never troubled unduly about exegetical or doctrinal niceties, that does not mean that he was careless of Scripture exposition. And, as we have seen, the great evangelical tradition was the most potent and enduring factor in his religious life. Expositions like those of Sir G. A. Smith were made the basis of long courses of sermons on the Prophets. And he read all round any subject that he took in hand. There was always a solid basis of reasoning in his doctrinal or apologetic sermons. A glance through notes of old addresses shows none could excel him in effective statement of the grounds of our faith in the deity of Christ and in the Resurrection, and that he was in touch with the best thought on such subjects as the nature of the resurrection body. But for him the test of use in exposition or in doctrine was lucidity, and, above all, vitality. What made the Bible a living book to men was

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

what he valued and what he used. As in literature, so in religion, one of the great services he rendered was to make his own the inspiration and help of great teachers and to pass it on in vital appeal to his fellowmen. His was a finely assimilative rather than a creative mind. What he read passed into the substance of his thought and was made really his own. So we find sermons and even letters tinged with traces of spontaneous quotation. For instance, a sentence in a letter quoted in the last chapter, "I have been running a race with a shadow, and was beginning to think it was the shadow feared of man," is a blended quotation of Meredith and Tennyson. There was no dead material in his mind. He turned a deaf ear to teachings that he could not transmute into living human interests. This power of assimilation, combined with his rare gift of expression, enabled him to bring home to the ordinary hearer the meaning that the most competent scholarship has found in Scripture.

The failure of many a ministry lies here. The truth is learned, but it is not made one's own.

"Such a price

The Gods exact for song ;

To become what we sing."

Men study prophetic and apostolic teaching in competent expositions. But it never becomes on their lips a message of life for

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Rutherford Waddell

their times. There is always the accent of the second-hand about it. In his essay on "The Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature" the Doctor quotes an American writer to this effect :

'ls not scholarship being wasted by being poured into natures that have no vitality to receive it ? Are not our colleges too rich in pedants the failure of whose career lies here ? Their manhood or womanhood is dead or only half-alive, and so the learning has found no real welcome or digest, and lies in them crude, hard, unsoftened, unsweetened into wisdom."

Burns has said the same thing in homelier and more vivid words. And a quotation from a greater American writer comes unbidden to the mind. In "The Scarlet Letter " there is this striking passage :

"There were others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised. moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which the purity of their life had almost introduced the holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame ; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native lanIhese fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked heaven"s last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame."

S:

Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

But here was one who could speak the truth of God in the language of men. Men heard in their own tongue the wonderful works of God. When the first edition of "The Voyage of Life " came out a leader of the northern portion of the Church, whose decisive control of business, with keen eyes glancing from beneath his skull-cap, kept successive assem-, blies in wholesome awe, said that he had never enjoyed read sermons so much and was amazed at Dr. Waddell's genius for gathering materials from all sources to fortify the Christian appeal.

The range of his preaching was extraordinary. A single incident, like the conversion of Paul, or a single parable, like the Prodigal Son, might supply material for a winter's course of sermons. A brother minister once happily applied to his preaching the words, "He hangeth the earth upon nothing." Year after year morning and evening courses of sermons were given lasting over half the year. Some of the subject-titles will give an idea of the ground covered and the labour involved : —"The Prophets," "Saul, the Tragedy of Israel," "The Journal of a Preacher " (Ecclesiastes), "O.T. Characters," "The Pilgrims' Progress," "The Second Advent," "The Romance of Grace," "Life, Death, and the Great Hereafter," "Visions of Sin," "Visions of Salvation," "The Dream Cities of Man and the City of God," "Waymarks

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in the Christian Life,” “The Voyage of Life,” “The Building of the Ship,” “The Evolution and Coronation of the Lamb,” “Youth and Its Ideals of To-day,” “The Epistle to the Romans,” “The Holy Spirit,” “Studies in Christian Doctrine.” When any special subject attracted attention he spoke on it. Thus, when “Robert Elsmere ” appeared, with its effort to preserve the Christian ideals without the historic Christian foundation, he delivered a series of valuable apologetic addresses on the points at issue. Professor Hewitson was well warranted in saying at the memorial service in St. Andrew’s ;

"Probably no other minister in this country, throughout a long ministry, has expounded with such care, such knowledge, and such practical application the Old and New Testaments."

The fact that so many of his sermons formed parts of series increases the difficulty of choosing for this volume those that are most representative of him. We were also precluded from printing any that have already appeared in his successive booklets and have had presumably the benefit of his own revision. Those chosen are good. But if any readers wish to see how a great preacher handles his subject let them turn to the sermon on "Doing Business in Deep Waters " in the later and larger edition of "The Voyage of Life." There is nothing abstruse or obscure in it. But the great doctrines are there ; and everything lives.

8 4

Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

Possibly his nearest kinship was with the prophets. The moral bearings of truth were ever foremost in his mind. The practical application of truth to individual and public life coloured all his utterances. Indeed we may say that for years he voiced the Christian conscience on all great moral issues that engaged the public mind. But he never forgot that great beliefs were needed for great living. In his booklet, “The Romance of God,” he says :

"Preachers deal too much in little fiddling moralities that fail to arouse the enthusiasm of their audiences. Kuskin tells us that if you cut out a square inch of Turner's skies you would find the infinite in it. It would take a good many square inches of some sermons to make an appeal to the love of daring and romance that sleeps in every breast. Bishop Gore declared, not long ago, that ' the peril of Protestant preachers is that they seek refuges from the sublimities of thought in opportunities of action/ But you need the loftiest motive for the lowliest duty if it is to be worthily done. You are not going to find a dynamic for even commonplace work by watering down the romance of religion."

At times the same conviction would flash out in some short, memorable sentence such as "The debtors of Calvary are the great saviours of the world." It was in making vivid and compelling the faith bv which men live that his power as a preacher consisted.

But when we think of Dr. Waddell as a great preacher it does not mean that we

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agreed with everything he said. There were, of course, those who thought him radical and even dangerous. Conservative folks were uneasy, though not hostile, about the forward movements which he was ever initiating. At one time orthodox people suspected his soundness. Here his deafness was in a measure a refuge for him. It made him a rather invulnerable target for criticism. And he knew it. He once told me with a chuckle how a worthy old elder said to him, "There are lots of things I would bring up in the Session if you were not so deaf." But those who knew him best never doubted his essential orthodoxy. As we have seen all his thinking was dominated by his evangelical upbringing and background. Radical though he was in many ways, a supreme loyalty to his spiritual inheritance was the guiding light of his life. And his conviction of the truth as it is in Jesus made his preaching essentially true, as it was convincingly sincere. The substance of his message and its driving force were distinctively religious. He had the North Ireland background without the North of Ireland rigidity of statement. And this bulked more and more as the years passed and life's experiences deepened. The last time I saw him he stressed the need of emphasizing something done definitely and finally for us as a surer ground of trust than our own wavering faith and purposes. But when I

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showed him the lines of Silesius giving the complementary truth he cordially agreed.

“Had Christ a thousand times Been born in Bethlehem,

But not in thee, thy sin Would still thy soul condemn.

In later years he was always apprehensive of forms of belief, similar to those in the early centuries, that minimised the place of Christ or insinuated some subtle form of naturalism into the explanation of Christianity. His sermon on his fiftieth anniversary, printed in "Memories and Hopes" under the title of "After Fiftv Years," deals almost entirely with such dangers to Christian faith.

An outgrowth of his intense evangelical conviction was his love of hymns. He continually repeated them to himself. He would as readily quote a revivalistic hymn in a sermon as the finest lines from Arnold or Tennyson. An example of this will be seen in the sermon in "The Voyage of Life" already referred to.

On great questions concerning final destiny he exercised a reverent reserve. He believed that if at any time, here or hereafter, there was repentance, there would be forgiveness. But he also pressed the significance of the fact that the most solemn words about the dark possibilities of life were uttered by Christ Himself. And his faith for the future

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was sure. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? ” he often said. Whittier’s lines were often in his mind :

"I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air ;

I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.

And so beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar.

No harm from Him can come to me On ocean or on shore."

In "The Fiddles of God " (p. 109) he speaks of the reserve of Christ about the future :

"On the assumption of the Gospels He knew all about the other world, but He has told us no details. He left that to the spiritualists and the theosophists. In nothing is His sanity more apparent than in His reticence about the future state."

On none of the foregoing points was there any temptation to disagree with him. His very refusal to be dogmatic was a help to faith and made us feel that we were in touch with a soul sensitive to the great meanings of life.

But he had some curious turns of belief. The lordship of Satan over the world was one. He held that the Temptation had no meaning unless the devil was able to give Christ what he promised. His belief in the devil was quite decided. "If there isn't a devil, who is carrying on the business ? I would like to know." His views, not less than his humour,

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Dr. Waddell as a Preacher

would make him quite appreciative of the dictum of the emphatic old Scot, “A releegion withoot a deevil isna worth a damn.” Often, too, with all his wide outlook, there was a leaning in him to adventism and the catastrophic aspects of Christian faith.

The criticism has been urged that on certain subjects, such as final destiny, there was no shading in his views. There must be one thing or the other, white or black. This is a difficulty for many with regard to the teaching of the New Testament itself. And two things mav be said with regard to it. First, it is a mark of great preaching to emphasize one great aspect of trutli without any qualifying considerations to weaken the impression. For instance, Paul never attempts to reconcile human responsibility with divine foreknowledge, though he emphasizes each in turn almost as if it held the whole field. Second, Dr. Waddell made much of the tendency of character to fixity, and sought to find in this fact the justification of Christ's separation of men into two classes at the end. Sin was to be regarded not in its present heinousness, but in its ultimate tendency.

I have found difficult}' in coming to an} 7 definite conclusion about the Doctor as a preacher to children. Two children's sermons are included in this volume ; and readers will be able to judge for themselves. It has to be remembered that no notes of these survive.

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They were taken down in shorthand just as he preached them. Several old members have spoken enthusiastically of his children's addresses. Mr. A. S. Paterson, speaking on behalf of the Sunday School teachers in 1886, said :

Mr. Waddell was especially happy in his addresses to children. Of the many things he had heard from his lips, nothing had fallen so deeply into his heart as two or three of the addresses which Mr. Waddell had delivered to the children."

I myself have the feeling that he was occasionally just a little over their heads. I once heard him tell them that they were "undeveloped possibilities." But on the other hand he could tell a story wonderfully well, and had an ever-open eye for happy illustrations from Nature. Then he never talked down to children in weary, stilted platitudes, and he was always arresting in his style. It is generally agreed that preaching to children is supremely difficult. For one tiling it usually means preaching with the steam shut off. And for a preacher like Dr. Waddell that meant a good deal. Then we have to be very guarded in judging the appreciation of children's sermons expressed by adults. As often as not it means that they appealed to the adults probably more than to the children. Many a preacher has the humbling experience of finding that his adult hearers like his children's sermons better than

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those intended for themselves. But we have to reflect that children often remember and understand more than we give them credit for.

There are other aspects of Dr. Waddell's preaching on which I intended to touch, more intimately associated with the finer shades of his character ; but these I must leave for the chapter dealing with his closing years.

I have tried in this chapter to present him as we knew him in the days of his prime. And I felt as I wrote that, if in the eventide of life I attend a service in St. Andrew's, the worshippers there will be as shadows and the voice of the preacher hardly heard. The past will be more real than the present. I shall see the familiar figure and hear once more the voice of the great inspiring preacher of my student days.

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CHAPTER V

Social, Educational, and Missionary Interests

"He's true to God who's true to man ; wherever wrong is done,

To the humblest and the weakest, 'neath the allbeholding sun,

That wrong is also done to us ; and they are slaves most base

Whose love of right is for themselves and not for all their race."

" Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm."

For Dr. Waddell faith in Christ meant implicit obedience to Christ. That was the form of his early faith, the accepting of Christ as the rightful lord of his life. And he was faithful to it in every phase of his ministry. The Kingdom of God was for him no mere general expression of Christian hope. It was something to be realized in the lives of men. And so he had a quick and painful sense of anything that marred or hampered human life. In the neighbourhood of his own church there was a region that called for concen-

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trated Christian effort ; and, under his guidance, the organizations of the church strove faithfully to meet the spiritual and social needs of the district. The Walker Street Mission, situated in what is now Carroll Street, was for many years a feature of the work of the congregation, being the continuation of similar work in Stafford Street. This work continued until the need for it was outgrown. The Ladies’ Association, later reorganized as a Friendly Aid Society, paid constant attention to poverty and difficult social conditions. And it was the difficult problems coming under their notice that had most to do with the appointment of a deaconess in the end of igoo.

But Mr. Waddell’s own inquiries at an earlier date showed him that all cases of poverty were not due to thriftlessness or the wasting of money in drink. Poverty, dire and hopeless, was being threatened to many by an old-world evil that was beginning to clutch New Zealand. In his visiting he found women working for pay that could not keep body and soul together ; and what he saw led him to inquire further into the conditions that made such things possible. Many a minister would have deplored the misery he saw and deplored the helplessness of himself or any other private individual to do anything to remedy it except by the provision of relief that could never remove the evil.

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But Mr. Waddell felt that New Zealand was being threatened with the evils of sweating, and had no doubt about what the Christian testimony should be. He made sure of his facts, and in the spring of 1888 he woke the city from its economic slumber by a powerful sermon on “The Sin of Cheapness.” Mr. J. T. Paul, of the “Times” staff, who kindly spent considerable time trying to find a report of this sermon, has come to the conclusion that it was not reported. An expression in a speech of Mr. Waddell about that time —“the thing got into the papers”— supports this conclusion. A reference to it as preached a few weeks before appears in the “Times ”of October 20th. But if it was not reported, it was widely talked about. A vigorous controversy began, with of course the usual criticism of the preacher. But it was one thing to denounce the preacher, quite another to dispose of the charges made by such a master of lucid and telling statement. For weeks the agitation went on, and the “Otago Daily Times” sent one of its most experienced reporters, Mr. Silas Spragg, to make a careful inquiry into the facts. In the Presbyterian Synod in November Mr. Waddell brought up the subject in a motion regretting the prevalence of such conditions and urging Presbyterians to discountenance them. Dr. Currie tells me that the mover rubbed it in well, and that there was a good

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deal of opposition to the bringing up of such subjects in the pulpit, chiefly from the older men. As far as I can gather from the press reports of the time there was general sympathy with Mr. Waddell's aim ; but the feeling is suggested that some good people would have preferred him not to have raised a troublesome question. One stalwart moved that the Synod take no action, but this was heavily defeated by the motion of Rev. James Chisholm, which Mr. Waddell had accepted as less elaborate than his own. The motion is as follows :

The Synod deplores the existence of the sweating system in the Colony, and instructs the ministers and the office-bearers to discourage it by every means in their power, and enjoins all to bear each other's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ."

In his speech Mr. Waddell gave figures that must have amazed those who heard them for the first time. Women were sewing moleskin trousers at 2§d. per pair, and by hard work from 8.30 a.m. to 11 p.m. could earn only 2S. a day. "The working classes did not go to church because the capitalists prayed for them on Sundays and preyed on them during the other six days of the week." He said that these sweating conditions were caused by excessive competition, and that competition was created by the enormous rage to get cheap things. He urged the

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Christian duty of teaching the laws of Christ and removing the conditions that led to such competition. Possibly it was not sufficient, and it was certainly not practically effective, to blame the rage for cheapness. For even those who blame it cannot resist it. But the methods that pandered to this rage might be checked. It was speedily found that the immediate cause of the trouble was the giving out of work at as low a rate as possible. Then, if some took that work who had other means of support, they undercut those who were entirely dependent on what they got from the firms. The latter had then to accept pay on which they could not live or else do without. As a result of its investigation the "Times " published a pamphlet report on "The Sweating System." Mr. Paul has given the salient facts in his pamphlet "Our Majority," published to celebrate the majority of the Tailoresses' Union. Unfortunately this deeply interesting pamphlet is now out of print. But the facts are on permanent record in it and in the files of the "Times " for the benefit of the historian who will write the story of our economic development. And they are sorry enough. Tailoresses took work home after eight hours at the factory, and slaved far into the night. One woman said that if they did not bring work home they could not make much more than half of ios. a week. The night work was killing, and even with it

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Social, Educational, and Missionary Interests

it was hard to make 14s. a week. One worker said that as a rule a girl could finish three pairs of moleskins a dav and get 3|d. a pair. When reductions came it meant starvation. One woman of 60 made shirts at Bd. a dozen, making 15 or 16 a day. Another used to get is. 3d. a dozen, but later had to make them for Bd. Bv working up to three in the morning she could make 12s. 6d. a week. One woman was destitute and had to get work. —

An immense bundle of material was handed to her, sufficient to make over a gross of oatmeal bags. This was a load just about as heavy as she could stagger under, as she was old and infirm ; but she took it and managed to get home. Then from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. she made twelve dozen and seven bags. The work was dirty on account of the material, and the dust arising therefrom makes the work unhealthy. She carried her heavy load of finished work back, and for her hard day's labour and her double journey received Bd."

Many of those interviewed looked dull and wearied —the young as well as the old. The way things were tending made it seem as if Dunedin, that had thought itself free of any such thing, were being threatened with the endless procession of stunted and povertystricken toilers that burdened Bright's imagination. In his Lord Rector's address at Glasgow University he said :

"In all our great towns, and not a little in some of our small towns, there is misery and helplessness much as I have described. The fact is

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there passes before my eyes a vision of millions of families—not individuals, but families—fathers, mothers, children, passing ghastly, sorrow-stricken, in never-ending procession from the cradle to the grave."

The evil was on a much smaller scale here ; but older lands showed only too clearly into what it would develop if unchecked. It is only fair to say that some of those who benefited by the system had no idea of the conditions it involved for the workers. Such a state of uninquiring acquiescence in conditions that work towards evil is only too common. But others were quite aware and cynically indifferent. The following passage from "Our Majority " is illuminating as to a certain class of business man :

"The warehouseman had told Mrs. R. that labour was plentiful and cheap—'You can get it for almost nothing.' Mrs. R. said that the girls working for her could not live and remain respectable if the prices she paid were reduced. He insisted that prices were too high, and offered Mrs. R. 3s. a dozen for making up a pile of shirts. ' I consider 3s. a dozen is enough for making them from the web,' he declared. Mrs. R. laughed and said, 'Dear me, Mr. , you talk like Manchester.' 'That's just where I come from,' said the warehouseman. Mrs. R. replied, T beg your pardon, but you don't understand where you are. That sounds too much like the Song of the Shirt.' Then he became prophetic. 'Before twelve months are over I mean to have them made here just as cheaply as they are at Home.' The warehouse-

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Social, Educational, and Missionary Interests

man's idea of sweaterdom was never reached. A healthy public opinion and a strong trade union spiked his gun. But more of that anon."

Here was a man who stood at the opposite pole from Mr. Waddell, and, indeed, from all decent people, in his conception of business. Mr. Waddell took as his first principle what Ruskin taught so eloquently, that the aim in economics was the making of manhood and womanhood. What ministered to that was to be encouraged. What tended to destroy it was to be condemned, no matter what the seeming loss. And here were conditions threatening the community—already operating in a considerable section of it — under which it was an impossibility to maintain health and a protracted heroism to preserve chastity. The conscience of the community was thoroughly roused. Negotiations were begun by which it was hoped to put an end to the scandal. The heads of each firm recognized the evil and promised to do what they could in meeting the request made to them not to give out work save to such contractors as would agree to pay a reasonable price for all work they in turn gave out. It seemed as if the exposure of the evil was to result in its immediate suppression by the voluntary adoption of fair methods by those who had unwittingly drifted into an evil way of doing business.

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But when it came to making a definite agreement the representatives of the large warehouses collectively refused to do what individually they had approved of. Meanwhile the "Times " had made its exposures of working conditions, supporting Mr. Waddell's strictures in every detail. Mr. Fenwick (afterwards Sir George Fenwick) took his place in the forefront of the battle, and had the whole power of the Dunedin press behind him. Public men became concerned for the good name of their city, and felt, too, a genuine interest in the misery of which they had been made aware. On June 7th, 1889, a great public meeting was held in the Choral Hall, Mr. W. Downie Stewart, M.H.R., father of the present Minister of Finance, being in the chair. The building was packed, and many representative citizens were present. The failure of negotiations with the merchants was reported, and the committee which had been investigating the matter concluded its report as follows :

"Finally, your committee having carefully considered the whole matter can see no way to prevent the recurrence of the state of things which has aroused public indignation in the past, excepting—

"(1) Legislative interference, and

"(2) The organization of the workers themselves into a union, similar to that which has been so successfully carried on in Victoria.

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"They recommend, therefore, the appointment of a committee for the purpose of securing these ends."

In speaking to the report Mr. Waddell did not mince matters. He could not understand the attitude of the warehousemen. And as he went on to make his condemnation of them more specific and emphatic he mentioned by name four firms that had opposed agreement on a fair basis. After detailing the negotiations which had taken place, he said :

"I, for one, must charge them with being henceforth indirectly involved in the iniquities of a system which we all deplore, and which they themselves profess to abhor. I charge them with not only not helping us to remove a stumblingblock out of the way of reform, but with actually sitting down upon the block and keeping it in its place. I say they, and they only, had the power at this particular crisis to prevent wages from sinking below a living minimum. Had they made the requirement the committee asked for—a requirement which, as far as I can see, could not possibly have involved them in any great difficulty or loss—it is morally impossible that the state of things which shocked us in the past could have continued in the future. They could have put a cog in the wheel which would have kept it in its place and prevented it from slipping back. . . . I waited upon almost every shop in George Street which was supposed to be in the shirtmaking trade. Everyone of them readily and gladly gave their consent to the tariff which I submitted to them. They thought it not only perfectly practicable, but a right good thing,

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and they readily agreed to accept it. But their concurrence was rendered valueless by the position which these large and generous and eminently respectable warehousemen took. Warehousemen, one would think, would have been above haggling for a halfpenny or a penny a dozen for shirt-making, when the lives and happiness of the workers were involved. I charge these warehousemen again with indirectly sharing in the gains of this iniquitous system of sweating. If it continues in our midst, I say these warehousemen will morally occupy a position almost, if not altogether, analagous to the receiver of stolen goods. . . . It may be a difficult thing for every warehouseman to make strict investigation as to how his goods are made up for him. But when public attention has been drawn to the circumstances under which such articles are produced—when it becomes a matter of notoriety that sweating exists in the community—then I say it is the bounden duty of every honest and righteous warehouseman to see to it that the articles supplied to them are not produced by this system, and that he gives no countenance or aid to those who may be using this system as a means of personal gain. If he fails to do this, then I say he is morally chargeable with being a co-partner in the evil which in word and heart perhaps he condemns. And finally I charge the warehousemen with caring more for money than for men ; more for gain than for the welfare of the human lives that help to procure this gain for them. . . . But the warehousemen are not alone in this eager race for gain at any cost. I am afraid we are all very much alike. But ladies and gentlemen, has it come to this —that money is more to be considered than manhood and womanhood ?

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That for the sake of selling shirts at three-half-pence less than our neighbour we will tolerate a system that reduces the makers of their goods to lead the life of galley slaves ? What can anybody gain by this ? . . . No, we do not gain. We are everyone ultimately losers. The greatest Master of the human heart—He Who knew what was in man better than all His critics put together—He said once, that a man is not profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or if he be the occasion of others losing their souls. And after eighteen centuries of professed worship and service of this Man, has it come to this, that we are willing to permit in our midst a system that in this young fair land threatens to reproduce before very long those very evils that are eating the heart and soul out of the older countries ? And shall we sit down here and allow it to suck the souls out of the lives of our women and girls ? I much mistake this large meeting if that is so. I much mistake the temper and spirit of the influential gentlemen who are on this platform to-night if they will allow it. I think we shall take this system with all its aiders and abettors, place them high up on the pillory- of public opinion for all men's scorn — yea, till the very geese take courage and hiss derision at them."

The outcome of that meeting was a request for a commission of inquiry, which was duly granted by the Government. Of this commission Mr. Waddell was a member. Sir Robert Stout, Mr. Fenwick, and other prominent citizens followed Mr. Waddell's lead. The only slightly discordant note was struck

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by a leading lawyer who evidently did not quite approve of people getting unduly excited over moral issues.

The direct outcome of this deep stirring of public opinion was the formation of the Tailoresses' Union, and, more important, the placing on the statute book of legislation for compulsory arbitration. If Mr. Waddell had sought personal triumph, his triumph was complete. But he did not. He was paid the honour of being elected first president of the Tailoresses' Union, but held the position for only three months —just long enough to make clear his sympathy with it. At its majority celebrations in July, 1910, he was an honoured guest and gave a striking, sympathetic, and informing address on the progress the Union had made in its first twenty-one years, with warm reference to Mr. Fenwick's work in the steps leading to its formation. I have given the story of the anti-sweating campaign at considerable length partly because there was nothing in the career of Dr. Waddell to which he could look back with deeper satisfaction and partly because it is in danger of being forgotten. Reliable information is available, but it is not in general circulation. And here let me express my indebtedness to Mr. Paul for his warm interest in this section of the memoir and his trouble in looking up apposite references in the "Times." His own booklet, too, will amply repay study for anyone happy

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enough to obtain a copy. Apart from the intrinsic value of the work which Mr. Waddell, as he then was, did in 1888 and 1889 the whole episode is a most illuminating and heartening one. Here was a student of literature with a mind touched to the finest idealism, the last, one would think, to have contact with the gross world around him. But none knew better the temptation of a certain type of culture to selfishness. He was the faithful disciple of One Who came down from the mount of vision and transfiguration to the help of the demon-tost and distracted at the mountain's foot. Sympathy with the downtrodden was of the very essence of his nature. And so the recognition of a Christian duty in the conditions he had come to know was swift and instinctive. Even good men are apt to acquiesce in evil conditions because they have become used to them, and because exposure of them is uncomfortable. But Mr. Waddell was never the man to shirk conflict on moral issues. A quick human sympathy, a passionate sense of justice, and a fine idealism were his warrant and his equipment ; and with them he won the cause for which he fought. That what he did has not been forgotten among the workers was shown by a letter the other day in an Auckland paper in which the writer said that we need another Dr. Waddell to waken the public conscience again on certain evils that were strengthening their hold.

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Rutherford Waddell

Little more need be said about Dr. Waddell's sympathy with the legitimate aspirations of labour. All his life he has maintained that sympathetic attitude. In 1919 there was some little comment caused by his writing a message to Labour in response to a request from the party. I can find little in the message to which any exception can be taken. Emphasis is laid on the moral aim and the moral requirement. One passage reads :

"The Labour platform must be thus judged. Is it the best calculated to produce the highest type of men, women, and children ? Ido not agree with everything in the platform, but on the whole it does seem to promise this —provided always that you get the moral character behind it."

The proviso mentioned is one that the Doctor would regard as all-important. But the danger of messages to parties is not in what they say but in the use that is made of them and the colour that is given to them. And in the large-letter question printed on the leaflet containing the Doctor's message, "Do you stand on the side of Morality ? " there is an irritating suggestion that would do much to discredit his message. Another thing about Dr. Waddell that is little known is that he was the first to advocate and bring about the adoption of the law regarding the indeterminate sentence. This he claimed in his speech at his farewell social in 1919, saying that nothing gave him more satisfaction than that.

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Social, Educational, and Missionary Interests

At the memorial service on May Ist Professor Hewitson described Dr. Waddell as "a leader in thought and in action." That leadership was shown in main" wavs. We have seen some instances of it in his congregational work. But it made him also an influence in civic life. He worked hand in hand with Mr. M. Cohen in the establishing of the kindergarten movement in Dunedin in the earlv 'eighties. He took a prominent place in starting the Technical Classes Association, now replaced by the Technical School, and for a time gave his services ungrudgingly as lecturer in English literature.

Whatever had as its object the uplifting, or the enlightening, or the restoring of men, whether in our own land or in far-off lands, was for him a Christian duty. Foreign missions were thus linked to remedial social work in a common Christian interest. Christian work among the children was always a ruling interest with him, and more than one striking address on this subject by him has been printed in leaflet form. Many readers will still remember the striking leaflet of March, 1927, "What are we going to do about it ? reprinted from the "Star," in which he deals with the drift of youth. He says rightly :

"If the Protestant churches mean business they must gird themselves to this duty after some such noble and self-sacrificing fashion as the Roman Catholic."

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Hi ' ;ce " onday In it tribute to the unselfish devotion of Sun': tai workers :

:.orch and State, ompared with them. 4 r -= senses, all • le will say, Amen."

The old St. Andrew's Sunday School, in the ■nt of the church, was long a trial to faith and patience, though he used to draw a lesson from its position as showing that it formed the foundatio e church. But the opening of the new Bible school in Carroll Street in 1912, with its up-to-date methods and equipment, was a crowning of his ho; In nothing has Dr. Waddell's leaderbeen more conspicuous in creating it in the mission work of the Church, and in inspiring methods of finance that would show that the g nation regarded it as a primary Christian obligation. For many years St. Andrew's - la -:rong it. Mr. Jd nt from it to the New Hebrides : and one of the Misd Hall workers. Mr. Wilson, had also gone ign field. Dr. Waddell's influence •wever I Qg power in ating and enL. aooary interest. He ha - mpletion of his coll , -red for servic Syria,

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Social, Educational, and Missionary Interests

but was rejected. This early interest never faded, because it was no youthful enthusiasm. It was a fundamental portion of his conception of Christianity. Its absence would make the Lord's Praver, "Thy kingdom come," a hvpocrisv on his lips. We find him looking at the mission problem from a new angle after his visit to the Chinese quarter in 'Frisco in his trip of 1886. Here was this wedge of Chinese life in the very heart of a great American citv. Is the contact a portent ? Its very presence is a danger and suggestive of danger on a larger scale. Then he goes on :

"But after all the fact that their morals are abominable points to the true policy in regard to this Chinese problem. Commerce judges men and races by what it can receive from them. But in the higher issues of life that test can never be final. Commerce must be inspired with a higher ethical principle, and this ethical principle requires not so much what a people can give us as what we can give them. One who changed and coloured the whole current of the world's thought tells us that he was debtor both to the Greeks and the Barbarians, both to the wise and the unwise. And he was debtor, not because he had gotten anything from them, but because he had that which they did not possess. In the recognition of that lies the true ideal, not only of men, but of nations. . . . China, with the East behind her, knocks for admission at the door of California. To bid her enter means great risk. To close the door against her is a risk still more tremendous. It is to contravene the workings of

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that Power which is in all and over all, and which, patiently and persistently, has been slowly leading the race to that unity which is its final destiny."

Are the nations to be for ever separate ? Or can they ever come together in the bond of a common interest and a common hope ? It is a great question, oftenest answered by being put aside. Dr. Waddell's missionary views need no elucidation. He made short work of professing Christians who did not believe in missions. I need only refer to his article, "Gang ower the Fundamentals " in "Continent and Island," the illustrated "Outlook " missionary supplement of three years ago. One caption in it is, "Our attitude towards Missions a Test of our Christianity." This is true and searching ; and Dr. Waddell knew how to drive it home. So it is not surprising that when Miss Anderson, now Mrs. H. Davies, volunteered for China he roused the congregation to a new missionary enthusiasm by a series of great missionary sermons. His suggestion that the congregation should be responsible for her full support was soon an assured certainty. Then thoughts of supporting a second missionary began to suggest themselves. Ere long one member issued the challenge that if the congregation would do this he would guarantee the salary of a third. And so St. Andrew's responsible for the upkeep of three mis-

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sionaries in the foreign field. And this we are safe in saying was largely the result of ministerial vision.

The missionary interest was living in his own heart ; and he was able to communicate it to others. Forward movements of this kind were the natural outcome of teaching and preaching such as his. They were all nourished by a great pulpit ministry in which work abroad was given its true place beside work at home, and was made an integral part of the church's task instead of being left aside as an optional extra.

Over all his work, for those in need or distress at home, for those afar off in China, or India, or the Islands of the Sea, there was the spirit of the great Christian prayer —

"Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."

11l

CHAPTER VI

Lecturer and Essayist

O blessed letters that combine in one All ages past, and make one live in all.

By you we do confer with who are gone. And the dead-living into council call;

By you the unborn shall have communion Of what we feel, and what does us befall.

Though Dr. Wad -ge for men found t natural aon in the pulpit, he wa dely known as a lecturer and From boyhood he was drawn to literature. We have seen how the reading of "Adam Bede " was a new beginning in his life. Great literature opened his mind to the understanding of the deepest problems of life and was a potent factor in his intellectual and spiritual development. On his shelves at Broad Bay still stand the agestained George Eliots of his student years with a fine set of Thackeray presented to him bv his fellow-students. On a recent visit Mrs. Waddell asked me to choose some book to keep in remembrance of the Doctor, and I chose one which I knew he prized highly, '"Last Leaves," by Alexander Smith, the

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author of the better-known “Dreamthorp.” His name and the date (1876) are on the flyleaf. And well-used Brownings and Tennysons of those earlier days are still in their places.

It was only natural, therefore, that from the earliest days of his ministry he should seek to interest the younger members of his congregations in what meant so much for himself. The subjects of his literary lectures w r ere almost entirely confined to the Victorian period, though in his first literary class in St. Andrew’s he took “Macbeth” as a studybook. And even within the Victorian period there was a distinct self-imposed limitation in his choice. For instance, I can find no reference to lectures on Dickens or Thackeray, though he was quite familiar with both. And this omission, or comparative neglect, is indicative of the bent of his mind. As a teacher, whatever might be the range of his private enjoyment, his chief interest in literature was its direct, almost its didactic, bearing on the life of man. Thackeray might have a larger thought of human life than George Eliot. But there was not in him the same element of avowed analysis. And so he did not suit so well the Doctor’s immediate purpose in his literary lectures. This limitation has been noted in very friendly appreciations in the local press. Thus the “Evening Star ” at the time of his retirement :

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"To vary the strain of eulogy with a word of criticism we think that his literary judgment is sometimes biassed by his devotion to ethical considerations. Sound religious philosophy and pure morality are the paramount things to his mind, and he does not care for beautiful writing from which they are absent. Similarly he is apt to give too high praise to second-rate books—especially second-rate poetry—if he approve the author's motive and trend. These foibles apart, however, how he revels in the masterpieces of English verse and prose ! Retiring as he is, and socially hampered by the infirmity of deafness, he has found in reading a rich solace that never failed him, and what he reads is generally given back to others in some form or other, with all the added suggestiveness of his interpretative genius."

At the time of his death the "Otago Daily Times " also pointed out that his standard of judgment was too distinctly ethical rather than literary. There is something to be said on both sides here. It is certainly true that all his literary judgments were controlled finally by moral values. He could not tolerate the nauseous or evilly suggestive in literature. For him its aim was the giving of form and substance to ideal conceptions. And with regard to the criticisms just mentioned, I doubt not that he would justify himself by maintaining that, while the writer of great literature may not be directly a moral teacher, there can be no great literature that cuts itself adrift from the high moral interests of life, and might appeal to Emer-

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son's dictum that "Genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude." Such a defence would, however, hardly turn the edge of the criticism. We feel, for example, that the great attraction of George Eliot for his mind, apart from the vividness and permanence of earl}- impressions, was the limitation that seems likeliest to diminish, though it cannot destroy, her enduring fame. I mean the constant preoccupation with ethical problems, which shuts her out in a measure from "Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view " —the claritv and objectivity of the highest literarv art.

But within the limits which he chose his interpretations of literature were enlightening and inspiring in the highest degree. I have before me a letter from Mr. J. A. Johnson, of Hobart, whom I remember as intimately associated with Dr. Waddell in his literary interests. He writes :

"I think the Doctor had a tremendous influence on the young people of his day, apart altogether from his influence as a minister, by his lectures under the general title of Literature and Life.' I said to him when I saw him just before his death, ' I am supposed to have been successful as a teacher of literature ; if so, I owe it to you. It has all been a reflex of those lectures in the early days.' He shook his head mournfully, and I shall never forget the look in those expressive eyes —still in his eighty-second year—an indication of the soul within. He started me lecturing for him—a fearful ordeal in those

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Rutherford Waddell

days —but I shall never forget the experience when he brought me down from Timaru, and I found St, Andrew’s Hall crowded to the doors with most responsive audiences —all his influence. He had gathered people from all quarters of Dunedin and suburbs. ... I wish to lay emphasis upon the wonderful personality of the man and the great influence he exercised, especially on the young men who came within the range of his personality. When we try to put such a power into words, something seems to be lost in the mere form of expression. His theme was always Religion and Life, Literature and Life ; and he had the power of translating everything into terms of life and character.

Mr. Johnson's letter is most interesting ; but in one respect it has made me feel like a Scotchman who has missed a good bargain. Knowing his literary connexion with Dr. Waddell, I made inquiries about lecture material'. In his letter he says, "I could tell you many anecdotes about him, but that is not what you want." That sentence will make me for ever tender to those who fail to keep within their terms of He mentions a particularly good lecture on "The Ethics of George Eliot's Works," which he promised to let me have if he could find it. Unhappily his serious illness has prevented any further correspondence. In the letter quoted we see the bearing of literature on life noted as the outstanding characteristic of Dr. Waddell's lectures. This is borne out by reference to his own statements. The

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second article in "Memories and Hopes" is on '"Literature and Life." In it he shows how all the ceaseless strivings of men, even after unworthier excitements, are a seeking in some way, however blindly, for fuller life :

''And to this universal cry for life, and life more ' abundantly, many responses are made, work and wealth and pleasure and travel and art and science. We want to put in a word for literature, for English literature."

He fixes for this purpose on poetry and romance. Books that merely convey information are not sufficient. Nor is that truly literature which depicts human nature as it actually is in all its sordid reality. Realism of this kind is only a perversion of literature. It is blind to the ideal element in life and to its full possibility. The failures and perversions of human nature are not our truest companions or the truest ministers to our life. And so the literature that confines itself to them, or that depicts Nature without conveying something of its infinite ideal suggestiveness, fails of its true function. The poet and the romancist come, and they make all things new.

"By their powers of sympathy and imagination they can detach the gross and material elements and set their creations moving in a world of thought and feeling. . . They take the dead past and the living present ; they pass them through the alembic of their own feelings and imaginations, and they come forth rare and beautiful

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existences. . . . They take man, . . . they select, distil, and construct. They lift him out of his time, liberate him from the imprisoning surroundings of his age, show him to us, not as the man in the street but the man of eternity —ideal, indeed, yet we recognize him as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And these ideal creations are real—in fact, the only real."

And a little farther on he asks :

"Is it not as natural and as noble a culture to know Imogen and Cordelia, Romola or Adam Bede, Pampilia and Guinivere, as to know the coprolites of an extinct brute, or the spawn of frogs, or the latest formula for sheep-dip ?

It has still to be acknowledged, however, that Dr. Waddell's interest was supremely with those writers who dealt with the spiritual problems that confronted his own early manhood —George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Clough. And so, in measure, the criticisms that have been suggested hold. But that only means that he was able to deal in a wonderfully living and effective way with great problems of life that were perplexing manv. He chose this for himself as the most profitable line of service of his fellow-men that lay open to him—the line along which his own keenest intellectual interests moved. But this does not mean that his literary lectures were confined to writers whose work bore more or less directly on ethical and spiritual problems. Two other classes, at least, received close attention. Those who,

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like Jefferies and Tlioreau, were lovingly minute in their observation of Nature, and those who, like Barrie and Jane Barlow, gave moving and lifelike pictures of humble life. The humourists, too, were given a welcome place in his lectures. Whatever interpreted the grace, the joy, the wistfulness, the thwarted hope, of men and women found its place, either directly or by plentiful allusion, in an exposition so living that it became henceforth an enriching interest in the minds of all who heard him. And his finely sympathetic understanding was the secret of all. A mind keenly alive to the mystery of life and keenly sensitive to beauty moved among the riches of literature and the glories of Nature and made them its own. And what he thus made his own by an unceasing industry that was never labour he imparted to others with a constant and never-fading interest. He was endowed with an exquisitely sensitive and appreciative soul. He used the faculty given him for the highest possible enrichment of his own life and the lives of those whom he touched. We might say that sympathy in this large sense was at once the source of his own enrichment and his finest gift to men. And when we think of his full and joyous use of the power given him, we can think of him as able to say at the end of the dav, though surely in words inaudible to himself, "Lord, thy pound hath gained ten pounds."

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His occupation with immediate and urgent social problems lias been already dealt with ; but he gave courses of lectures on the more general aspects of these problems, such as "Socialism." The first public lecture I heard by him was when I was a schoolboy in Invercargill on "The Industrial World, Yesterday, To-day, and To-morrow." Carlyle's fierce denunciation of shams was often in his mind ; but his chosen hero, intellectually and morally, in these matters, was Ruskin, whom he spoke of constantly as the greatest of Britain's prophets.

But, though this allusion to his lectures on industrial subjects seems to direct attention again to the emphasis he laid on the practical bearing of truth, we must remember that the world of the ideal was the supremely real world to him. He could never have wakened men and women to such a genuine interest in literature if it were no more to him than a convenient ethical reinforcement. He reckoned that the task of a teacher was to appeal to the slumbering idealism that was in every man. In the article, "Man, as the Poem of God," in "Memories and Hopes," he says :

"The spiritual life wants to be interpreted and revealed within multitudes. The groat majority are silent poets. They have feelings, sins, sorrows, visions, dreams, and desires that they don't know the meaning of. It is the function

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of those who are the poems of God to interpret these by lip and life, to find meanings in them, and draw music out of them. . . . It is a great and glorious thing thus to interpret the world and its mystery to bewildered men and women. And how much the world needs it ! "

But this he could do only because his own appreciation of beauty was so real, his own perception of divine meaning in life so sure. He was a great teacher because his own mind was already rich in a fine appreciation of what was best and most finely expressed in literature. He delighted in perfection of expression in literature. Alexander Smith says :

"And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature. In literature, the charm of style is indefinable, yet all-subduing, just as fine manners are in social life. In reality, it is not of so much consequence what you say as how you say it. Memorable sentences arc memorable on account of some single irradiating word. . . . On style depends the success of the essayist. Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker ; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought gets old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mind of genius, reissued fresh and new."

If this element in the true appreciation of literature did not bulk as largely in Dr.

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Waddell's lectures as the spiritual and social interests, it filled a large place in his own outlook. I can still remember him pointing out to me the underlined description of snow in Smith's "Last Leaves," or the beautiful memorial poem by Archbishop Alexander on the death of Matthew Arnold, and how he lingered over the verse :

"Poet of exquisite regret

Of lines that aye on Time's contused height

Out of the storm shall stand in stars of white ;

Of thoughts in deepening distance set

Perfect in pictured epithet

Touch'd with a pencil-tip of deathless light."

His delight in felicity of expression leads us naturally to think of Dr. Waddell's wide appeal as an essayist. But it will be well first to recall some of the subjects on which he used to lecture and the names of some of the writers to whom he frequently alluded :

Tennyson, especially 'in Memoriam " and "Idylls of the King," Browning's "Philosophy of Life." Browning's "The Ring and the Book," George Eliot (various courses), Richard Jefferies, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, "An Evening with the Humorists," 'Prospects of Literature in New Zealand " (printed in "Memories and Hopes"), "The New Scientific Conception of Nature and its Bearing on Literature," "The Irish Humorists," "How to Read a Novel," "Hilda Among the Broken Gods" (W. C. Smith), Jane Barlow, Barrie.

I am not sure if he lectured on George Macdonald ; but he knew him personally and

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knew his writings well, both prose and verse. R. L. Stevenson was another favourite author; and Amiel appealed closely to his more introspective moods. Minor authors who once bulked largely on Iris programmes were Lucas Malet and J. Lane Allen. In his occasional essays the number of authors referred to in the most easy and natural way is astonishing.

And this brings us to the form of selfexpression by which he was most widely known. A great number of these essays appeared in the Dunedin “Star,” and for all who knew the Doctor their authorship was an open secret. At the time of his death the editorial appreciation in that journal said ;

"For twenty-seven years he contributed a weekly column to this paper more prized by thousands of readers here and throughout the world than any other column it has contained. He was a prince of essayists, pregnant, discursive, allusive, for whom everything he saw and everything he read, assisted by his humour, helped to point a moral or adorn a tale. Into these writings, as far as words could convey it, went the whole force of his personality."

Essays such as those of Dr. Waddell are, as it were, the flowering of a life, the ripe and mellowed output of a richly-stored mind. Like his Master he had long accustomed himself to find in everything he saw analogies of the truths that were uppermost in his mind. Some incident mentioned in the newspapers,

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some hardly noticed habit of animal or bird, or some ingenuity of Nature, might be the inspiration of a charming and suggestive essay. Examples of this may be found in “The Parable of the Pea” and “A Stradivarius as a Wheelbarrow,” the first two essays in “The Fiddles of God.” In the latter of these he tells of his reading that “a Stradivarius worth £2,400 had been purchased by a violinist at Strasburg, Germany, for 6s. Bd. from a little boy who was dragging it about full of sand as a toy cart.” He then goes on to reflect on how often instruments fitted, or capable of being fitted, for finer and nobler ends than the boy’s Stradivarius are put to ignoble uses. But it is not the mere drawing of the lesson that creates and sustains the interest. It is the wealth of allusion and illustration that he brings to it, the touch of imagination with which he makes it live, the literary grace with which he embellishes it, that create the charm. And though he often drives home the lesson, and certainly never leaves it vague, he more often conveys the irresistible suggestion of higher meanings in life, and helps his readers to feel the truth of these for themselves.

But his essays were not all homilies. Often some everyday subject is taken, and we are made to feel that there are things in it that we had not thought of before. Thus in the volume just referred to there is an

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essay entitled “The Idyll of the Cow,” well worth reading for its close and friendly observation and for its wealth of literary allusion. Near the close is this genial summing up in favour of the cow :

"And so, here the cow comes with its final use and charm for us. She belongs to a quiet and contemplative era, and in her ruminating preaches that lesson to us The horse is related to the fien' god Mars, to speed and battle, and the vanity and pride of man. He is the earliest and most formidable of fighting engines, so the Jews of old were forbidden its possession. But the cattle upon a thousand hills are indicative of peace and prosperity The Promised Land was to be a land, not of horses but 'flowing with milk and honey,' and the food of the predicted Messiah was to be 'butter and honey.' And so the picture of the cow, lying in the dewy grass or under the shade of the trees, easefully chewing her cud and deep in thought, is a call to us to try to attain to a like restful calm."

The long silences in which he had so often to dwell became to him the opportunity of rich reflection ; and the capacity for this was so strengthened by use that it became almost an instinct with him to catch some fine fancy from everything he saw. We can well understand what thoughts for one whose mind was so richly stored with the words of poets and lovers of nature all through the ages the rapture of spring or the dying glories of autumn would awaken. But the commonest incident or the meanest object became the quickening touch to a mind like his, and

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released its stores of reflection and garnered knowledge. Alexander Smith says of Hawthorne :

"He writes of the street or the seashore, his eye takes in every object, however trifling, and on these he hangs comments melancholy and humorous. He does not require to go far for a subject ; he will stare on the puddles in the street of a New England village, and immediately it becomes a Mediterranean Sea with empires lying on its muddy shores."

This was in its measure Dr. Waddell's gift too, more direct, perhaps, in its lesson, less subtle in its suggestion, but none the less a gift for enriching the lives of others with a larger vision and a growing power of finding new meanings in common things.

In these essays there was not concentrated the power of his intense convictions as in his preaching. But they are as truly representative of the man. They are the overflow of his full and ever-active mind. In them we see him as he thinks to himself of the meaning of things. We begin to look at the world through his eyes, to catch something of the charm of his spirit, and almost unconsciously to find ourselves at home in the faith by which he lived. Not all his essays have this high quality of subtle influence. Some show the tug of the daily task. But there are many that reveal him as he was and make his readers sharers of his outlook and his faith.

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Besides his essays many other examples of his writing survive in one form or another. In the next chapter I shall give some specimens of his nature descriptions. But there are deeply interesting letters descriptive of his various journeys, full of keen observation, containing sagacious and humorous comments on men and things. A few of these have been already quoted, but the greater part of the material lies untouched. Then there are articles on important religious, social, and educational subjects of which only the most meagre suggestion can be given in a volume like this. A of the files of the “Outlook,” or the “Christian Outlook ” as it was in the good old days, would by itself provide material for a worthy volume. Of the “Christian Outlook ” Rev. James Chisholm speaks thus in his “Fifty Years Syne ” :

"It is edited by Dr. Waddell, who is recognized on all hands as singularly qualified for this work. His Christian courage, that will not sell the truth to serve the hour ; his wide knowledge of the best literature ; his vivid style, quivering often with intense conviction ; his spiritual insight and reverent devotion to the claims of Christ ; his ardent sympathy with every movement in Church and State, that has for its end the well-being of the community—these and other qualities have raised his paper to the front rank of religious journalism, and drawn tributes of praise from the most competent judges both in Britain and the Colonies."

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But it is beyond our scope to do more than mention these various forms of the Doctor’s literary activity. All that has been possible for us is to seek by very limited reference to his lectures and essays to learn what manner of man he was and to catch some accents of the voice with which he spake the truth it was given him to speak.

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in His Study

The Lure of the Trout

CHAPTER VII

“Under the Open Sky”

Ho! Wind of the wild morasses !

Oh, breath of the high hill-passes !

Your call is sweet in the city street

As the voice of a friend to me

Come, speak to a fellow-rover

What news from the fields of clover

What tidings now from the mountain’s brow

And the waves of the open sea ?

We’ll dream that the foam is whiter,

The air of the hills is brighter,

The woods are green with a deeper sheen,

Because they were loved so well

The reading of the preceding chapters might easily give the impression to strangers that Dr. Waddell was one who toiled unceasingly as preacher, social reformer, and essayist, and found his only relaxation in literature. But that was far from being the case. The vitality of mind that found outlet in these activities was restored and freshened by a life-long enthusiasm for the open, its scenes and the sports that belong to it. Shooting and fishing were eager interests with him from

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his boyhood. He used to tell how in his young days he lay out among the bogs waiting for game until his clothes were stiff with frost. In New Zealand the same enthusiasm continued, though the fishing interest outlived the shooting. In later years even fishing, in which he always delighted and which was a joy even in remembrance, became often largely nominal —a dwelling with memories by the rippling streams which he loved. Often in these later times he was too easily exhausted after a trying winter's work to undertake the eager working of river reaches that would have meant new life for him in earlier days. But there were always healing and restoring for him in the mere contact with Nature. Running streams had always a charm for him. In the article on "The Lure of the Trout," published in "The Fiddles of God," he writes :

"There is something soothing in watching its ceaseless flow. The old Hebrew poet, when he wanted a fitting emblem under which to picture his nation's felicity, chose the river. 'Then shall thy peace be as a river/ It is an extremely suggestive saying—peace as a river ! The peace not of stagnation, but of fullness of life, and not of something merely passive and quiet, but as of a wheel that sleeps on its own swiftness. And the river carries fertility and joy wherever it goes. And the music of it when we pause to listen to its rippling over shallows, coiling snakelike about the rocks, putting an edge on some things and wearing it away from others ! And the charm of it for every- sort of life ! The birds

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sip it and Hick it playfully with their wings. The cattle drink and drowse Inside it. It wanders in and out and round about, gossiping with grass and flower, toying with the branches of trees, and whispering its secret to every instructed ear. Little children love to dabble their pink feet in its cool water and watch the shadows dancing in its pebbly bed. It sings its song to the tired angler as he rests beside it, and croons its lullaby to the old man drifting into second childhood. Its lure, its witchery, is felt by all, but no one can express in exact words its mystic and compelling charm. We remember Kipling's song :

Cool and clear, cool and clear,

By shining shingle and foaming weir,

Under the crag where the ouzel sings,

And the ivied wall when the church bell rings,

Undefiled for the undefiled,

Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child.

But almost to the end he felt the thrill of the old sport. Nearly three years ago he went up to Frankton, where the Kawarau flows out of Lake Wakatipu. Writing to an old friend he says :

'" It is lovely, for a while, to be out of the hurl)- burly, to feel in a quiet corner, far away beyond which 'rolls the wrath of human life.' I brought my fishing rod and bike with me, neither of which I have been using for four or five years. I felt a kind of stirring, a spring fever in the blood, that I used to experience in earlier years. So I tried the fishing here ; but luck was agin me. Fish are said to be here, but I saw only one or two, and they declined my proffered friendship. Still it was good to swing the rod again and feel hope stirring in the breast."

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Yes, that spring fever of long ago. How often must he have schooled himself to sit at his desk, in a corner of the study where he had no outlook, when he would fain have been away amid the opening glories of the spring. Every year he used to preach on the spring-tide and the promise it spoke to the heart, when

'"The songs, the stirring air

The life re-orient out of dust

Cry thro' the sense to hearten trust

In that which made the world so fair."

But he generally managed to get away for a few days after the first of October. For him to be disappointed in that would have been almost as cruel as the disappointment of Lord Grey of Falloden when he could not steal away for a day from public duties to see the beech woods breaking into leaf. Even apart from his eager interest in fishing, there was healing for mind and heart in these golden hours ; and we can understand the recuperation, the contacts, the colour they gave him for his work. On a glorious spring morning faith itself is revived. There is a more vivid appreciation of the poet's words :

"How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy"

Long-familiar descriptions come back to the mind like some enchanted utterance of the very spirit of the season —

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N i w rings the woodland loud and long,

The distance takes a lovelier hue,

And, drown"d in yonder living blue,

The lark becomes a sightless song.

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,

The flocks are whiter down the vale,

And milkier every milky sail

On winding stream or distant sea."

In his article on the trout there is a characteristic description of a morning out in the open with its restoring freshness —

"As the angler sits in the hush of a spring morning he may see dawn melting into day. He can recall in after years the sights and sounds that made memorable his walk to the river ; the twitter of the birds rippling away through the stillness ; the wafts of clover-scented air ; the sentinel hills looking on silently, or. may be, the level paddocks round which march lines of bannered gorse, lifting high their flag of gold ; the high grass, yellow-spotted with buttercups, and 'sown with Orient pearl. : The speckled trail of the übiquitous rabbit winding amid the greyish-green sea of dew-besprinkled pasture."

Often on these expeditions he took some friend with him, winch meant for both parties enjoyment to the full. Mr. J. A. Johnson tells how once he was the chosen friend. The camp was on the Pomahaka. The trip was full of interest for the tyro. But one night there was more interest than he desired. The Doctor went along the stream to look for a fish which he had left under a tussock. His companion had been fishing in the

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opposite direction and got back to camp before tea-time. Hour by hour passed and no appearance of the Doctor. At g o’clock neighbours were roused, and Mr. Johnson was weighing the very serious question of how he was to face St. Andrew’s congregation without the Doctor. Happily between two and three in the morning the wanderer staggered into the arms of the searchers. He had difficulty in locating the tussock where he had planted the fish, and in looking for it lost his direction. I fear he was not the best of woodsmen. He never went in for exploring trips, though he delighted in long walks in bracing weather. Mr. McCully tells me that once when he took the Doctor’s place for a day the latter, who was very run down, walked in from Warrington to Dunedin in

a snow-storm to make sure that his organs were sound.

A subject that exercises some people very much is the ethics of fishing. This is a somewhat ambiguous expression. But I am not referring to the supposed detrimental effect of fishing on veracity, but to the question. Is it right or humane to fish at all ? I have heard surprise, or at least misgiving, expressed at the Doctor engaging in such a questionable recreation. He himself discusses it and quotes the reasons advanced in its defence without, apparently, any undue selfreproach. And his conclusion of the whole

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matter is at any rate sufficiently unanswerable.

Anyway, the good folks who hold up their hands in pious horror at the cruelties of shooting or angling, and who yet eat mutton and beef, and feed up hens and ducks in their backyard, with malice aforethought, and with the sure intent of one day hacking off their heads, put themselves out of court as critics of the ethics of angling. All that can be fairly asked from angling, as from abattoirs, is that the method of killing involve as little pain as possible." And then he adds, ''Anglers as a rule are all good fellows."

This, too, has a bearing on the ethical question —the kind of character produced. Ido not know if the Doctor ever read the lines '"Out Fishin'." He would certainly have agreed with them. Here are two verses out of the six :

''The rich are comrades to the poor,

Out fishin',

All brothers of a common lure,

Out fishin' ;

The urchin with the pin an' string

Can chum with millionaire an' king :

Vain pride is a forgotten thing

Out fishin'.

"A fellow gets a chance to dream,

Out fishin',

He learns the beauties of a stream,

Out fishin' ;

An' he can wash his soul in air

That isn't foul with selfish care,

An' relish plain and simple fare,

Out fishin'."

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But settle the ethical question as he may, let him, a much more serious matter, be more often unsuccessful than successful, for the angler the fascination remains fresh long after old age has claimed him for its own. And the Doctor’s conclusion is that the real cause of that fascination “is the mystic glamour of Nature, so elusive, yet so pervasive and indescribable.”

Some years ago Dr. W. H. Fitchett invited Dr. Waddell to write some articles for “Life” on shooting and fishing in New Zealand and to give prominence to the literary side, the side that touched the imagination. The result was the short series, “With Rod and Gun in Maoriland,” a most charming piece of descriptive writing full of suggestive touches. His habit of drawing material from all sources was shown here too. There was a vivid description of deer-stalking as well as of fishing. I said to him one day soon after the articles appeared, “What on earth do you know about deer-stalking ? ” “Oh,” he said, laughing, “I got all that from Oliver. (Rev. W. C. Oliver, the well-known Methodist minister, who was a noted deerstalker.)

Other sports did not attract him latterly. As a young man he was a cricketer, an excellent bat and captain of the college eleven ; and he even started a club in St. Andrew's. At one period he was enticed to play golf, but,

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“Under the Open Sky”

though lie played it faithfully for a time, he never took it seriously. I fear that Professor Sellars' caddie would have the same opinion of Dr. Waddell as he had of his own learned employer, "It's a' vera weel, professor, teaching laddies Greek, but it tak's a man wi' a heid to play gowf." Rev. Wm. Saunders, however, says that he was an eminently successful figure on the links even if it was not as a player. He could lure men away even from golf to listen to his stories. Dr. Waddell was not an aquatic sportsman ; but the glamour of the sea always appealed to him, though usually he preferred to enjov it from the shore. Its vastness, its ever-changing moods, its mystery, the magic beautv that so often lay upon it fascinated him as they have men in all ages. I think that on the whole he found more pleasure in the quiet and restoring aspects of Nature, in those gently-flowing streams and quiet morning hours that he has described for us, than in those that hint of her terror and might. But none the less must we find room for a fine description of the restless ocean from his letters in his Home trip in 1886 :

''There is a rapture in the ocean that nothing else in Nature can give. 'What a majesty in the-v waves ! How they storm, and froth, and fret ! They hunt the ship in packs like wolves. They dance in glee around her. They make at times frantic efforts to leap on board. See that huge fellow there coming on with the sinuous serpent-

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like glide. He watches his opportunity, as the ship goes down into a trough of the sea, and with a wild career he leaps up the vessel's side, but the vessel bends towards him. He claps his hands, and seems to shriek out, 'Ah ha, now I have got you, now I am upon you.' And the ship says, 'No you haven't,' and lifts herself, oh, ever so easy and so effortless, as it seems, and the foiled waters fall back from her baffled and broken. And then the wind, how it raises them, and scatters them, and lashes them ! How they cower and jump and jumble ! They run against each other in a vain effort to get away somewhere from the storm fiend that lashes them from above. And thus in a hundred ways I hold converse with the sea. I can't hear others often ; but I can always hear it. It troubles you with no meanness or folly. It has no gossip or slander to detail. You can't be petty in its presence. And it is always ready to speak to you. All your moods are here. If you are restless or discontented it will seem so too. If you are dejected or wean,', what sympathy in its moans. If you are sad or glad, in its waters what laughter and what tears ? Wonderful ocean ! what thoughts hast thou inspired ! What spirits soothed, what heroism created ! What words written, what songs sung of thee ! 'And there was no more sea.' And Bonar sings, and we join him—

"Summer-ocean how I'll miss thee.

Miss thv sorrow-soothing shore,

Miss the magic of thy murmur.

When the sea shall be no more."

In one of his sermons, "An Autumn Homily," there is a fine description of autumn colouring, the funeral pomp of the year,

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which I felt tempted to quote ; but it is somewhat long, and curtailment would spoil it. So we shall leave him to whom Nature spoke with so many voices in sight of the infinite sea whose mystery- and magic never ceased to engage his soul.

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CHAPTER VIII

The Man We Knew

''Behold, I dream a dream of good

And mingle all the world with thee.''

A very true impression can be formed of Dr. Waddell from his writings. In them we see the man himself with his fine apprehension and delicate sympathy. There are passages redolent with the charm of Nature and others poignant with the pathos of life. But countless friends will have other memories of the man himself, as they met him day by day which they hope to have suggested, if nothing more, in this memorial volume. The impression that he made on his friends was greater than can ever be conveyed in words ; and only a nature as fine as his own could give him as he was.

Professor Hewitson spoke justly of his power of inspiring enthusiastic admiration and warm affection. And for a man who can do the former to be able to do the latter also is the sure sign that his is a nature true

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and human to the very core. Great powers nobly used command our admiration. But the man who commands also our warm affection is one whom we feel to be very near to us, who stands on common ground with us and can enter with ready interest into all our daily life. The interest that draws forth this warm affection can never be simulated. It must be as real and unaffected as the nobility of soul that commands our admiration. And this is the secret of Dr. Waddell's place in the affectionate memory of so many. None was more pure. But it is equally true that none was more human. To all of us he was "the human-hearted man we loved." There was always in him what commanded respect —a wonderful strength of conviction and an almost romantic sense of honour—but there was also a sharing of common feelings, and even of common foibles, that he never outgrew and never wished to outgrow. Whatever his greatness he himself was unconscious of it, and he almost made his friends unconscious of it too. They could always feel that he was their own and would never wish to have it otherwise. And yet, though the touch was so near, it was the touch of a finer nature ; and affection ever shaded into admiration.

I should say that one of the most marked features of his character, and one of the great secrets of his influence, was a fine freeness

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for the interests of others. It never seemed an effort for him to lay aside what might seem the most pressing claims on his attention, and to give himself wholly to the concerns of his friends. He seemed to be always at their disposal. Even in conversation the interest of some people in what their friends are telling is perfunctory. It was never so with Dr. Waddell. He conveyed the immediate impression of genuine interest, and made all whom he met feel that in him they had a friend. And this fine detachment was no happy accident of disposition. It was the ripened instinct of a nature that made it a constant rule to consider others rather than itself.

Another secret of the affection he won and the influence he exerted was that he never complained. In one passage, which we would do well to study more than we do, Christ teaches us that when we fast we are to anoint our heads and wash our faces that we may not appear unto men to fast. The selfdiscipline of life is not discountenanced, but it should be undergone secretly, and no parade made of it. Our sacrifices and renunciations must be a matter between ourselves and God, and never be obtruded on the notice of others. The fruits of our victory over self are to be seen in the glorious morning face, in the new courage and cheerfulness that we bring to the help of our fellowmen. And here

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was a man who had made up his mind to accept and trust the will of God in all things. This meant many a self-renunciation, much trusting along darkened ways. But of this outsiders knew nothing. The victory was won in the secret of his own soul. But they felt the influence that went out from such a life even if they could not understand it. The unselfish interest was spontaneous, lit with all the graciousness of the Christian spirit ; but it was an unselfish interest into which went all the virtue of victory over self. Free and spontaneous as it seemed, there was in it the quality that only self-discipline and long self-control can give. Men felt this in Dr. Waddell. His troubles were never made known to others. But the fruit of them was seen in a finer grace of soul. The cheerfulness of a man who has learned through faith never to bemoan himself is one of the most telling virtues in the life of man. And this hidden heroism was one of the life-giving springs of Dr. Waddell’s nature.

I spoke a little ago of his romantic sense of honour. If he thought any obligation had been incurred on his behalf he took care that no one would suffer unjustly by it. Once, when by misunderstanding such an obligation was undertaken for a friend of his he insisted on meeting it, and was prepared to sell his library. Fortunately his friends came to know of it and that heart-break was pre-

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vented. There was a similar romantic loyalty in his friendships, unflinching and unshaken in the shadowed way. He simply could not refuse to stand by a friend in trouble.

Professor Hewitson in the St. Andrew’s memorial service commented on the singular union in him of gentleness and strength. Kindly and deferential in his ways, he could yet take a stand on his convictions of right that made popular opinion a matter of complete indifference to him. “He was as pliant as the willow and also as immovable as the oak.”

His friends know how sparing, almost ascetic, he was in diet. With all his genial aspect to the world and his complete enjoyment of all earth’s good, there was this element of austerity in his nature. Matthew Arnold tells us of one who was beautiful and gay ; but when she was hurt to death there was found a robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.

“Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse ! Young, gay. Radiant, adorn’d outside ; a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within.”

But the last thing he would dream of was to make others sharers of his asceticism. Nor was it a word that ever found a welcome in his heart,

"He that was friends with earth, and all her sweet Took with both hands unsparingly.'

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His care was to fight his battles alone and to make others sharers of his joy. One friend of over forty years, a close sharer in his literary interests and one to whom he could freely have unburdened himself, writes :

'"Generally he preferred to present the lighter side of his nature when away from his work. He never allowed himself to become a heavy companion however pressing were his duties or however heavy his trials. He was like a cheerful schoolboy, loving sport and adventure and good stories."

Much has been said of his humour. Of that rich never-failing spring of life in his heart it is impossible to give any true impression. His stock of good stories was inexhaustible ; and his enjoyment in hearing new ones was good to see. Even yet, when I find some good story, the first thought is, "If only Waddell were alive to hear that ! " But no repeating of humorous anecdotes without the atmosphere of the moment, the expressive face, the soft Irish accent, and the hearty, though never noisy, laugh, can make them what they were. There is one thing, however, that we can see, and a very significant thing it is, the closeness of his humour to the highest qualities of his soul. Professor Hewitson, speaking of his deafness, said that the isolation of deafness often makes men sensitive, suspicious, and moody. It gives them a feeling of being neglected and not wanted, and perverts the disposition. This is no

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doubt true, though many deaf are among the gentlest of their kind. And in Dr. Waddell’s life there was an element of pathos, from the silent world in which he was doomed to dwell. His finely sensitive nature was subject to forebodings, which, had he been other than he was, might have made him the prey of gloom. As he saw the trees waving in the wind he felt what a joy it would be to be able to hear the rustling of the leaves once more. At times he was inclined to conjure up the possibilities of sickness and weakness and to anticipate the shadow of the darkening years. The sadness of life often weighed on his spirit. He had a quickness of sympathy that sometimes amounted to pain. I remember him saying in church how one winter evening his mind was haunted by the sight of a small boy going home with a little bag of coal on his back. “ Here was I going home to my comfortable fire ; and I could not get out of my mind that poor boy with his few coals to keep his little fire going as long as possible against the cold.” But in all this he was saved by his humour as truly as by his faith. It was a way of escape for himself. But, even more, it was a way of saving his friends from the burden of his troubles and infirmities. His humour was a native gift. His use of it was a form of his habitual unselfishness. He always sought to meet his friends with a smile on

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his lips. When he felt that some might have difficulty or feel awkwardness in talking with a deaf man he laid himself out to make the way easy for them. On one occasion he spent a week at a country manse. The women folks felt it was all right while the local minister was there. The Doctor and he could find plenty to talk about. But how about entertaining the deaf man when the minister had to go away for the week-end to supply St. Andrew's ? The hostess confessed afterwards, "We need not have bothered about that. There was no need to entertain him. He entertained us." And it was always the same. His humour was one of his chief means for placing his friends at their ease ; and often those who met him for the first time with misgivings, wondering how they would get on with him, became his friends for ever.

Just before his last illness he spent a fortnight at Fairlie. He was the life of the party, and, with his talk and stories and sympathy, made it a holiday to be long remembered by all who were there. Surely it is not too much to say that this taking of the initiative in genial and spontaneous social intercourse, in spite of limiting circumstances, was the finest victory of his soul, our final proof of its heroism and unselfishness. He was one of those who could say

“Yes, I have had my griefs ; and yet

I think that when I shake off life’s annoy,

I shall, in my last hour, forget

All things that were not joy

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And let it be said also that his humour never impaired our impression of the sanctity of his nature. For that was no cloistered sanctity. There was always in him a sense of the mystery of life and a certain wistfulness of soul. There were those deeper elements in him that give their full meaning to love and the feeling for beauty. None entered with finer sympathy into the pathos of life or comprehended it with a more sensitive imagination. But a certain boyishness of heart combined with these deeper feelings to the end. None ever fulfilled more faithfully his service of the highest, yet none remained more truly one with his kind. The nature so fully obedient to the will of God remained all through life a nature "hale, and glad, and free." Being a Christian never changed him from being an Irishman, with all the felicity and none of the perversity of his race. And his humour was always kindly. He had a keen eye for the foibles of men ; but there was never anything mordant or bitter in what he said. His sense of the ludicrous was unfailing; and if he himself were made to look ludicrous none enjoyed it better. Quite a good chapter might be written on "Adventures with an Ear-trumpet." He was very quick in his movements when he saw that anyone wished to speak to him ; and when he whisked his ear-trumpet out of his pocket some thought that he was a lunatic drawing a revolver.

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An elderly woman relates how, when she first came to New Zealand, she was a domestic servant in Dunedin and one day slammed the front door in the visitor’s face when he produced the trumpet.

He could always brighten a doleful situation with a cheery remark. When he was seriously ill friends took him out to help him on the way to recovery. One day a picnic was arranged. Unfortunately heavy rain came on and the small party were reduced to eating their lunch under a dray in a paddock. But the doctor delighted his young friends with his philosophy—“ Anyone can have a picnic on a fine day.” One day, during a drive over the heights of Dunrobin in a raging gale, he was given a rug to wrap round his head and shoulders. After a time he looked out and saw some heaps of stones gathered in a field by the wayside and remarked, “They have to put stones on the ground here to keep it down.” He had a remarkable gift of grotesque comparison. Speaking at a Crookston Church social on the back-seat habit in churches he said that a church with the front seats empty always reminded him of a lad}' who had forgotten her teeth. When visiting a cousin whom he had not seen for over forty years he was asked to perform the marriage ceremony for one of her daughters. At the breakfast he said that when he was a boy he had to go

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and gather the eggs. Now and then a hen would disappear and could not be found. But after a time she would turn up again with a brood of chickens. It made him think of these old days when he saw his long-lost cousin with her family. As she was a country' woman, he was duly reminded of the impropriety of comparing her with an old hen. One day he was telling me of a shooting trip to the Upper Taieri with the late J. A. Park, soon after his arrival in Dunedin. They were benighted before reaching their destination and had to take shelter in a wayside shanty. “It was about the roughest place I was ever in. The tea wasn’t so bad ; and I suppose we had pretty good appetites. But the bed ! I believe if they had been unanimous they could have carried us out.’’ It will be fresh in the memory of his friends that after he went to live at Broad Bay he was knocked down by a car and had his ankle badly broken. The roysterers in the car never looked to see what had happened ; and he was calling out for help to move him out of the line of traffic. Then the story of the two soldiers flashed on his mind, and how the one shut up the other with, “Wheest, stop your hollerin’. Do you think you’re the only one that’s kilt ? ”

On one of his visits to Dunrobin a friend came with him and there was a considerable amount of luggage to take over the six miles

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journey from the railway station. I therefore borrowed a larger trap from a neighbour and also his horse to make a pair with my own. The two greys made quite an imposing show. The neighbour had a dog which always followed the horse. As we drove home the Doctor commented favourably on the pair. I had to confess that one horse was borrowed, and a little later on that the trap, too, was borrowed. After another mile or two came the guileless question from the back seat, “Is the dog borrowed too ? ” In a letter to me on general topics he made brief but quite sufficient allusion to the candidating activities of a well-known minister who had preached unsuccessfully at short intervals in two or three vacancies. “Poor ! There are said to be two periods in every woman’s life —the first when she wonders whom she’ll have, and the second when she wonders who’ll have her. must be getting near the second stage by now.”

Once when he had a pile of books for review in the “Outlook ” I said, “You’ll not be able to read all those.” He laughed and said, “Oh, you remember what Dale said, ‘You don’t need to eat a sheep to know what like the mutton is.’ ” Occasionally his deafness, without the aid of the trumpet, caused amusing situations. Once in a humorous lecture he told some Irish stories which made an Irishman in the audience very indignant.

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Rutherford Waddell

At the close the latter got up and spoke his mind very freely. Then the Doctor, who had not heard a word of what was said, rose and acknowledged the vote of thanks ! He of course delighted in catching one napping. “Where did you get hold of that title ? ” I asked him when “The Fiddles of God ” was published. “Why, man, don’t you know your Bunyan ? ” was the prompt rejoinder.

On occasion the Doctor was fond of practical jokes. In the old days there was a belt of trees along the Oval in Princes Street South. Late one night he was walking in the shade of these with Rev. G. Morice of Balclutha, who had come south just four months after himself and whose tragic death by drowning forty-eight years ago will still be remembered by some. They were deep in conversation and Mr. Morice was speaking into his companion’s ear, as was possible at that earlier day. He happened to be on the inner side of the path. Mr. Waddell was carrying a walking stick, and reached round behind himself to catch Mr. Morice a crack across the back of his legs. The latter thought it was an attack from the trees and jumped about four feet in the air.

A story which he enjoyed against himself has to do with his writing. His writing was usually neat and distinctive ; but it was not always easy to decipher. And when he was in a hurry it was sometimes too much even

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for himself. In one article he sent in as a paragraph heading the words, “No Cross, no Crown.” The compositor did his best and made sense of the heading, but not quite the sense intended by the writer. In the proof appeared the eminently sententious reflection, “No Cow, no Cream.” Even his troubles were made lighter through the humorous turn he could give them. He said to a friend who visited him in hospital after his accident, “I have great trouble with my legs. It’s keeping the peace between them. They have been good friends for a long time, but in this bed they are forever quarrelling : one of them will refuse to get out of the other’s way.” His usual expression for an old sermon was “a dried tongue ” ; and in some instances he might not restrict it to old sermons. But enough of a fruitless attempt to describe his humour, as if we ever could recapture the grace and sparkle of his words.

Another feature of his character was his utter unconsciousness of anything remarkable about himself or his work. If he were writing anything requiring careful statement he would be as much concerned about it as if he were only a beginner. He would consult his friends in the most naive way on points about which they could tell him nothing that he did not know already. He really believed that some of us had a better understanding of certain subjects within the circle of his own interests than he had.

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Possibly the last thing he wrote was an introductory chapter to “Vital Issues,” the Youth Committee’s booklet published this year. And he brought the proof of it along to me to see if I thought it was on the right lines ! This disconcerting deference and humility were continually in evidence. And they were beyond all suspicion of pose. His own keen sense of the ludicrous never extended to them. Another characteristic was his wonderful simplicity of faith. We have seen evidence of that in our tracing of his religious history. But we can hardly appreciate fully the courage and simple directness with which he took the promises of God and rested on His faithfulness. Once, when his wife was very ill and he was in sore distress, a great reassurance came to his heart and the peace of God laid all his fears to rest. He seemed to see the brightness of a great light and to hear the words, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” Such experiences were very real things to him. And could we but learn of him he would be our teacher in simplicity of faith as he was in spiritual insight and in wide human appeal. Such simplicity in the deepest attitude of the soul towards life and God is the mark of its truest greatness. With all the conflict of the years behind him, with all his wide learning and his insight into the heart of man, with all the struggles of faith through which he had passed, he kept unspoiled that

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childlike spirit in which we enter the kingdom of heaven.

''Love was believing,—and the best is truest ;

Love would hope ever, —and the trust was gain."

I am but too conscious that some of the finest traits of his character have found no place in this sketch, and that friends from whose hearts his memory can never die will look in vain for some descriptive word that might help to fix the impression of all that he was to them. They will turn away with words of disappointment on their lips —"All true, but nothing adequate. If we had only someone like himself to make him live again before us as he was." How vain that longing is we all sorrowfullv know. But while the sense of failure must rest on our best efforts to make him known in his rich human interests and in the fine shadings of his character, we can find something satisfying and something that has the ring of true feeling in it, in his co-presbyters' tribute to him at their first meeting after his death :

'His personal character produced an immediate impression of gentleness, refinement, and courtesy. A fuller acquaintance with him disclosed fixity of purpose and strength rooted in a faith which had in it an heroic element that at times seemed to defy the counsels of prudence. A fountain of humour that never dried up, and never sent forth bitter waters, made his approach to men wide and easy. It kept his heart young, and opened to him the hearts of youth.

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His body, never robust but with remarkable vitality, he subjected to a regimen that had in it something Spartan and ascetic, and he did an amount of work that astonished strong men. Two days before he died he corrected the proof of an article for the press. He trusted in the Lord, and the Lord was his hope, and unto him was fulfilled the promise, ‘He shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not fear when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green ; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.’ ”

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CHAPTER IX

The Closing Years

"At evening time there shall be light

To wistful human eyes

Such suns can rise no more

Because their radiance never dies

On that eternal shore.

On us they shed a light

So sweet —it was their own—

None else may borrow or repeat

That which was theirs alone.

It was in the spring-time of 1919 that Dr. Waddell retired from St. Andrew's. It was in the autumn of the present year, just two days before the fifty-third anniversary of his settlement in Dunedin, that he entered into his rest. He had hoped that he might have ten years of quiet retirement. He was given nearly thirteen, with interests unfading and powers unimpaired to the last. His retirement was full of fresh interest to him. For the first time in his life he owned a house, and a house that commanded a matchless view of harbour and hills. In that "suburban balcony " which he made familiar to hundreds of readers he drank in inspiration and delight,

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and from it he was able to send words of cheer and counsel throughout the land. A year after his retirement, Mrs. Waddell died after a life of long suffering. His only daughter had now been married for some years ; and the Doctor was left alone, though in a way the loneliness was not greater than before, for heavy affliction had for some years made Mrs. Waddell unable to share his home. Now and then he who was so reticent about his own sorrows raised the veil enough to let us see how deeply he felt for her. After a few years he married Sister Christabel, who had done so great a work in St. Andrew's. St. Andrew's congregation has many grateful memories of Sister Christabel. But for nothing will they be more grateful to her than for having filled the closing years of the man thev loved most on earth with light and happiness. Few of them but would have given anything to help him in the loneliness of retirement ; but a man in his position was beyond the reach of their warmest wishes. There seems a strange irony in the fact that the most loveable and sociable of men, whose friendship so many would count it an honour to possess, may be doomed by circumstances to a growing loneliness of soul. From that Dr. Waddell was happily saved by a marriage that brought him deep happiness and a companionship as cheerful as the native impulses of his own buoyant heart.

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The Closing Years

To some extent he dropped out of the run of things. Often he would have welcomed more visits than he received from ministerial friends. But Broad Bay was a little out of the way, and he might be out when a caller did find his way down there. And in the new generation there was probably a slight diffidence about intruding on the meditations of one who filled so high a place. If they only knew, how quickly they would have been placed at their ease on that point. But he eagerly welcomed his old friends : and many happy memories remain of visits to him in his new home. That home he named " Dreamthorpe." No doubt it is named after the book in which he so much delighted. But he liked the look of " Dreamthorpe" better than that of "Dreamthorp " and had no hesitation about adding another letter. These later years were years of constant industry and quiet happiness. In some respects he exercised a wider ministry than before though his name was largely unknown to a new generation. Nearly all his communications to the press were anonymous, though the authorship was an open secret among his friends. And so there were many even in Presbyterian circles who did not even know of his name. One day he smilingly showed me an envelope addressed, "Dr. Waddell, Dunedin," and on the top a post-office sorting room stamp, "Not known in Dun-

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edin." Even his humility could not keep him from seeing something of the humour of that. From time to time he preached in the little local church, and at one time could point proudly to his name on the plan as a Methodist local preacher. Latterly he took three services a month for the Presbyterian Church. Thus quietly passed the years until this year the end came with unexpected suddenness. About three weeks before his death he went into a private hospital for a minor operation which was successfully performed. But complications set in and serious organic trouble disclosed itself ; and his friends began to fear that at his age he could not long withstand the recurring attacks of weakness. In the evening of April 16th the end came. The night he died and the morning following were such as he would have loved, with slight frost and silvery mist, and then the glorious morning touching the hills with light. But he had passed to where the sun shall no more be their light by day. Happily he was spared what he feared most, the decay of powers and the burden of long infirmity. At times the passing of friends and the deepening solitude of deafness gave a touch of pensive melancholy to his thought. Lines like George Macdonald's came readily to his lips,—

"We are old who have been young

And we grow more old

Songs we are that have been sung,

Tales that have been told."

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The Closing Years

Often, even in the days of his active ministry, he quoted with feeling Browning's words about man's aspirations cramped by growing feebleness, "Like a sick eagle looking at the sky." As we look back on those last days it is with thankfulness that what he feared he did not have to endure. But at the time his death came with the shock of sudden loss. So alert and full of human interest was he to the end that the news that he was dead gave to the whole community something of the feeling that strikes home to the heart when a leader of thought is cut down in his prime. Though he had long passed the threescore years and ten and had lived to prove that four-score years are not labour and sorrow, his step was so sure and his interests were so vivid to the very last that none realized how slender the silver cord had worn and on how slight a remainder of physical strength the eager and gifted mind had been working. Death seemed to come unawares and to call him hence. But with all its seeming suddenness we felt how sacredly fitting was death for one whose life's work was so nobly done.

“Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt

Dispraise, or blame ; nothing but well and fair,

And what may quiet us in a death so noble."

There are times when death seems to crown a life of faith with its true completeness. The

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work is done ; and the folded hands and peaceful brow speak of nought but rest and quiet. There is here nothing of the baffling tragedy of the untimely cutting-off of a life of promise, and nothing of the littleness and querulousness and pitiful decay of soul that the years sometimes bring to belie our hope of a fuller and more glorious life. There are lives that, as they near the end, make it harder for us to believe because they suggest decay and death rather than life. There are others that make it easier because of the clearer light they give, lives that give meaning to the words of the wise man of old, "The righteous hath hope in his death."

It only remains now to think of how rich and full was the witness of those closing years. In an earlier chapter I said that some of the finer and deeper qualities of his preaching would be seen more clearly when we came to think of his later years. That does not mean that he was a finer preacher in Broad Bay than he was in St. Andrew's. But it does mean that in his later days we see set in clearer light some of those qualities that all through gave his preaching its finest grace. No doubt there was something lacking in his preaching at Broad Bay that men knew in the days of his prime. When a man's regular ministry is done, there is an inevitable loss of driving power in his preaching, even apart from that entailed by the decay of mental

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and physical powers. He is no longer the leader in great causes. His preaching becomes more "occasional " in character. There is more of reflection and less of battle in its tone. But there are compensations. The finer utterances of the heart that are apt to be crowded out in the public interests of a busy ministry find their proper place. The preacher is now able to impart more fully the rich fruitage of a life spent in the service of men and in the fellowship of the highest thoughts. With some old age is sterile in thought and darkened in hope. But with men like Dr. Waddell it is rich with the gathered treasures of a well-spent life and able to touch the lives of others with blessing and hope. Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of old age in words that were very familiar to the Doctor :

'"What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us,

Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime,

Think of the calm he brings, the peace he leaves us,

The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time !

"Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant

Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep,

Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant,

Life's flow less noisy, but the stream how deep ! "

It has been said that there was a strong consolatory element in Dr. Waddell's preaching. And he no doubt sometimes preached with the direct purpose of giving comfort in troubled davs. But even when this direct

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purpose was absent the consolatory quality was present. It was the result of his whole way of thinking and of the reality that divine things had for his heart. Two things especiallv gave to his preaching this high power of helping men, his own sure faith in the Gospel and his sense of the mystery of life. These two lie very near together. It is the man most sensitive to the mystery of life who understands best the light given in the Gospel. And Dr. Waddell was a preacher of comfort because his words were the words of one who felt and knew. In his essay on Burns Carlyle says :

''But a true poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of wisdom, some tone of the eternal melodies, is the most precious gift that can be bestowed on a generation ; we see in him a purer, freer, development of whatever is noblest in ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to us ; and we mourn his death as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us."

Dr. Waddell wrote no poetry. Once when I asked him if he ever tried it, he laughed and said, "I am afraid that if I tried, my tongue would be in my cheek all the time." But all the same he had the poet's heart. Like the true poet he felt the touch of the vital truth of things. And a teacher who makes real the truth of God is our greatest help to all true living. His own faith in the Gospel and in Christ as the final revelation of the will of God became surer and deeper as the years went

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on. In Christian old age there is a fuller witness as well as a riper wisdom. It is the witness of a tested faith, a faith that can say, “I know him whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.” The old words of faith come to the lips, grateful as ever to the heart and reinforced with life’s experience. It is the testimony of one who has thought and has experienced, who has “seen God’s hand through a lifetime, and all was for best.”

And, if in one way the force of the preacher is less in old age than it was in the vigour of manhood, in another way the emphasis on essential things is deepened. It is related of Dr. Alexander Raleigh, one of the most deeply spiritual preachers of his time, that when he was dying he whispered, “I think I could preach now.” There is a deepening realization of the great truths of salvation on which our faith must rest, something done by God and given us by God as alone sufficient to give quietness and strength of heart in all the struggles and changes of our lives. And it is just when that knowledge is ripest that the opportunity of pressing it home on the consciences of men is passing away. So it was with Dr. Waddell. He had this urgent heart of the evening hour. There was both a greater urgency and a finer grace as the years grew over him. Thought crystallized into

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certainty ; and the Word was made even more truly his own. But if he was the helper of men's faith by a growing clearness and a deeper certainty, he helped it still more by his constant suggestion of the divine meaning of life. The true helper of our lives is the one who makes it easier for us to see and believe in the highest. And we who remain to-dav can thank God for one who was the helper of our faith through ripeness and grace of soul, through his own deep feeling of life's mystery and greatness, and the sense of reality that he imparted to our hearts. This was the fruit of his labours, that he made the eternal a nearer possession for us all. There was in him a certain wistfulness of soul, a feeling of fuller meanings yet to be revealed. Here he was a helper of our faith, as all are helpers who are sensitive, as he was, to the solemn mystery of life. He helped to touch our hearts with a new reverence by his feeling of the wonder and glory of the world. For him its secret could not be divulged, or its greatness revealed, in any easy phrase. He shared Sir William Watson's scorn of the thought or poetrv that only "festooned the porch of things."

''Unflushed with ardour, and unblanched with awe.

Her lips in profitless derision curled.

She saw with dull emotion—if she saw —

The vision of the glory of the world

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He was one of those to whom the answer comes through deeper reverence and fuller life. Such are the true helpers of our faith, our teachers in feeling the wonder of the world and the riches of the glory of our inheritance. As we think of him, and of all that he taught us here, and, still more, of all that his constant bearing suggested to our hearts, we feel a new and deeper assurance of that life to which his faith ever pointed. We feel that he has closed with those things on which his thoughts so often dwelt, and that all mystery has been made clear. " Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face." We feel that the deep longings and august anticipations that God puts within our hearts are no more than the promises of His faithfulness, and that all will be fulfilled.

In every phase of action, love, and joy

There is fulfilment only otherwhere.’

So in these closing years his ministry to the faith of men was rich and full, richer and fuller than he had any conception of. He was so human, yet so closely in touch with the divine. His faith influenced men because he had fought the battle and paid the price. He had looked on life and death with human fears and human perplexities that brought him very near to his fellow-men. So when he spoke they instinctively felt that here was one who understood, and who had made a

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deeper faith his own. Immortality becomes something great, and simple, and credible in the company of such a soul. It suggests what cannot pass away, those feelings that never find completeness or adequate answer here. It is the instinct of a true life to believe in immortality ; and the sight of a true life prompts us all to believe in it. This was the glory of the long years given to Dr. Waddell, that they gave the confirmation of a deeper peace of heart and a finer beauty of soul to the message of life which it had been his life's work to preach. In the ripened grace of his life and in his constant sense of something greater yet to be known he was a helper of men's faith to the last. His closing years made clearer to us all the truth of the old words that the hope of the righteous is full of immortality.

"For safe with right and truth he is,

As God lives he must live alway ;

There is no end for souls like his,

No night for children of the day.'

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In St. Andrew s Pulpit. 1917

St Andrews Presbyterian Church dunedin. n.z

ADDRESSES AND PRAYERS

As an Eagle Stirreth up Her Nest

[lt is an interesting circumstance that this sermon was delivered at St. Andrew's Church on theday of the historic landing of the Anzacs at Gallipoli, on April 25, 1915, though the news had not, of course, at the time reached either minister or people]

Scripture : Isaiah xl, 18-31

Text : Deut. xxxii. 11-12. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadclli abroad her wings, taketh them, bcureth them on her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him and there was no strange god with him.

Also in the Book of Exodus xix. 4. Ye have seen how I bare you on eagles' wings and brought you unto myself.

I want to speak with you this morning on the Divine Education of Life. That among other things is what these words suggest. As life moves to its close, the purpose of it gets clearer. When the strife is over and we look back upon it through the sifted vears, we can judge it best.

And that is where Moses is now. The long battle has ended. The noise is stilled, the mists have lifted. He sees a purpose running through it all, gathering it up and binding the scattered leaves of the past into

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order. What is it ? He expresses it in one of those beautiful poetic metaphors that shine through all this closing address. "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him ; there was no strange god with him."

Now the journey of Israel from Egypt to Palestine is the type of the journey of every man from earth to heaven, from sin and self to God. Moses here figures it forth under the image of the eagle and her young. It will repay us then, I think, to stay a little and stud}' these words.

i

The first tiling that emerges out of them is the community of nature between man and God. It is this community of nature between the young eagles and their parents that enables the latter to find an answering echo in the hearts of the former. It would be inane for the eagle to flutter over a stone or a calf or a dog. No amount of stirring up could ever make them poise their wings for the eagle's flight, because there is nothing in common between them.

And so the first truth we take from these words is the essential oneness of man's nature with God. He is made in God's image. That image is stamped upon his moral being. The similarity between the two may be obscured

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and largely effaced, but it is never wholly wiped out. That is why we sing :

Down in the human heart

Crushed by the tempter,

Feelings lie buried that grace can restore ;

Touched by a loving hand,

Wakened by kindness,

Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.

That is a great truth, then, that underlies the imagery of this verse. The truth of a relationship, a community of nature, between man and God, as between the eagle and her young.

You go into your garden and you plant your flower seeds. You trace out letters. You put them in so as to spell out words. Then you cover it all up, and there is nothing but the level mould. By and by the spring comes, and the summer, and the sun, and the heat, and the rain, and you go back and look, and 10, there are the letters, there are the words, written out in flowers all over your flower bed. The sun has revealed them. They were lying there till he came, and but for his shining they would never have appeared.

And here is this nature of Man, your nature and mine. God has put certain seeds into it. He has written in it words of His own, memories of Himself, messages from the Divine and the Eternal. And then He comes near and shines upon us, and there is

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a stir, a movement, and buds come out, and blossoms, and flowers. They were there, these things, as the seeds were in the ground, but they would never have sprung up of themselves, never unless God had come near and revealed Himself to us. What is the meaning of this book but just that ? It runs forward till it culminates in Christ. You turn your life to Him and you feel an answering thrill in His words, —a strange movement, a sense of kinship. You read His message to you, and you are conscious of a community between His life and yours. There is something in it that finds you, that grips you. His words find an echo in your heart, in your conscience. You take them away and you see the same thing elsewhere. You take them to savages, to men and women so low in the scale of being that you can hardly call them human. Yet there is something in this Book and in these promises, and in this Person whom we call Jesus, that has a strange power upon them. You have not to wait to prove Christ to them by demonstration or apologetics. No, you have only to tell, and there is something that grips them, lays hold of them.

What is that but the proof of the community of spirit between God and man ? What is that but the answering of your spirit and theirs to the Divine ?

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You remember—those of you who have read George Eliot's "Spanish Gypsy"—you remember how the old father, the old Gypsy father, comes one day upon his girl. The girl had been taken away, stolen, when she was a little child, brought up by her fostermother and father, and never knew other ones. Then one day her real father appeared. He tells her his pedigree. He makes known who he is and what he wants. He wishes her to fly with him. She hesitates, shrinks back. Then he warns her that the blood of the Gypsy is in her veins, that she carries in her the hopes of her people, that she cannot cut herself off from the memories and traditions and nature that she inherited from her race. She thinks she can. Then he says to her :- —

In vain my daughter,

Lay the young eagle in what nest you will,

The cry and swoop of eagles overhead

Vibrate prophetic in its kindred frame,

And bid it spread its wings,

And poise itself for the eagle's flight.

II

And now we pass to a second point—the method by which God awakens this community. Mark, I say, God awakens it. The initiative comes first of all from Him. What is the method then ? First there is the exemplary. You see the picture here. It was a picture which Moses and Israel must often

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have looked at as they made their toilsome journey through the desert, and which I daresay some of our soldiers in Egypt may perhaps witness in these coming days. It is the picture of an eagle soaring round the top of some mighty cliff. There is her nest; there is her young. They lie cosily together, or they cluster on the cliff edge, and the mother flies round them. See, she drops like a thunderbolt down the blue chasm ; then up again towards the sun. Then she comes nearer, she touches them, she calls out to them, she flutters over them, she flicks them with her wings. What does it all mean ' We know what it means. It is the effort of the parent to induce her brood to follow her. It is the first stage of education, the stage of example.

And that is the first stage of the Divine education of man ; that was how He taught Israel to go. He went before them in a pillar of fire and cloud. He gave them laws and ceremonies ; He marked out the way ; He uplifted the duty and strength of the life before them. He held forth motives and sanctions to induce them to travel by it. He does the same with us all ; the picture is not confined to Israel. It is coterminous with humanity.

This brings us to the second method by which God seeks to win His end.

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Look at the picture again. See yonder away up on the lonely peak,—a blue black shadow moves like a sweeping scimitar. It is the eagle. She has failed to win her young to tempt the blue empvrean with her. They cuddle together, back from that fearsome outlook, back into the nest. The nest is cosy, it is warm, it is safe there. And now see what follows. She stirreth up her nest. She scatters the sticks. She smites in upon their lazy comfort. She breaks up their home, and again she nutters and sweeps and soars and urges.

As an eagle stirreth up her nest —-so God. Don't you know that process, some of you ? Have you not been through it ? "Stirreth up her nest," and as you say the words, some of you can go back in memory to the fact. It is the old home yonder, far away it may be. You are a merry company of boys and girls. How careless, how cosy, how comfortable in that home. You thought it would be always so —that others might change, but not you.

We had been gathered from cot and grange,

From moorland, farm, or terraced street,

Brought together by chances strange,

And knit together by friendship sweet.

And now —now —

Scattered to east, and west, and north. Some with a faint heart, some with a stout, Each to the battle of life went forth, And all alone we must fight it out,

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And not in the sunshine, not in the rain,

Not in the might of the stars untold,

Shall we ever all meet again,

Or be as we were in the days of old

The pathos of it ! And the pain sometimes ! What does it mean ? As an eagle stirreth up her nest —so God. That is His further method of education. It is the parent seeking to create character, to develop purpose. Don't you know that so it has been —that this stirring up out of the old home has given new powers and larger faculties and breadth of view and high outlooks, and rich and great experiences, that you never could have got otherwise ?

And now look again. You are in another home —a home of your own. You have succeeded. You are comfortable. You have gathered round you children, books, art, wealth, and what wealth can give you. You are content. All is going well. And yet — and yet —not quite well. You have seen now and again wavering visions of a better life. There have come to you calls of Christ. Sermons have reached you. Worship has uplifted you at times. You have made good resolves. You have forsworn selfishness. You have seen the evil of the world, and the men in whose hearts the love of the Father is not. You have thought that you would resist their customs, forsake their company, and join valiantly the ranks of those who are fighting

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the battles of the Lord. And you meant it, you did indeed. But to do all that meant trouble, meant sacrifice, meant loss. Like the eaglets you gazed over the cliff and up to the sky —what a peril was there in that course. What a high courage it would take for that better life. What self-denial, what struggle, what danger ! And you —well, what did you do ? You shrank back like the shirkers that they are talking about in this war —back into the narrow cosy place where you are—back into the nest again. Yes, “the owl sees the sunshine and winks in its nest.”

And then see what follows. The nest is broken up. Death touches your nearest, and they sleep. Sickness comes, loss comes. Gains go into dust, luxuries to the auction room. It is a terrible trial. It is a hard, bitter experience. But it happens to many.

What does it mean ? It is the old story over again. "As an eagle stirreth up her nest —so God." And thus it runs right through all life. Man wants to be let alone—wants to lie cosily in his nest ; wants to succeed and progress ; and make no attempt to shake off his sin and his sloth and to develop his spiritual and eternal being

And what is true for the individual is true for the community, is true for the nation. Is not that the deeper meaning of this terrible war that has gripped us with its grim and

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bloody fingers ? May it not be that as an empire our material was outstripping our spiritual prosperity ? Ease and luxury and progress were producing their usual fruits—pride, carelessness, godlessness, loss of the sense of brotherhood, a rush of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Then we are plunged into this war. Fires of suffering run through the empire. Thev burn up selfishness. We are fused together like molten metal at furnace heat. A great spirit of patriotism swallows up everything else. "And grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their wounded sons. And young women forget all vanities save to make lint and bandages that may serve for the shattered limbs of their lovers."

Or, even when there is no war, look at the world then. Look at business and trade. We are ever expecting settlement, prosperity, peace. Newspapers publish the signs of the advance. Politicians prophesy it to-morrow.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time ;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

We know it never comes to settlement. Credit is a bubble bursting every hour. Securities grow insecure. Real estate becomes unreal under our very feet. Nor is it man only that contributes to this unsettlement. Nature

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conspires against us. She meets us with her storms and floods, and earthquakes and fever, forbidding us to be ever sure of that for which we labour. Nothing in the world of business, as Horace Bushnell says, is allowed to have a base of calculable certainty. Unforeseen disasters wait upon human plans in so many forms that we are sure of nothing and nothing comes out exactly as we expect.

What does it mean ? As an eagle stirreth up her nest. And is it not well —is it not well ? We are in constant danger of forgetting that we belong to the blue, that we are the children of eternity, that we are the image of God, and can be happy and blest nowhere but in the element of our nature, in the sphere for which we were made.

11l

What do you say —the pain of it ? The cruelty of this Divine stirring-up ? Listen. Is it cruel of the mother eagle to allure her young to use their wings, to flutter over them, to break up their nest ? Cruel ? —Would it not be more cruel to leave them alone, to let them be, to allow them to grow weak and wingless and starved and stunted, and the prey of crowding vermin ? What sort of kindness would that be ?

And men and women whose home is in heaven, whose life is in God, who are children of eternity—what shall God do with them ?

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Leave them alone, let them forget their heaven, let them starve their faculties, stunt their nature, grovel in the dust ? That would not be kindness —that would be misery, that would be loss. Look at the hens and ducks and geese in your backyard. Once, naturalists will tell you, they were birds of long wings and swift for flight ; but as food was placed easily for them and shelter furnished them in winter, they lost their desire for migration, their wings grew shorter, their bodies heavier. Now they are the victims of a narrow policy, and the idle and stupid occupants of backyards, fattening for the butcher’s knife.

Men and birds belong to the same dispensation of law. And what if food should be so easy, and the body so comfortable, that the soul should lose its wings and forget its dreams of the Divine and its home in eternity? Ah, that were the direst disaster of life. Anything —anything in the world but that. God loves us too well to permit it. And all that we think severe and hard and comfortless and cruel is His way of saving, educating, and lifting us. Bats may have barns, owls hoot in midnight firs, daws circle round smoky chimneys, and tomtits flit in your garden, but eagles are children of the blue empyrean ; “with undazzled eye they greet the sun and circle round the skv.”

And so man. Ye have seen how I bare you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself.

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Brought you to Myself. Yes, that is the goal and the meaning of it all. Brought you to Myself. Father, I will that they also be with Me where I am. God —Christ never rests, never leaves us alone, till we stand with Him, till His character is formed in us, till we are lifted to where He lives and moves. And how high is that —how high ! Oh, it is a dizzy height, an incredible height. It is higher than sin, for they are without fault before the throne of God. It is higher than sorrow, for God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. It is higher than darkness, for there shall be night no more. It is higher than death, for there shall be no more death. Ye have seen how I bare you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself.

Is not that wortli all the stirring up of the nest —all the break-up of peace and prosperity ? Shall we not welcome everything that forwards so glorious an end as that ?

IV

To-day I conclude thirty-six years of service of this church. That does not look as if there had been much stirring up of the nest, so far as lam concerned. I have been a long time in one place—practically the whole of my ministerial life. But a stirringup of the nest does not always depend on change of external circumstances. The real

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stirring-up is ever inward, related to the mind and the soul. That may go on and nobody know of it. Perhaps were I to tell you all you might realise that the nest has often been broken and scattered, but that is not to be spoken of now. The only thing that matters for you and me is the purpose of it all. And that purpose is, "Ye have seen how I bare you on eagles' wings and brought you to Myself." The assimilation of character to God, the ever-deepening personal intercourse between the soul and its redeemer, Christ—that is the purpose, that is the end, of all changes which the years bring. They are all meant to draw us in closer to Him who never changes, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. "Ye have seen how I bare you on eagles' wings," and so we can pray as well as sing the song,

Wings to bear me over mountain and vale away,

Wings to bathe my spirit in morning's sunny ray.

Wings that I may hover at morn above the sea,

Wings to bear me through life and death triumphantlv.

Wings that I might recall them—the loved, the lost the dead,

Wings that I might fly after, the past long vanished,

Wings to lift me upward, soaring to eagle height,

Wings to waft me heavenward to bask in realms of light.

Wings to be no more weary, lulled in eternal rest,

Wings to be sweetly folded where faith and love are blest.

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have seen how I bare you on eagles’ wings.” They that wait upon the Lord shall mount up with wings as eagles. In the shadow of Thy wings shall I rejoice. He shall cover thee with His pinions, and under His wings shalt thou tmst.

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Peter at the Fire

Preached on Sunday, 10th February, 1918

Reading: Matthew xvi, 13-23.

Texts : I.uk' xxii. 55.— And Peter followed afar off. And when they had kindled a fire in the midst of the hall, and were set down together, Peter sat down among them.

John xxi, 9. As soon as they were come to land they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread.

Peter warmed himself at the fire. Who lit this fire ? What was Peter doing there ? What business had he in that crowd ? The fire was lit by the enemies of Peter's Master. Those about him were men and women of the world, quite indifferent to Christ, men who knew little and cared less for Christ. What was Peter doing in that company ? What business had he there, especially at such a time, when his Lord was being outlawed and insulted by the world ? And especially when Peter himself the night before had protested that no matter who should desert Him, his Lord could count on him ? Ah !it was that thought that made Peter cold, that sent a chill through the fibres of his soul that no mere material fire could warm or dispel.

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I wonder if that picture comes home to any of us ? It might. It is the picture of many. What does it mean ? It is the picture of men and women who have drifted from Christ and who are trying to keep themselves warm and comfortable bv fires which the world supplies them with. That is the thought that I want to develop ; and we must develop it bv tracing the evolution —or rather the devolution —of it in Peter's decline and fall. The germ of it begins awav back, as Dr. Campbell Morgan has pointed out. It began away back at that scene in Caesarea Philippi that was read to you a moment ago. Christ asked His disciples what was the popular opinion about Him. And Peter told Him. He was a prophet, the highest type of man, maybe He was Elias or Jeremiah, or some of the Old Testament prophets. "And you," says Christ, "You ? What do you think ? " Peter answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." And Christ's heart leaped up. "Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona ! " Why ? Because of your genius, or insight, or intellect, or cleverness ? Oh, No ! Because it is a revelation of God Himself to you. What audacity is that ! This meek, modest, lowly man, not only accepting such a testimony, but telling the man who gives it that it is not his own achievement. It is a revelation from Almighty God. Peter never touched a grander moment than that. But

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take care of yourself in your grand moments, in your hours of success and of triumph, for that is the time that the Devil gets the easiest catch upon you.

What came next ? Jesus announces Jerusalem and the Cross, and Peter protests. “God save us ! ” he says, “That can never be to you ! ” “Get thee behind Me, Satan ! ” What a sudden revulsion of feeling! A moment ago, “Blessed art thou Simon Barjona ! ” and now, “Get thee behind Me, Satan ! ” And why ? Why ? Because he staggers at the idea of death, and death in the most appalling way, death on the Cross. It seemed to him monstrous, incredible that the Eternal Son of God should go of His own will to meet such a hideous doom. And Christ calls that Satanic. Do you mark that, my brothers ? The Cross is the crossroads of life. If you take the wrong turn there nothing else will come right in your religion. The beginning of the course that ends in comradeship with the crowd that crucifies Christ is to doubt or to deny the atoning death of Christ. Christ calls it Devilish, Satanic. It very nearly wrecked Peter ; and sooner or later it will wreck the discipleship of any man or any woman who gives way to it. That is the warning which blazes out from Peter’s career in lines of tell-tale fire.

Now let us go the next step. We go to the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter has

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recovered himself. '"Master," he says, '"it is good for us to be here." What next ? He has forgotten the great revelation, ''Thou are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." What does he want now ? He wants to put Christ on a level with the great prophets, with Moses and with Elijah. He says, "Let us build here three tabernacles, one for thee, one for Moses, one for Elias." Then came the voice of rebuke out of the cloud, "This is mv Beloved Son. Hear Him." "My Beloved Son." Not a lawgiver like Moses, nor a prophet like Elijah, but "My Beloved Son. Hear Him."

We need that reminder in these days. Voices are telling us that Jesus is not different, except in degree, from other great teachers. They want to build Him a temple along with mediums and mahatmas, with Plato and with Buddha and with Confucius. That was Peter's blunder. And he blundered here because he went wrong at the Cross, about the vicarious death of Christ. And the Voice comes out of the cloud to declare that that cannot be. Christ refuses to be co-ordinated with any teacher or any prophet, however great. Christianity is not merely an historic religion like Buddhism or Mohammedanism. It has not grown up out of man's inner needs and hopes and fears. It is a revelation from God and of God, or it is the wildest delusion that ever befogged the brain of mortal man. Nor

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is Christ a mere human evolution to be coordinated with other human world teachers. He is the incarnation of the Eternal God, or He is the most arrant liar and deceiver that ever bamboozled the human race.

And now let us look at the last stage, for we cannot follow them all one by one. Let us look at the last stage in the devolution of Peter. We come to the night before the Lord's death. Christ is talking about the great trying hour that is at hand. He is telling them that He is to be betrayed, that the sword will fall and the sheep will be scattered ; and Peter is touched with pity. He says, "No, Lord. You can certainly depend on me. I will lay down my life for Thy sake." When a man gets away from the fact and the spirit of the Cross he loses his reckoning, and at last he loses the understanding of himself. We shall see that with Peter in a moment. But let us look in the Garden.

“ ’Tis midnight, and for others’ guilt The Man of Sorrows weeps in blood.”

And who are these young men there asleep ? Peter is one of them. They fell asleep on the Mount of Transfiguration while the Lord was praying. Now the}* are asleep when He is in the red deeps of His agon v. And He had asked them to keep awake. That is what follows when we get away from the

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Cross. Broad views about Christ, then selfconfidence, then failure in the devotional life, sleep when we should be on our knees. “The thing to be afraid of,” writes Dr. Watkinson, “is not violent palpable sin. It is dullness, slowness, slovenliness, heartlessness, prayerlessness. That is the thing which makes all wickedness and all woe possible.” Now see how it works out in Peter. While he slept Christ’s enemies were not sleeping. They were on the watch ; and now He is a prisoner in their hands. The procession is marching back to Jerusalem. Who is that man skulking away back there in the dusk of the morning in the rear of that procession ? It is the man who protested against the Cross for Christ. It is the man who was asleep last night in the Garden. It is Peter ; and you read, “Peter followed afar off ” —away back in the rear. That is a perilous position for any disciple. He could not perhaps have done much else just now, for the opportunity was past. His failures had entangled him in a situation that tied his hands and made almost imperative his separation from Christ. And when a man gets separated from Christ and allows Him and His Cause to get into the hands of His enemies while he has rendered himself incapable of protest, anything may happen to him. “Thus bad begins but worse remains behind.” And you know what the “worse ”

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is. When next we catch a glimpse of Peter he is hobnobbing with the sworn foes of his Lord. He is warming himself with them at the fire they had lit ; and then you know what followed —open apostacy, vehement, blasphemous repudiation of the Master he once loved and honoured and Whom last night he protested he would stand by to the end.

It is an old story. What did you say the man’s name was ? His name ? It is the name of multitudes to-day. It is the name of hundreds and of thousands in this city. It may be yours or mine to-morrow. For, mind you, if you desert Christ, if you turn Him out of your life, you have got to bring in someone or something to fill the place. And so then you will find all round about you former disciples of Christ and of the Church trying to keep up the heat and energy of the soul by the fires of the world.

What are these fires ? They have many names —money, pleasure, politics, art, theosophy, philosophy, socialism, spiritualism, Christian science, and a hundred and one other ghosts of religion, wandering will-o’-the-wisps that deserters from the Christ of the Cross are fated to pursue. And how came they to be warming themselves at these fires ? Just as Peter did. The spiritual devolution of Peter’s character tells their history also, or the history of many of them. It is not the drama, this, of a man who lived long ago and

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that we are tracing as a mere history. No, it is the drama of every human soul, the drama of multitudes of souls about us at this moment who have slipped back from the Christ into the crowd that ultimately crucified Him. That is what gives this story a deep personal interest. Am I speaking to any who are in that condition this morning, any trying to keep themselves warm and comfortable by fires lit only by the world, any who as they look into these fires see in them, as Peter did, old lies, accusing conscience, shame, remorse, unsatisfaction of heart and mind ? What is to be said to vou ?

Well, listen. That is not the end of Peter, that cursing and swearing coward amid the enemies of Christ. No, that is not the end. Come away up yonder to the shores of Galilee. It is the grey dawn of another morning. Look, there is another fire burning on the beach, and round it are gathered another company of men —fishermen. They have been out all night beating about upon the sea. And now thev are here in the grey dawn after a wonderful haul of fish. And look ! There is Peter among them. And there is the Lord. And Peter is warming himself now by the fire which the Lord had kindled for him. And he is a changed man. Peter, the man with such a shameful past, how came he here now ? You remember how the story ends. Peter has protested with an oath, round the fire in

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the court-yard, that he did not know that Man, the Christ. A cock crew. A cock crew. It struck him like a whip of lightning out of the silent sky. Lifting his eyes in despair he caught the spectacle of the Face of Christ as He passed at that moment through the court-yard. Ah, that Face ! That Face now with the foul marks of spitting and slander upon it ! Where did Peter spend the next hours and days that followed ? Can anyone fathom the depths of his broken heart and the sorrow of his miserable and woe-begone soul ? Yes, there was One who could. It was the One he had so deeply wronged. And do you remember the message that the angels gave Mary to take to the shuddering disciples? “Go and tell them,” said the Risen One, “Go and tell them the glad news. Tell the disciples and Peter.” Mark is the only one of the three Gospels that puts in that touch, because Mark was the friend of Peter.

“Tell the disciples and Peter.” The graciousness of that ! “Tell them that lam gone to Galilee and there shall meet them.” And they met Him round that fire on the shore ; and the broken heart was healed by the sublime forgiveness of his Lord ; and Peter steps into the front rank of those who have made the world glad that they were born. That is the Christ Whose preaching becomes a true gospel to the world.

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To any of you who may be trying, then, to warm yourselves by the world’s fire and only feeling the cold of the heart increasing, to you who have drifted and deserted and denied, or who may yet do it, He looks on you. Can you see the vision of that Face, marred, spat upon, slapped, outraged for you ? Ah, if you can but see that Face looking forth upon you as you try to get warm by the fires of the world, it ought to strike home to you as it did to Peter —he went out and wept bitterly —and then you will be ready to welcome the great forgiveness which He offers to every penitent disciple.

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The Iron Gates of Life.

Preached on Sunday, 18th January, 191)8.

Heading : Acts xii, 1-24

Text : Acts xii, 10.— They came unto the iron gate

This whole story seems far away, but it is not. It is very, very modern. It is happening every day. It is happening to you and to me. The one thought that I want to deal with this evening is The Iron Gates of Life.

You remember the story here. Peter was imprisoned, securely locked up, chained, guarded by battalions of soldiers, the keepers at the door. Suddenly, a light shined in the prison. An angel appeared and told Peter to get up quickly. He did. His chains fell off. He followed the angel. He passed through one door after another, till they came to the iron gate which led out into the city. This was the strong, secure —apparently impassable—barrier to get through. The iron gate —but surprisingly, it opened as easy as "kiss your hand."

So there we get our first point — The Iron Gates of Life. Everybody meets them. In a sense, we are all like Peter. We are all in prison. Life is a prison. It has bars and

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boundaries everywhere that we cannot pass. The body is the prison of the soul. We have intellectual limitations, and physical limitations, and moral limitations. We are shut in on every side. In a sense we are far less free than the lower creation. We travel a bit along the road to liberty. We are able to overcome this or that ; we get past the first and the second ward, but at last we come to an iron gate —to a barrier that seems insurmountable.

The Iron Gates of Life —how shall we name them ? Each life has its own gates. There are some that are special, and some that are general. Some peculiar to the individual, and some common to the race. The special are such as emerge out of a person's circumstances. In business, for instance, a man has a struggle to succeed. He masters one difficulty after another. He fights through this loss and that loss ; but at last he comes to an iron gate, to some barrier or other that blocks the way, and it seems impossible for him to get further. Every man and every woman has experiences of that kind.

And then there are the iron gates that are common to us all, that we must all meet some day. For instance, there is the iron gate of sickness. We are ill now and again, but we get better. We throw off this and that trouble. We get round the corner, past the first ward and the second ward ; and so it

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goes on for a while. But at last a day comes when we do not —a day when we become conscious that the disease at last is fatal, and there is no hope of recovery. We have finallv reached the iron gate.

And then, there is the iron gate of Death. That is the universal iron gate. Some may escape these other gates of which I have been speaking, but none escape this one —none. Some get through without illness, and without old age. Strong and young, they suddenly come to the boundary of life. But young or old, sick or well, this is the iron gate to which we are all travelling, and to which some day we shall come.

The Iron Gates of Life. I cannot stay to specify them in detail. You all know them. You have come to them in the years that are past. You will arrive at some of them in the year on which you are now entering.

And so Igoon to the next point. When Peter came to the iron gate, it opened of its own accord. It opened of its own accord. Isn't that true of life again ? Sometimes the iron gates that we come to, that seem to block our path, when we come up to them, swing back suddenly, mysteriously. The} r open for us —we do not know how.

But, you say, it was the angel with Peter that caused the gate's opening. Very well,

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don’t angels come to us in the same way, and do they not perform the same services ? What is an angel ? We are not to think merely of some shining, winged, sky-clad creature. Open your Bible here, and you will find that things, as well as beings, are spoken of as His angels. The forces of Nature are sometimes spoken of in that capacity. So are men and women. You find the word “angel ” in the Old Testament applied to prophets ; in the New Testament to leaders and teachers of the Christian Church. Yes, “God’s chariots twenty thousand are, thousands of angels strong.”

And so you are not to quibble with that word "Angel." You are to think of it as any thing, or anv person, or any thought that comes to you with a liberating power. You remember Silas Marner. The old man came up to the gates of despair and distrust of man and God —the gate of pessimism and sorrow. What happened ? One New Year's night, on coming to his solitary home, he found on his hearthstone a little curly-haired child. How or where it came from he could not tell. But there it was, examining with childish curiosity its little pink toes. And then you remember how that little one became the angel that opened the iron gate for him into a new and blessed life. And the creator of Marner writes :

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“Men are led away from threatening destruction. A hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm, bright land, and the hand may be that of a little child.”

Yes, it may be. It often has been. It is so at this moment. Many a man and woman, standing before the iron gates of life, have found them opened by the hand of a little child.

So is it in other spheres of life. Other things become angels that swing back unexpectedly the gates. For instance, James Smetham, the great artist, writes :

I went to chapel to night, fretting with plenty of dark and vexing suggestions, all sore as to feeling, and I came away calm, sweet, fresh, all my caresgone, rejoicing in the < iod of my salvation."

There it is again. The iron gate of vexing dark thoughts and sore feelings opening of its own accord in the chapel. So it runs through life. And so everyone who holds the faith of Peter, and serves Peter's Lord, verifies things of that kind. They may be affrighted at times as they see some dark and terrible bar that drops across their path. How will they get through ? They do not know. But courage ! Never fear ! Go on up to it. Some angel will come when you get there, and the gate will open of its own accord.

Take, for instance, the gate of old age. Sometimes people fear it and fret about it. They hate the thought of being left depen-

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dent, of hearing the world go on by them. They are of no consequence to it now. They are nut broken and withered leaves, useless and forgotten. And yet it may not be so. It has not been so for many. Oliver Wen (all Holmes has a beautiful poem entitled "The Iron Gate." The occasion of it was his resignation of the editorship of the "Atlantic Monthly "on his seventieth birthday. They gave him a breakfast, and he replied to the speeches in this poem called "The Iron Gate." It is a poem in which he deals with this very subject of old age :

Old Age, the grey-beard ! Wei] indeed I know him,

Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey ;

In sermon, storv, fable, picture, poem.

Oft have I met him from my earliest day.

And then he goes on to tell how he met him in books —in Aesop's Fables, in Ecclesiastes ; how he knew him at a distance. But now he takes his shrivelled hand ; he travels beside him. But it is not what he expected. Instead of sorrow he finds him smiling as he draws near ; and, more, he brings other things :

What though of gilded baubles he bereave us,

Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime ?

Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us

The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time.

So when the iron portal shuts behind us,

And life forgets us in its noise and whirl,

Visions that shun the glaring noonday find us,

And glimmering star-light shows the gates of pearl.

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Yes, so it is—hundreds have found it. And so we may be sure it will be also with those other iron gates, and the last of them—the iron gate of Death. We go out to it with fear and trembling. But for those for whom it has been Christ to live that last iron gate will swing back easily —oh, so easily, and they shall go through into the life and love and liberty beyond.

What are all the previous gate-openings of life but the prophecy of this last one ? Christianity is a religion of surprise. A religion of surprise ! Open your New Testament, and you will see how wonder figured in the eyes of the early believers, and they get that inspiration from their Lord. His words strike the keynote of it. Ever so often they do that. Watch. Watch. Be ready. Look out. The Lord is at hand. In such an hour as ye think not He cometh. And so His followers believe, and as they do, they find their faith verified. He is meeting them everywhere with His surprises. The gate of sorrow opens into the wonder of joy. Pain and poverty, that seem intolerable, 10, in a night they are past and forgotten in the riches of a new life. In the hour when we think we have come to the last chance, when we are ready to sit down in despair, 10, an angel touches us, and the chains fall off, and we rise and go out through the iron gates into the larger life beyond.

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How many will testify to the truth of these words of Helen Hunt Jackson, the American poetess :

Blindfolded and alone I stand,

With unknown thresholds on each hand,

The darkness deepens as I grope,

Afraid to fear, afraid to hope.

Yet this one thing 1 learn to know

Each day more surely as I go,

That doors are opened, ways are made,

Burdens are lifted or are laid

By some great law, unseen and still,

Unfathomed purpose to fulfil.

Yes, so it is for those who have Peter's faith and Peter's fidelity. They came to the iron gate, which opened of its own accord. Yet there was no magic in it. No magic ! None whatever ! Nothing happens without an adequate cause. What was the cause in this case ? Peter ? The angel ? Some supernatural and unknown thing ? Oh, no, no. Listen. "Peter therefore was kept in prison; bid prayer was made without ceasing of the Church unto God for him."

There it is. God opened the door. He was led to do it through prayer. Prayer, therefore, sets God in motion. It is a veritable cause. Why not ? A stranger comes to Dunedin. He knows nobody. He is suspected by the police of having committed a crime, of being a foreign spy. He is arrested. But the Mayor of Christchurch knows liim, so

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does the Resident Magistrate in Invercargill. He asks to be allowed to speak to those through the telephone. He is allowed. Matters are put right, and he is released at once with a thousand apologies.

Why can man not open communication with God in the same way —moving powers and forces for the right and the true ? Here is this great universe. It is full of such forces. They were waiting for man to utilise them since the beginning of time. We call them such names as electricity, light, radium, and such like. Whenever man approached these in the proper mood they responded promptly, with immense generosity. These forces —what are they but the energies of God ? But there are subtler forces even than these —forces of spirit and of life. Prayer is the appeal to these. Prayer, when it is the right sort, allies itself with these, travels by means of these, influences and transforms life bv these.

I go down to the telegraph office, and there I am at the centre from winch, at any moment, I can communicate with every quarter of the globe. I can send messages to friends in India, in London, in China, in Ceylon. So prayer is the centre from which can radiate communications to every quarter of the visible and invisible world. We may not tell exactly how this is done. But it is done. It is done. Nothing is more certain than that. Xo fact of science is more indis-

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putable than that. This whole book here — what is it but the record of that ? And history is crammed with illustrations of it. There is the China Inland Mission of which you have all heard. Hundreds of missionaries, thousands of workers. How did it come into being ? By prayer. It was founded by Hudson Taylor. How has Hudson Taylor founded it ? By prayer. He tells us that his mother, without letting him or anybody else know, set apart a certain day to pray for his conversion, and at the end of the time she sang a song of praise. She did not even go to find out if her son was converted. She waited for him to come and tell her. And he did, and he was astonished that she knew of it.

There is George Muller who died a few years ago. What did George Muller do ? Here is a card that was sent me shortly after his death. Here is one paragraph in it :

''Without anyone having been personally applied to for anything, the living God has sent, solely in answer to prayer, during sixty-nine years, £1,163,736 —sent that for the orphans, with an additional sum of £421,269 for other bodies —or a grand total of £1,585,005."

That is to say George Muller got that money in answer to prayer, and saved over twelve thousand orphans.

Then you have William Quarrier that you Scotch people ought to know about—one of

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the greatest men that Scotland produced—who has done similar work to that of Muller. The celebrated Erskine says that a friend told him that he had been at different times conscious of special spiritual blessings, and he had a most distinct impression that the blessings came to him through the prayers of a particular person ; and, meeting that person one day, he enquired, and the person told him that he had been praying for that very blessing on him for a long time. George Muller says that for eighteen months he prayed for five individuals in particular, and he saw them all brought into the kingdom. I could keep you here till to-morrow morning telling you stories of that kind. A mother wrote to me the other day very anxiously about her boy who had grown up and seemed to be breaking away from the truth he had learned in childhood. Well, there come times when you can do nothing but surround your sons and your daughters with prayer.

In the top of one of the skyscrapers of London there was a newspaper office that received its news from Scotland by wire in the top of a five-storey building. There were two young men in charge of it. One went out one evening to collect local news. When he came back late at night he found the door locked, and he could not get to his comrade on the top floor of the skyscraper. What did he do ? He immediately went to the

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nearest telegraph station, and he wired to the Edinburgh office, "Wake up the man in the fifth storey. I am locked out." By way of Edinburgh he got into his room in the fifth storey of a London skyscraper. He got the door opened. So many of us are shut off from directly influencing others. There seem to be unscaleable barriers between us —iron gates. But there is a way that you can get at them. You can work upon them through God by means of prayer.

If that be so then, what does it mean ? It means that the men and women who do not pray are living lawless and inhuman lives. If men and women can be influenced and changed, and made better by prayer, then what are we to say of those who decline prayer, who. refuse to utilise the resources that God has put at their finger-points for the blessing of their fellows ? That is the reason why we must deplore thin churches and scanty prayer meetings. It is a sign, not of progress but of our inhumanity and our indifference to the well-being of the world.

Do you say that you have prayed and prayed, and no answer came ? Yes, but are you sure that you have not mistaken the answer ? Are you sure you are not setting it down to other causes ? The church here could not believe the answer when they got it. They could not believe it was Peter. They said it was his ghost —anything rather than

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believe their own prayers. Is it not often so with us ? We get the answer to our prayers, and we do not recognise it. We set it down to other causes, as if God’s chariots were not “twenty thousand, thousands of angels strong,” but, even if the answer does not come, what then ? What then ? Well, you must be prepared to let God keep some of your prayers on trust for a while. We —or they for whom you pray —are not yet readv for the answer. But, mind you, they are not denied —they are only delayed. A child asks her father for some gift far more valuable than the child could rightly use, if it got it. The father does not give it then, but, in his heart he says, “Yes, you shall get it, you shall get it by and by, but not yet—not till you can get the full power and blessing of it.” Is the request denied because it is delayed ? No, the answer is made the very day it is asked. And so God is the trustee of many and many an answer to prayer, and He will fulfil them some day. And will come with a glad surprise. The iron gates of life will many a time be opened for children because of the prayers of godly parents —prayers forgotten by them —parents long since passed into the Invisible.

Yes, the iron gates of life are swinging back scores of times, and we say it is due to this or that. We ought to say it was due to some prayer offered by us, or offered for us,

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perhaps before we were bom, likely by parents long since dead. Yes, what is all life, what are the conquests that it makes of sorrow, or doubt, or loss, or sin, or death —what are all these but answers to the prayers of Christ for the world ?

“And now, unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion, and power, both now and evermore.”

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Till the Stars Appeared.

Preached on Sunday, 13th April, 1919

Scripture: Isa. xl, 18-31

Text: Nehemiah iv : 21. —So we laboured at the work from the rising of the morning till the stars appeared.

This is my fortieth anniversary in this congregation. I select these words as suitable for some thoughts for the occasion :

I

"So we laboured at the work." The work. What was it ? We know what it was for Nehemiah. We will not dwell on that. We want to ask what it is for us. The work. How shall we name it ? Let us go straight to the Master. We shall let the Lord Christ tell us. "This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent." Every word there is pregnant with the profoundest significance. "Hath sent." He has come into it from the other side. He is not a human evolution, but a Divine gift. That is the starting point, and it carries everything else with it. " And so we laboured

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at the work," and this is the work "that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent." That is primary ; that is fundamental. If you go wrong there ruin awaits you everywhere. Is not that what this war has been writing out for us in lines of blood and fire ? We are watching with awe the doom of civilisations that forget it. They thought they could repair human nature without Divine aid. They thought they could build the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, by the untempered mortar of human wisdom and power, and their "towering Babels " have buried them beneath the ruin. And what is true of nations is true of individuals —is true for each of us. When we come to ask what life means we must start here : "This is the work of God that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent." Multitudes do not do that. Spurgeon was once staying at an Italian inn. The floor was dreadfully dirty. He thought he would like to get it scrubbed, but, looking at it, he perceived that it was made of mud, and the more scrubbing the worse it would be. That is humanity in its natural condition. It wants regeneration before it can get reformation. It wants to be washed before it is starched. It requires to be washed white rather than whitewashed. It needs the new man before it can get to the superman. It must be brought under the power of a Higher Self than its own if it is to achieve the end

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of its creation. "This is the work of God." There are other works, any amount, but they can only be perceived and achieved when you start right, when you realise that this is the primary and fundamental business. "This is the work of God that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent." Then you can go on to construct character and build the new Jerusalem successfully, not otherwise.

II

"And so we laboured at the work." Laboured. Yes, the work needs labour. Nehemiah and his friends were beset by foes—foes fearsome and formidable. And so it has always been, and to-day more than ever. The war against the enemies of the spiritual life without us and within us is a war in which there is no discharge. It is the constant and special business of the ministry to direct and inspire it. It is true that in these days in certain quarters the work of the clergyman is ranked among the unproductive employments. A certain four-year-old cousin of mine (whose father was a minister) confided to his mother one day that he was going to be a train-driver. After a time that ideal faded out, and "then told her that he was going to be a minister like father, and do nothing." That is the popular notion of the parson. A section of modern democracy assuming the premises goes to the

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logical conclusion thus, as I read recently in an Australian paper : "When will the people seriously wake up to the fact that these priesthoods, and in particular the Christian variety, are the enemies of liberty and general social well-being ? " To some extent this superficial idea is justified. The results of spiritual work are the last to appear. They are the final products of evolution, and critics in a hurry do not make allowance for this. So the minister is misjudged. But his severest judge is himself. There is possibly no other profession in which a man may do so much or so little, be so lazy or so laborious. For 40 years I have been living my life and trying to do my work amongst you. Of the character and the quality of that work it does not become me to speak. I will only say this : that in one form or another the spirit of Ruskin's true and terrible words has ever haunted me. "It is the doing of good work that is the entrance of all princedoms. If it is not done the day will assuredly come when those who have shirked labour must labour for evil instead of good." "And so we laboured at the work."

We laboured. Yes, we. Marketable honey is the product of a hive of bees, not of a single bee. It has been my good fortune during all these years to have had the cooperation of scores of men and women of high character and far vision. Nothing is more

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remarkable than the way in which losses have been made good and the blanks of ranks filled up as the years went by. The individual waves of the sea are perpetually breaking and thinning away from less and less to nothing ; but new ones ever take their place, and the succession never ceases.

Life's a vast sea

That does its mighty errand without fail

l'anting in unchanged strength though waxes be failing.

And so it has been during all the 40 years' ministry of this church. I have had the pleasure and honour of being associated with as fine a company of labourers as ever any minister possessed. The dry records of these years in cold print may not seem to count for much, but Sir Robertson Nicoll says truly that the pages of a church report may be prosaic enough on the surface, but to those who understand what they mean they are full of a heavenly poetry. "The collection of the money, the giving of the money, the keeping up of the societies, the Sunday School teaching, the Bible Classes, the help in the choir, the visiting, the prayer meetings, the unbroken, hopeful, wistful attendance at Divine service—how good these all are ! We do not recognise the workers as we should ; nor do we acknowledge the value of their work. I am sure the Lord thinks very differently from many of their sniffing critics. What these

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critics do for the regeneration of the world has never been clear to me. What is clear is this : that it is the work of the Church in the field, the unnoticed, regular, obscure work that has kept the soul alive in England.” And it has done the same in New Zealand. And it has kept the soul alive these 40 years in this church. All honour to that gallant succession.

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But great and good as all this has been, something more will be needed for the future. A new age is breaking upon us. It demands new energy. We are moving into a time that will test the Church as it has never been tested before. Dark days are ahead of us. We have ended one war, but another is upon us even more ominous than that which is over. We are all watching with wonder and awe the advance of Bolshevism. A shrewd Russian writer aptly named it "an Asiatic despotism under a communistic label." Dr. Fitchett, of Melbourne, says it has in it a strain as fierce and as cruel as that of the Caliphs, who in its early days carried Mohammedanism by the sword over three-fourths of the civilised world, and threatened at one moment to overwhelm Christianity." And its relentless advance threatens to be as irresistible as the slide of a glacier. Marshal Foch compares it to the green, slow-drifting poison gas that Germany invented and used

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to the horror of mankind. What its principles are we need not here inquire. It is enough to say that it is out to make an end of Christian civilisation as it understands it. Let it be willingly admitted that there is much in that so-called civilisation that needs imperatively to be destroyed. But if the Christianity of Christ disappears from the world, then chaos and primeval night will come again. And nothing less than that is the peril that threatens us to-day. And let us not think it is far off from us. It is already here upon us in these lands. It is not simplv that stark atheism and materialism are being preached by pen and speech among the masses. It is Christianity itself that is challenged as the great despotism. "Our nation will never be safe " —I am quoting from an Australian Labour paper —"for honest men and women until the Cross is on the ground. That emblem of tyranny stains the atmosphere." That is the sort of teaching that is filtering down among the masses of these lands. It is well the Church should know where its enemies are, and what they mean. And beyond and behind all these again is the whole Oriental world —China, India, Japan, and the black races of Africa. If these vast hordes of mankind are not Christianised they will prove to the new civilisation what the Huns and Vandals were to the old. The Church must put all its forces into the field

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if it is not to be overwhelmed. It must make an end of its shirkers, its camp followers. They must either get out or get in. There is no room for them elsewhere, and the Church must gird itself as never before for a fight to a finish. Hitherto it has been merely tiddly-winking with the work. It has been holding its creed as a "perhaps," and its faith as a Sunday luxury. Well-dressed congregations have been singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War," while probably two-thirds of those who sang have never struck a blow for the crown rights of Christ.

The war just ended has shown us what fighting is, and when you measure up the numbers, the sacrifice, the money, the endurance, the hardship, the blood, and the death of those who fought the Hun against those who fight for Christ the contrast is ghastly. All that must be reversed if Christianity is to leaven the world. And if Christianity does not leaven the world the end is not far off. Dean Church, a quarter of a century or so ago, wrote some words in one of his great books that are applicable to-day. He said then : "There are grave reasons for looking forward to the future with solemn awe, but awe is neither despair nor dismay, and Christianity has had dark days before. That faith which has come out alive from the darkness of the tenth century, the immeasur-

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able corruption of the fifteenth, the religious policy of the sixteenth, and the philosophy of the eighteenth may face without shrinking even the subtler perils of our own." Only let us bear this in mind, that it is not an abstraction, or a system, or an idea, which has to face them. No, it is the plain you and me who believe. We sing :

''Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,

The eternal years of God are hers ;

But error, wounded, writhes in pain

And dies amid her worshippers."

Yes, all right. But don't you forget this : That truth has failed, will fail again, if not backed by truthful men. Christianity is the truth of God, but it is not self-acting. It must act and operate through its believers ; and its believers must be men and women who do not hold tepid opinions about it, but firm convictions. Opinions accomplish nothing. Convictions born of the Spirit transform worlds.

IV

"And so we laboured at the work." "From the rising of the morning." That is my next point. "From the rising of the m< ruing." When I came here 40 years ago it was the morning of my ministerial life. I had been only about 16 months in a settled charge. I was very inexperienced. I knew little comparatively. What I did know was

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somewhat crude and undigested. But there are things associated with the morning that wise people such as were given to me will be patient with. They will remember that the mellow autumn fruits and glorious colours that we see around us here—that these passed through a green and sour stage. And so the morning's light is naturally somewhat raw and unsweet. Youth is ambitious. Few of us learn by the experience of others. We do not start where they left off. We think we shall find our way where everybody else fails. But if we are sensible the years bring what Wordsworth calls "the philosophic mind." We see much go from us. Many of our bright, brave aims and ideals dissolve in a dripping mist. There come the inevitable disillusionments of life. It sobers and often saddens. "The dreams of my youth," writes Hazlitt, "came upon me, a glory and a vision, and come no more save in darkness and in sleep." And that is so with many. But for the Christian believer there are great compensations. A poet of my country sings, "Give me back the wild freshness of morning." Ah ! but there may be better things than even the wild freshness of morning. "For years and years," as one has well written, "on to old age men dream that there is only one kind of happiness —the happiness of our will gratified and our ambitions realised, and the little idols we have set up smiling down upon us. But

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when they are made wise in the communion of the Holy Ghost they understand that their blessedness is quite other than that ; that it comes to those who have died to the anarchy of inordinate desire, and live the life hidden with Christ in God." That is true. And now the long day wears to its close. The morning and the meridian are far past, and my face looks to where the days bury the suns in the dear golden west.

O to be with thee sinking to thy rest

Thy journey done ;

The world thou leavest blessing thee and blest

O Setting Sun.

The clouds, that ne'er the morning joys forget

Again aglow

And leaf and flower with tears of twilight wet

To see thee go.

V

"And so we laboured from the rising of the sun till the stars came out." That is my next point. "Till the stars came out." Lord 'Wolseley says in his "Soldiers' Pocket Handbook," "It is most important that the officers should study the almanac well, and keep before them the hours of sunset and sunrise, and of the moon's rising, so that all possible advantage may be reaped by every hour of darkness." Kxcellent advice for soldiers of the Cross as well as soldiers of the Empire. "And so we laboured till the stars came out." What shall we say is the significance of that ?

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Do you remember it is recorded that when God created the stars, He said, among other things, "Let them be for signs." And these stars in the sky of life and labour —of what shall we say they are the signs ? For my purpose I will mention three things. First, they may be taken as the sign of how our work will look at the day's end. It will not end in the great glow of a sun-burst, but in the glimmering starlight. Few of us, perhaps, expect that in the rising of the morning, but all who labour seriously know full well that sooner of later when they have done all they are but unprofitable servants. They know well how poor and meagre look the results when the light of eternity begins to widen about them.

Where have you been, my brother ?

For I have missed you from the street.

I have been away for a night and a day

On the Lord God's judgment seat.

And what did you find my brother

When your judging there was done ?

Weeds in my garden, dust in my doors,

And my roses dead in the sun

That is so. We all discover it, if we are earnest, sooner or later. John Eliot, the apostle of the Indians, at the end of his long life, said, "My doings have been poor and small and mean, and I will be that man who shall cast the first stone at them." If Eliot could say that of his doings —Eliot, perhaps

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the most wonderful worker since the days of the Apostles—it becomes infinitely lesser ones like myself to say far stronger things of mine. "Yes," you reply, "humility is so easy where pride is impossible." But God's workers have nothing to be proud of except God Himself. It is He that worketh in them —all is of Him ; and so thev are

Content to fill a little space

If He be glorified,

A second thing that the stars may be taken as sign of when they appear in the sky of life and labour is this : They are a prophecy of the end of both in this world. I suppose that after 40 years' work I ought to feel old, even patriarchal. The funny thing is I don't —not a bit. My mind is far more alert and active to-day than ever it was before, and I hope spiritually I have not declined. I think if only the instrument —the body —would but respond, say, for ten years longer, I could do more and better in these ten years than in the past 40 put together. But I fear I cannot look for that. Browning's words come to me often :

Honey and gall of it !

There is life lying

And I sec all of it,

Only I'm dying !

That is the experience that takes many — the consciousness of seeing work that thev would like to do and feel that they could

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do better than ever ; but they are held back, denied the power to accomplish, and at last know that they must “die like a sick eagle looking at the sky.” That is “the gall of it.” And yet there is honey in it —great honey — for is it not one of the strongest proofs of human immortality ? So it has been found by many. Study Browning’s wonderful poem of “Cleon ” if you would realise its force and significance.

And so I come to the last thing which I will mention as the stars' prophecy. They are prophecy of the light and power and joy of a grander coming day. Whittier, in a beautiful little poem in answer to an address from some of his old schoolmates of 27 years ago, ends it up thus :

Hail and farewell ! We go our way

Where shadows end, we trust, in light.

The star that ushers in the night

Is herald also of the day

Yes, infinitely greater and more glorious day. Is not that just what the stars prophecy ? Look up at them as you go out to-night. They appear to you only little thin glimmering pin-points of light in the ebon sky, while this earth of ours looms vast and mighty beside you. Yet it is just the reverse —just the reverse. Think of the magnitude and multitude of these stars. Take your stand in imagination on one of them—say, on Sirius, with its flash and flush of many colours.

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And now look back on your earth, and what is the size of it ? It is the size of a halfpenny, but a halfpenny seen at the distance of 50,000,000 miles ! And millions of stars are even vaster than that —vaster than our sun. And then, lest we should be overwhelmed by the might, and magnitude, and multitude of these immense worlds that we call stars, then —well, what then ? Then "lift up your eyes and behold Who hath created these things that bringeth out their hosts by number. He calleth them by name by the greatness of His might. For that He is strong in power not one faileth." Yes, and they are all for us. For we are of infinitely more concern to God than the gases and chemical matter of His stars. Oh, the might and yet the tenderness of this glorious God ! Listen ! "He healeth the broken-hearted and bindeth up their wounds." He doeth that, He Who taketh up the isles as a very little, and wheels these myriads of suns and stars through His infinitudes of spaces. And so we gather faith and courage to sing with Browning :

Grow old along with me.

The best is yet to be,

The last of life for which the first was made.

Our times are in His hand,

Who saith, "A whole I planned."

Youth shows but half; trust God ; see all, nor be afraid.

No, we will not be afraid though the mountains be removed and the hills be cast into

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His Boyhood Home - Ireland

"The Suburban Balcony" ' Dreamthorpe," Broad Bay. Dunedin. n.Z

Till the Stars Appeared

the sea. And if the smallness of our poor work saddens us sometimes, if our sunrise seems to be merged at the last into the thin shimmer of starlight, mav be over there — who knows —it may take on something of the dimensions of the stars themselves ? We may be astonished, as Christ suggests to us in His parable, at the great and gracious commendation which He will give to that which seemed to us here of no consequence at all. And when at last the day comes, as come it must, to all, when our sun finally goes west, and the "night-wind brings up the stream murmurs and scents of the infinite sea," then, if it has been for us Christ to live, we shall welcome it —welcome it not in the minor key of Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," with its low moans and its dim hope, but rather in the clear, triumphant notes of a later singer :

Star-rise and moonlit peace,

The last clear call has come !

And silver fingers on the pale brow's fleece

Beckon the sailor home.

No "moaning of the bar," but down the tide

The worn sails filling free,

The stately Spirit barque in fearless pride

Stands out to sea.

Star-set and silver sleep,

The night wind freshlier blows

As through the pathless silence of the deep

The great ship goes.

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No "sadness of farewells," but from the skies

Like music faint and far,

One gathering shout of triumph swells, and dies

Beyond the morning star.

"Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God, our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power both now and forever."

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Snowdrops

25th August, 1912

[The Snowdrop was Dr. Waddell's favourite flower, and many members of his congregation sent him the first blooms from their gardens. On the Sunday following its first appearance the Doctor always chose the Snowdrop as the subject for his customary address to the children]

I want to speak to the boys and girls for a little bit. My text is I Corinthians i, 27 (the last sentence) :

God chose the weak things of the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong.

I have been reminded that Spring is come. Snowdrops have been drifting in upon me for the last two or three weeks. Kind friends know my weakness for snowdrops and send them to me. I had sme sent to me from the North Island two or three months ago ; they get Spring up in the North Island long before we get it down here.

I have been asked when I am going to preach about the snowdrop again. Well, I have been preaching ten or fifteen years about the snowdrop, and I think I am about preached out. Then I remember that boys

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and girls grow old, and new ones come and take their places, and old boys and girls have short memories, so that they don't remember much about what I said ten years ago any more than Ido myself. However, I think I can discover something about the snowdrop that I haven't said anything about yet. I am going to put it under the title of a wellknown play, "She Stoops to Conquer." Now, your teachers will tell you to-morrow, if you ask them, who is the writer of that play, and all about it, but I am merely telling you the title just now.

She Stoops to Conquer. That, I think, is one of the lessons the snowdrop may teach us. How do we get that out of this ? * You will observe that the snowdrop has got a very thin neck, and it cannot hold up its head —at any rate, it does not choose to do it. It is very humble and modest. Its neck is a very flexible one. Well now, when you are out in a cold snowy day, and the wind is blowing very strongly, if you are standing on the street talking, what do you do ? You button your coat up, and you turn your back to the wind, don't you ?

Well, that is just precisely what the snowdrop does. When the wind blows, and the sleet falls, it just turns round from the wind. Instead of setting its face straight up towards the wind, it goes round with the wind, and it

* Dr. Waddell held a snowdrop in his hand while speaking

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goes round in such a way that the wind cannot get inside it, and the sleet cannot get inside of it, because if the sleet and the wind could get inside of it they would smash up the little thing. It would take all the honey out of it. That would take away the life of it, because the life is in the honey, and the life of those that come after it. If it were not that the snowdrop has a nice thin soft neck, we would have no snowdrop next year.

Now, there is an illustration of a thing stooping to conquer. The snowdrop conquers the big mighty forces of nature simply by stooping, by yielding up, by turning round to it. And that is the law of life. We stoop to conquer. That is true everywhere.

And that is true not merely in Nature, but it is true in life. Take, for instance, mothers. How does it come that "Mother" is the sweetest name in the language, the best beloved person in the home ? How does she gain that conquest ? By stooping ;by being a servant to everybody. You know the old poem —it was in the school book when I was at school :

Who ran to help me when I fell,

And would some pretty story tell,

And kiss the part to make it well, —

My father ? Well, I remember when I was a boy at school, a bov in my class read it, and he said "My Father" —and we all

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laughed at him. Why did we laugh ? Because fathers are not given to that sort of thing. Fathers cannot stoop their necks so far as that, and it is only mothers do that ; and it is just because they do that that we all love the mother. And she gains the conquest by stooping. So it is with boys and girls also. The boys and girls that go down low, stoop to serve others, to help others, are kind to others : those are the boys and girls that are conquering ; those are the boys and girls that are conquering in the school, in the home. Last week, a man died —General Booth. All the civilised world was talking about him. Newspapers were writing leading articles about him. The King and Queen sent messages to his friends. Why is it that General Booth created such a tremendous talk about himself ? Why is it that he won the hearts of everybody from the King to the lowest in the slums ? Why ? Because he stooped ; because he went down ; because he was ready to serve the lowest, and think about the lowest, and care for them. That is why he won the hearts of the world—he stooped to conquer.

Yes, that is so. You will have noticed perhaps in last night's paper a story about a girl in the "Titanic," which was wrecked some time ago. When one of the boats was putting off, it was discovered that there was one too many in the boat. Who was to go out ?

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Well, a young girl said " I will go." She said to a woman who was standing beside her, "You have got children ; I have got none ; so you will go in the boat and I shall go back." She went back on to the deck, the boat left, and she went down, gave up her life ; and so all the papers have been talking about her.

O great young heart, all goodness fence

Thy grave by yon grim sea.

Who says the race is dying down

That owneth girls like thee?

Now, your teachers to-morrow will tell you who wrote that poem, and they will tell you that it was written also about a boy who gave up his life in the same way to save two or three comrades ; and when he was going out to the fourth one he was drowned. And so the poet sang about him :

O great young heart, all goodness fence

Thy grave by yon grim sea.

Who says the race is dying down

That ownest a man like thee ?

That is so. The readier we are to serve others, to think of others, to care for others ; the lower we go down to do that, the higher we rise.

Now, the next thing I want to say is that you want to begin this when you are young. You want to begin stooping when you are young. You know if you don't learn athletics when you are young, when your body

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is supple, you cannot do it when you are old. It is just the same about love, and service, and kindness. It is only when you begin when you are young to do that in little things that you will understand and be able to do it when you grow up in bigger things. Little things ! It is just by the little things that you begin. For instance, a boy had an apple to share with his brother. He cut it equally in two. Then he looked at the half that he was going to give to his brother, and he took a bite out of the other one. "Here, Jim," he said, "they were not equal, but I have made them equal now." That was not the way to stoop. That was one of the little things that will make it mighty hard for that boy some day when he grows a bit older. Take care of selfishness in the little things that make you desire to have something that somebody else has. Take care of that, and, in order to do that, I would advise you to read a very beautiful book, "Romola." In that book there is a story of a young fellow called Tito Melema, and the story of this young fellow is that because he wanted to run away, and did run away, from everything that was uncomfortable and unpleasant, because he thought only about his own pleasures, and his own joys, he came to commit some of the basest deeds.

That brings us to the last point. We call ourselves Christians. Why ? Because of

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Christ. Why is Christ sitting on the throne of heaven to-day ? Because He went down low, He stooped, and He conquered. He is the chief of conquerors, because He is the chief of stoopers, because He went down to the lowest for all. "Therefore hath God highly exalted Him and given Him a name that is above everv name."

And so that is the lesson that we take from the snowdrop this Spring. It stoops to conquer. Let you and me act upon it, and then we, too, shall win victories for ourselves, and for others, and for the world.

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The Rain and My Word

28th January, 1912

Text : Isaiah lv, 10.— For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the enter ; so shall My Word be that goeth forth out of My mouth.

For as the rain cometh down so shall My Word be.

I suppose you have had enough of rain these last few weeks ? Most people have, anyway ; but we have never got enough of a thing till we understand what it really is, and we never understand a thing till we get to the moral and spiritual meaning of it. And so, while it is raining outside, I am going to talk inside here about rain ; and I am going to talk about it in order to get at the spiritual and moral meaning of it.

And that is what we have in this verse. I suppose some of you read poetry, and maybe some of you will write it some day. Well, you know that the characteristic of the poet is to be able to detect similarities among things that differ ; to be able to see the law of unity in diverse things.

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Well now, the great poet of the universe is God ; and here He puts two things together that seem utterly unlike—rain and His Word. And yet He says that they are very much alike.

How do they resemble each other ? Well, I may mention four ways. I might perhaps find forty ways in which they resemble each other ; but I am not sure that I would find you here at the end if I started to tell you of the forty ways. So we shall be satisfied with four, and even if you do not remember the four, it may do you good just to hear about them, as I shall show you in a moment. Well then, let us see what the similarity is between rain and God’s Word.

First of all, as the rain cometh down from Heaven, so does His Word. That is to say, that this Book here has not been produced on earth. This Word here is not the word of man. It has come down from Heaven just as the rain has.

That is the first resemblance between rain and the Word—that they both come down from Heaven ; that they are not a creation of man. And so that makes this Book different from all other books ; that makes this Word different from all other words.

The second point that I shall mention is that the rain purifies, it washes things, it

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washes your face, for instance ; washes out the channels ; cleans the streets ; makes everything fresh and pure and clean.

And so, there is another point in which the rain resembles the Word of God. The Word of God purifies, just as rain purifies. How much, do you think, it would take to clean a square mile ? It would take a hundred thousand truckloads of rain, of water. A hundred thousand truckloads of water would be required to wash, or clean, or purify a square mile, just as much as God does in twelve months with His rain. All the trains in New Zealand, if you could get them together, would not water more than ten square miles that God waters with the rain ; and to do that you would need to cover the whole place with rails in order to get it distributed.

So it is a wonderful purifying thing, the rain, and it is wonderful the quantity of it that God brings down quietly to purify the earth.

Now, it does that, even when you don’t always remember it ; and that is the reason that we would like always to get the Word of God into your head and your heart, even if you do not remember it, because it helps to purify you.

There is a story of a chief who once told a boy to go to the spring and bring him a

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The Rain and My Word

basket full of water. The boy went away with the basket, and he dipped the basket into the spring, and what then ? The water all ran out of the basket, of course. The boy tried that two or three times, and he could not get any water in the basket, and he didn’t know what to do, because he thought that if he went back the chief would be angry, and perhaps cut off his head. So he came back trembling. “ Have you got that water?” the chief asked. “Oh, chief,” said the boy, “I could not get the water to stay in the basket.” “Never mind,” said the chief, “look how clean the basket is now.”

Well, God’s Word purifies, and it purifies even when we are not able to remember it all. That is the reason why we like you to come to Church to hear the Word of God. You don’t remember all that is said, but it gets into you, and it runs through you, and it purifies you. And that is the reason we like you to come to Church and to Sunday School as young as possible, because then the purifying begins early, and it is more easily carried out.

That is the second similarity, then, between the rain and the Word of God. Now, we get the third one. The rain is very soft, but it is a great smasher. There is nothing in the world that has such force to destroy as the rain. It eats away, it crushes down rocks and turns them into powder and dust.

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And God’s Word is the same. That is another likeness between it and the rain. God’s Word is a great dissolver, a great breaker-up, a great smasher of things. The hardest thing to break up is the heart of man. One of the prophets says that it is harder than stone ; and yet the Word of God is the one thing that can break it up. Nothing else has shown the power that the Word of God has to break up the hard and stony heart of man.

And then, there is this last thing—that the rain is not only destructive, but it is also constructive. Now, these are big words, but they have very simple meanings. They mean simply that when the rain washes out and dissolves rocks, it takes the particles away, and distributes them over the land. That is how the soil is made. That is how the Taieri Plains are made. They are made by the rain breaking up the rocks, and then washing them down the river, and spreading them over the plains. That is what I mean when I say that the rain is not only destructive but constructive.

And so it is the same with the Word of God. When the Word of God gets in and breaks up the stony heart of man, it turns him to other issues. It takes his cruelty, and turns it to kindness ; it takes bad temper, and turns it to good. It breaks up, destroys ; but then it restores, constructs. It gives new sources of joy and power and energy.

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Remember the four points of likeness between the rain and the Word of God ; and when the rain falls in your face when you go out, then say that it is like the Word of God : First of all, because they both come down from Heaven ; next, because they both purify ; next, because they are both great dissolvers ; next, because they are both great constructors, builders up.

And now, there is one last thing that sums up everything. The greatest Word that God ever spoke was Jesus Christ. And so, if you take in Jesus Christ, if you let Him lead you and guide you and satisfy you, then these four things will follow. All that I have been saying will come to you. Christ will be the destroyer, the restorer, the purifier, the making divine of your life. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.

That is the parable of the rain, and so, when the rain comes, let us look through it, and let us learn that God has taken that, and given us that, in order to remind us of Himself, and of His Word to us.

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A Child’s Morning Prayer

Oh, God, my Father, I thank Thee for the light of this new day. I have lain down and slept ; I have waked because Thou hast sustained me. I bless Thee for the gift of life and for so many things that make it a glad possession : for health and hope and home with all its love and joy : for this fair world and its wonders and loveliness which it is so constantly unfolding to us. Help me this day to help Thee in Thy work for myself and for others, and keep me from crossing Thy will and so making crosses for myself. Fill me with the Spirit of Christ, and enable me to manifest that spirit in everything I say and do. May I not forget how near Christ is to me. May I ever remember His promise “Lo I am with you all the days ” —not merely the bright days but the bleak days, not merely the sunny days but the sad days. And since His Presence is thus near and His help is seen, then I need fear no evil. And so Igo forth to this day, not knowing what may befall me, but committing myself to the guidance and the guardianship of Thee O Lord Christ, my Saviour and my King. Amen.

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Closing Prayer

Dr. Waddell’s Thirty-seventh Anniversary

April xbth, 1916.

Lord Jesus Christ, we thank Thee for Thy patience to us all. We often try it. We rarely put Thee to the proof as Thou dost desire. We take life into our own hands till it becomes unmanageable, till we have made confusion and chaos. And then we come to Thee, often, when we can do no better. May it be that those who are here who are youngwill let Thy will come to them before the locusts have eaten their years, before the days come when the grasshopper shall be a burden, when desire shall fail. May they give to Thee in their early life the passion of their heart and the utmost labour of their hands.

We desire to thank Thee for Thy goodness to us as a congregation and a minister through all these seven and thirty years. We have much to confess of failure and of sin. Forgive us these, and let the coming years, if they are not great in number, be great in quality, great in spirituality.

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We commend to Thee all those who may be in difficulties and troubles, all those who may be knowing what it is to have hopes defeated, to have disappointments that press upon the heart, that crush it and break it. Grant, gracious Father, that coming to Thee they may get the grace and the strength that shall enable them to transmute these into richer uses, that they may be able to “take of the spoils won in battle and dedicate them to maintain ” their life and its work and the life and work of the House of God.

Hear our prayers. Bless our service. And unto Thee be the glory, now and ever. Amen.

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ESSAYS

The Tides of Life

The magic of the sea fascinates us all ; its regularity, its beauty, its varietj'. Keats, in a memorable line, speaks of "the grey, unpastured sea, hungering for calm." The tidal motion of the sea is a curious phenomenon. On some shores it creeps up with the gentleness of a child, on others with the stamp and rush and roar of a hurricane. Strange it is to think, as one stands by the beach, of that mighty, incalculable force which is ever hastening inwards and outwards across vast leagues of space —

Perhaps in furtive swiftness and silence, perhaps with a confused, multitudinous noise, among which are inchoate cries and fragmentary, bewildering echoes of muffled songs and chants ; perhaps as in charging hordes of wild sea-horses, when the riders are not seen in the dazzle of spray, nor their shouting heard in the tumult of wave dashed against wave and billow hurled on billow.

The tidal motion of the sea is determined to some extent by the contour of the shores, but the real cause is the sun and the moon. They act according to the law of gravitation. The moon being nearer the earth, draws the waters towards it ; its attraction is double that of the sun. But twice in the month —

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at new and at full moon —sun and moon pull together, and then we know what are called spring tides. Twice also in the month they pull at right angles, and then we have the neap tides. But in addition to these regular tides there are other movements and upheavals of the sea. There are the great ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream, from 1,200 to 1,500 miles wide, to which Great Britain owes its origin and life. There are what are called tidal waves, which have really nothing to do with the tides, but which are caused usually bv some crack-up in the earth's surface, such as an earthquake, for instance. Ebb and flow, flow and ebb; up and down, back and forth. What is all this but an emblem of the Sea of Life ? It, too, has its tides. It is true of nations and of individuals. There are long, level, monotonous eras in the history of empires. Then the sleek, dull age is ripped asunder by some calamity, some call and carnage of war, some spiritual outburst like the Pentecost or the Reformation. These change the whole face of the world, and a nation's life wheels into an entirely new career. So, too, is it with individuals. In business, in work, in story, in art, in religion there come these luminous times —times in which the glow and energy take hold of us and lift us forward, and

The rr.ind leaps to the tidal crest, and then Sweeps on triumphant to the harbour sought.

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The Tides of Life

And then, after a while, the ebb succeeds the flow. The inspiration dies. We have to plod and drudge through drab, level, and unhghted stretches of thought and work. Everyone will remember the haunting, poignant, pathetic lines in which, in his magnificent poem on "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold describes this ebb in relation to faith:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd ;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

There is no denying that these ebbs and flows, these ups and downs, these hours of high inspiration, dying down into limp and flaccid life, dishearten and sometimes dismay people. What is one to do in these circumstances ? How is one to carry oneself successfully through these tides of life ?

First of all, it will be well to remember that they are facts. Everybody experiences these alternations of emotions and power. They come into every life, into some more frequently than into others, but no one escapes them. Wesley, in his "Journal," describes glowingly the date and day in which his new life as a Christian began. Yet within a year after these ecstatic experiences he

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writes: "I am not a Christian now." It is this sort of relapse that makes converts doubt the reality of the experiences, and the sceptical to scoff at it. Yet what would we have ? Where do we find mechanical regularity, steadfast monotony ? We find it as we go down in life. One of Dr. Martineau's finest sermons is entitled "The Tides of the Spirit." In it he shows how as we ascend the scale of being changeless uniformity grows less and less. In the body, for instance, the organs never remit their work. The beating heart, the heaving chest, the silent chemistries go forward in young and old, asleep or awake, without intermission. But when we turn to the mind it is different. The mind is not under the control of the will as the bodv is. The day labourer can say : " I will dig for so many hours, or build so many bricks in such and such a time." But the thinker cannot say "I will do so much writing," or the poet "I will compose so many poems." In these higher spheres the worker is dependent upon moods, gales, tides, inspirations, which he can neither make to order nor prolong at will. It is the same in the higher reaches of the spirit. Dr. Martineau even argues that it is true of the Creator himself. "God," you say, "is eternal and unchangeable. If bv this vou mean that there never was a time and nowhere a place empty of His agency, it is most true. But if vou mean

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that His agency is everywhere and always equal, that it cannot be encountered more or less, that it is the same in the life of an angel as the gravitation of a stone, that there is no nearer to Him and no further from Him, then you give expression, I believe, to the largest falsehood that can be framed.” It is good not to be dismayed or disheartened at these ebbs and flows of the life, as if some strange thing happened to us. They are neither uncommon nor irrational.

And now, how are we to bear ourselves in them ? Take first the ebb tides of life. Well, to begin with, it will be good to wait with what patience we can command. The cool, refreshing waters may seem far away — never returning. The fullness of yesterday may have gone like a rapid dream.

Grim rocks of doubt and dread and pain Rear their grim fronts where once was sea.

Never mind, the sea may come again. Meanwhile, wait. And next, hold hard to what the high tides gave you in the days gone by. Do not trust the glooms of your spirit rather than its glories. It is more likely to have been right in its lightsome hours than in its depressed ones. And so, do not let go its gains of happier times. On the coast of Britain there are towns —Cardiff, for example —whose shores are so long that there is a great rise and fall of the tides. When the tides are out

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there are miles of mud, over which no ship could sail. But the city builds docks and locks in the receding waters. And there within the docks one may see entire fleets of the largest vessels discharging cargo, whi e at the same time just outside the docks there are miles of sea bed, mud flats, and evilsmelling ooze. But after a while the tide returns, and floods all the foreshore, and the great dock gates are opened and the mightv ships sail out to meet the incoming ocean. That is what we have to do in the ebb-tides of life. Build docks round what has been given to us in flood-tide days, continue our work, and wait, being sure that

Courage is better than fear

And faith is truer than doubt ;

And tierce though the fiends may fight,

And long though the angels hide,

We know that Truth and Right

Have the universe on their side.

And when the tides come in we hardly need to be told what to do. We have only to ask the captain of the ship outside our Heads. It is enough even to studv the sand flats between the harbour and Anderson Bay. They look lifeless when the tide is out. But they are not. They are stuffed full of all sorts of hidden life —crabs, whelks, shellfish, worms, and what not. They watch and wait for the incoming waters. At the very sound of this

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The Tides of Life

A faint undulation thrills the still, small world. A shrimp darts from a sand mound ; a blood-red anemone thrusts out feathered antennae. Now one, now another shellfish stirs, lifts, gapes It is the response of the obscure, the insignificant, and the silent to that mighty, incalculable Force which is hastening from the fathomless depths and across countless leagues of the Great Sea.

And a similar watch and wait and utilisation of the tides of life should be exercised by men and women. If it were so it would be a very different world. For there is as much right sentiment allowed to die out of almost every life as would carry it forward to undreamt-of achievements. And these lost opportunities press upon most people with the weight and pathos of broken wings that can never be lifted again.

And yet something may still be done to turn in again these high tides upon our life. In the sea tides there are obstacles that minimise or neutralise the effect, such as shore conformations, rocks, contrary currents, etc. It is the same in the tidal movements of life. There are barriers there that diminish or defeat mental and spiritual impulse. There are tempers, companionships, modes of thought and passion and work that hinder the higher life. Then we must not forget that the dynamic which moves and uplifts it works according to certain definite laws. The newspapers tell us every day the details about the sea tides, their place, and season and reason.

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Moreover, this dynamic comes from the outside, from the sun and the moon. Very wonderful it is that the loose, formless, blind, insensate waves should awake at the touch of that pale hand beckoning from the midnight skies and follow it round the world. And so man does not create the forces that move and mould him. The earth quivers every instant with a power that has voyaged from the moon and sun and the heavenly hosts of stars and planets. We are all the subjects of what Matthew Arnold called a “power not ourselves.” To learn the laws of this power and steer ourselves into the lines along which it moves is the secret of Life. Whoso can do this will find himself lifted as really and as regularly as the moon lifts the waters and draws them after it round the world. What these laws and lines are is still a matter of dispute. We have not yet been able to map them out quite so accurately as those of the sea tides. But we are making headwaj 7 . Some find this “Power not ourselves ” in one direction, and some in another. This one discovers it in the beauty of Nature, or in the World of Art. Others find it in the sphere of Literature or in Science. Most of all in Religion. Thus, e.g., that great artist, James Smetham —great alike in both colour and word —-whose paintings Ruskin says are to be “classed with the very flower of modern art,” has this record in Iris diary

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Went to chapel to-night filled with plenty of dark and vexing suggestions—all sore as to feelings. I came away calm, sweet, fresh, all my cares gone, rejoicing in the God of my salvation.

But, however or wherever the tides may come, the great thing is to make sure that we utilise them. The lapse of years only makes more pointed and poignant Shakespeare's words :

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

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We shall all be talking Doctors this coming week. We look at them with pleasure and feel confidence when they are about, but it was not always so. The present writer remembers that when he was a small boy he used to get "school " headaches, or tummv aches, as the case might be ; but a threat to take him to the Doctor made a speedy end of all such troubles. In those days the lancet was the doctor's great standby. No matter what was wrong he would usually say "We'll take a drop of blood from you." The arm was bared, the bandage applied, and the shining blade was shoved into the vein, and out spurted the red fluid. That scared the unsophisticated country 1 boy of half a century ago. He was ready to exclaim with Volumnia, "O Jupiter ! No blood ! " and get away into some safe distance lest the Doctor might have his. In those days, too, the Doctor only appeared when all other resources were exploited. Hence his arrival

•The decision was the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Branch British Medical Association, held in Dunedin, February, 1920.

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indicated a desperate state. “Is Pat dead yet ? ” one man was heard calling to another. “No, but I don’t think it’ll be long now. I saw the Doctor going there last night.” Today we have changed all that. We summon the Doctor on the lightest of pretexts. We go to visit him almost as blithely as we go to a picnic—if we can spare his fee ; but even if we cannot we rely on his generosity and go all the same. We suppose that the general state of health has improved in spite of the new ailments that we dignify by polysyllabic names that are constantly being discovered. We feel that in a way there is no living without the Doctor, or even with him. Yet it is astonishing how our forefathers managed to do the former. A visitor to Jedburgh many years ago asked a native where he would find a chemist’s shop. The native looked puzzled. “What’s that ? ” he said. “A place where they sell medicines.” “Oh,” replied the native, “we have nane o’ them here. We have juist tar for the sheep and whisky for the men, and that’s a’ the medicines we need.” And they managed wonderfully, those hardy forbears of ours, on these simple remedies. A person interested in dietetics, passing through a certain village, saw an old man sitting on the doorstep ravenously devouring a chunk of bread. Anxious to improve the occasion, he said, “Look here, my good man, you shouldn’t eat so rapidly at your time

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of life ! Think of your digestion." "My di-gestion be arlright ; oi be on'y savintyfoive." "Then you don't consider that old ? What age was your father when he died ? " "Fevther? Feyther beant dede. 'E be oopstairs puttin' gran'feyther to bed ! " Even yet, in spite of the multiplicity of doctors, such experience is no ancient history only, for we saw in "Punch," we think it was, one old countryman of 85 saluting another of some 90 summers thus : "How are you to-day, John?" "Well, I thank you." How are you ? " "Got a touch of toothache." "Oh, swank ! " replied the other. But enough of this. Let us pass to another point.

We have all come to believe that the Doctor is a necessary evil. He makes his living while all the time he is trying to destrov that which creates it. He is in daily conflict with disease. He wages a constant fight against death. The latter has the advantage of seniority, and in the end is always successful. The Doctor is really the uncrowned king of the country. His power is absolute ; his presence a charm -as Rudvard Kipling put it :

On presentation of their visiting cards they could pass through the most riotous, the most turbulent crowds unmolested. If they flew a yellow flag over a centre of population they could turn it into a desert ; if they flew a Red Cross flag over the desert they could turn it into a centre of population towards which men

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would crawl on their hands and knees. If it were necessary to the success of any operation they could stop a 20,000-ton liner in mid-ocean till the operation was completed. They could order houses to be burnt up or pulled down, and they could call on the nearest troops to see that their prescriptions were efficiently carried out.

But their power is used not for their own gain—that comes by the way, sometimes does not come at all —but for the public good. There is no class of people in the community so constantly on the job. Others have definite hours for work. The Doctor has none. His bell or 'phone goes night as well as day — Sunday as well as Saturday. It is a winter night. He has been hard at it all day. He feels weary and goes to bed. He is just getting off into a comfortable sleep when whirr goes the 'phone. It is a mighty temptation to be deaf or unresponsive. But he resists. Maybe he has the cuteness of one we know who was called up in such circumstances. The patient was far away over the hills. It was a child. He knew that the anxious mother was rather given to futile imaginings. She 'phoned that she was afraid that her child was developing croup. A happy thought struck the Doctor. "Bring the child and get it to cough into the 'phone." It was done. "No, it's not a croupy cough ;go to bed. I will be up in the morning."

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But the situation cannot always be saved like that. He has to obey the summons or fall out with his conscience. And a sore conscience is an evil companion. And then his work takes him constantly into sordid surroundings, keeps him daily in contact with sadness and sorrow, disease, despair, and death. Yet he does not flinch. We are accustomed to the wild pranks of the "meds," as they are called. There is a riotous strain in their student constitution, partly natural, partly put on for effect. They love the limelight in devilry. 1 hey are the leaders in all the wild frolics and lawless irreverence that astonish the staid citizens. Yet these same fellows by and by will come to feel their responsibility, and will meet grave crises with a spirit equal to the occasion. They will be faithful in duty, sympathetic in need, selfsacrificing when the call for help arrives. They may even, many of them, be transformed into "The Chief," to whom Henley's sonnet, written out of his own experience in the hall of suffering —the hospital—pays a fine tribute :

His brow is large and placid, and his eye

ls bright and deep, with steady looks that still.

Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfil-

His face at once benign and proud and shy.

If envy scout, if ignorance deny

His faultless patience, his unyielding will.

Beautiful gentleness and splendid skill.

Innumerable gratitudes reply.

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His wise rare smile is sweet with certainties,

And seems in all his patients to compel

Such love and faith as failure cannot quell—

We hold him for another Heracles,

Battling with custom, prejudice, disease,

As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.

Yes, but it must not be forgotten that there is a war in which, for the Doctor, there is never any discharge. They are always in the hottest part of the battle. And their constant exposure subjects them to more perils than any other class in the community. So it comes about that their death rate is high—is, indeed, we believe, almost the highest of all. Sometimes people complain of their big fees. But let it be counted to them for righteousness that there is no other profession that faces such perils and temptations and that gives so much charitable help. There is a story of a parson who could not get his Doctor to send in his bill. After several fruitless efforts the Doctor at last said : "Look here, I will undertake to keep you as long as I can out of Heaven for nothing if you will try to keep me out of Hades on the same terms." Well, the Doctors keep many out of one or the other of these places, and get no pecuniary reward. And even if they do they bring in blessings that no money could otherwise purchase. "How many of us owe all that makes life worth living to the Doctors —the courage which comes of health, the com-

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panionship which gives value to every day, the lengthened sojourn of the old, to whom love, memory, and custom bind us by a threefold cord, or the frail life of a delicate child, who embodies every hope and ambition that we possess ? " They see the worst of us, though perhaps rarely the best. They know the seamy side of life as nobody else does, and watch silently and sympathetically the tragedy of Nature squaring her account with our evil and our sins. But they keep our secrets sacred, and we feel safe in our trust of them. And yet, in spite of all, they remain, as a distinguished member of the fraternity, Sir J. Crichton Brown, says, "the most cheerful and the most contented of any class of men in the community." Why they are this is a curious psychological question ; but we cannot discuss it just now. We pass to another.

A considerable change has come over the medical profession during the last generation. Previous to that the profession was inclined to be materialistic. The members of it suffered from the defect of the specialist. They concentrated mainly upon the body. But thev have come to realise that the di ignosis of a corpse is not the diagnosis of a living being. It may be a useful preparation for it, but it is only a preliminary. It was found when they hunted for causes of disc back into the living man or woman that thev did not find them in the material structure.

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They found that their origin lay deeper—that it was for the most part in the mind or emotion. The moralist says that sin does not begin in the body ; it ends there. And so with diseases. The greater number to which flesh is heir take their rise in the psychical sphere, and must be dealt with there. The modern Doctor who knows his business is not so cocksure as his predecessor of a generation ago. He realises that the medicines which were in vogue then are foolish now or worse, and that to order them for certain specific diseases is as futile as to prescribe a porridge plaster as a cure for love. He is aware that he has to deal with mysteries that evade his scalpel or his materia medica, and that his main business is to reinforce the latent healing power that is resident in his patient. So it comes about that the spiritual in man has to be taken into account even more than the material, and that if he can arouse courage, hope, will-power, faith, more than half the battle is won. But such things as these do not depend on any medicines in the pharmacopoeia. They depend mainly on the character of the Doctor himself. Hence it follows that the most successful practitioner ought to be the man in whom the spiritual is dominant. Law pervades everything, from atoms to suns, from bodies to souls. But law implies a Lawgiver. Hence it would seem to follow that the Doctor who

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most deeply cultivates communion with the Lawgiver should, other things being equal, be the most accomplished Doctor. This was perceived centuries ago by the father of medicine, Hippocrates. The oath which the student took when he entered the Hippocratic school began ; “With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my art.” It is interesting to recall in this connection that the words holy and healthy are one and the same, indicating that they are at bottom a unity, and that if we could manage to secure the one we should get the other also. In a letter to an Edinburgh gentleman who had sent him a book entitled “The Healing Art the Right Hand of the Church,” Thomas Carlyle wrote : “The physician must first of all be a priest—that is to say, a man of pious nobleness, devoted to the service of the Highest, and prepared to endure and endeavour for that same, taking no counsel of flesh and blood, as the theory of priests is—first of all, a real priest, and then that he should . . . follow said counsel as the actual will of God, which it would be were the physician what I say.” But not to pursue this line further, we may remind ourselves of what historically Christianity owes to a Doctor. Of the 27 documents which comprise its record, all except two were written by men of the Jewish race. But these two are notable. The one gives us the most

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human picture that we have of the Founder of Christianity ; the other of its spread from Jerusalem to its establishment in Rome, then the centre of the world. And both these were written by a Doctor. The oldest and the newest criticisms agree in attributing these writings to Luke, the beloved physician. We may let one of the most distinguished members of the profession, the late Professor Sir Alexander Simpson, speak our last words for us in this connection:—

Scholars have recognised that hisS(Luke's) writings show him to have been a student of the Hippocratic school, which produced the books that represent the highest development of the medical science of their time. The writings of his Greek teachers—he was himself a Greek—are only of antiquarian interest to-day. They are of the knowledge that passeth away. Many a system of medicine has been written since then, and has followed the Hippocratic writings to the dusty shelf of comparative oblivion. But the Lukan treatises are instinct with life. They are imperishably vivid and vivifying. . . kenan, with all his disposition to find blunders in histories is fascinated with the beauties of his style. He says of Luke's evangel that it combines the emotion of the drama with the serenity of an idyll, and with much other praise declares expressly " It is the most beautiful book in the world. No physician has done justice to his own culture who has not studied a treatise of which this famous French critic could speak as the most beautiful piece of literature in existence, and which comes from the pen of a member of the profession which it ennobles.

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LETTERS

Letters

A Friendly Epistle.

Dunedin, 1903

My dear Collie,

I have let your letter lie by me a long time without reply. I was always waiting for a "more convenient," with the usual result. I was very glad to hear from you. Letters now are scantier than they used to be when I was editor, but what they lack in quantity they make up in quality. There are not so many deadheads mixed up in the postman's bundle.

Well I have got through another winter and am rejoicing in the prospect of spring with the summer soon. The latter is seriously discounted by the dust and wind, but it brings heat and light. The winter has been rather trying —cold and somewhat dreary, but I think I have battled through it with less fatigue than last winter. In fact, lam sure I have. I have had less help from the students this year, and less need of it, I am thankful to say. The last month or so, however, I have been a bit off colour again, but

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I think the bad turns are not so bad, and perhaps come less frequently than before. Still, I am not boasting of it. When a man can only preach old sermons and do other odds and ends, boasting is excluded by the law of works. I have been doing practically no writing, save an article now and again for the paper. I still like to keep my hand in. .Muriel* and I were down for a week at Invercargill staying with the Macdonalds. I went down in reality to lecture in aid of Macdonald'sf Bible Class. My hrst appearance on a lecture platform since mv illness. I got through better than I expected. I took the service on Sunday. I fancy some folks might be imagining that I was after the vacancy. I did not think of that till after I had consented to go.

I say, what a time you had with that lively nag of yours. You were afraid of the "Tapanui Courier" correspondent getting a sight of you. Some day will arrive when vou will not be the least frightened, for she will have kicked, not merelv the trap, but yourself, to pieces. I am expecting that will be the end, or the ends, of me some day—cut to pieces by some tram or train. I, however, will have a tolerablv decent excuse for entering thus into the other world, but you will have none save vour own hardihood, and that

* "Muriel." his daughter, now Mrs G. Anderson of Western Australia.

t The late T. M. Macdonald, Crown Solicitor at Invercargill

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won’t count —or rather it will count against you. Ido wish you would pass on that old gay mare of yours to somebody else whose life is of less consequence.

You kindly ask about Mrs. Waddell. She thought she might weather out the winter here but had to cave in at last. The trouble is she waited too long and got badly run down. She went to Sydney last month, and has had rather a bad time since she went —ulcers on the pupils of her eyes. Dr. Ferguson says they were not connected with her throat but with a low state of health. She was, however, getting better when last we heard.

I hope your mother is keeping well and has got through the winter and feels the new life of the spring rising about her and in her. Give her mv kindest remembrances.

Now I must close up. With kindest regards,

Faithfully yours,

Rutherford Waddell.

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Anent “The Outlook”

Warrington,

22nd July, 1906.

You would see that is out for our scalps. He is useful to make things hum when they tend to become humdrum. is making a good second. He is on the track of the Editor also. He clings like a leech, though without the leech’s usefulness in sucking away bad blood. He makes it instead. I fancy good will come out of it. It will bring matters to a crisis. It is impossible the “Outlook ” can go on under the present conditions. There are only two courses open as far as I can see :

(1) That the Assembly recognise the reality of the “Outlook ” and rise to the occasion and appoint an editor at a proper salary who can give his whole time to the work.

(2) That the Assembly disassociate itself from the “Outlook” altogether as an official organ and take steps to form a syndicate to run the paper on broad Christian lines—like the “Southern Cross,” for instance.

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The latter has always been my ideal for it. If neither of these courses is adopted the thing will dawdle on for a while and then peter out. How would you like the position of Editor ? It is a delightful easy chair if you take it that way, and at any rate the convenership will be open. lam going to resign.

Concerning Literature.

Extracts from Letters to a Cousin in Melbourne

December, 1922.

I share your regret at Alice Meynell’s death. She did not write much, but it is all precious—pure gold. A wonderful style, a subtle and deft and delicate fancy and imagination. “The Colour of Life ” —prose essays—take you captive by their charm and chasteness of style, and by their suggestiveness. But the poems are my prime favourites.

I read the “Forsyte Saga ” on shipboard coming up to London. It is, as you say, a stupendous work ; but in the crowded canvas there is not a single likeable soul. They are all of the earth earthy. I wondered if it was worth while spending such transcendent genius in carving tumours.

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And again in 1925 —In Reply to Comments on

Hardy and Meredith

Actual life is too sad and tragic to have it over again in deeper and darker colours in the pages of fiction. . . . Even if the whole thing is a delusion we may as well have our delusions pleasant as not. It costs nothing to have them magnificent, and there is always more than the odds that the bright and not the dark is the truer.

Meredith is like Scott in that it takes him too long to develop his drama. He spends too much time in arranging his stage. . . . But undoubtedly he is great in many ways. “ Evan Harrington ” is a wonderful yarn. I loved “Diana of the Crossways.” What a fund of epigram is in it. One of the epigrams which I recall will appeal to you after the experience you have been having recently—- “ She was running a race with a shadow. She did not know what it was ; it ran in a shroud.”

“I have so often felt I would love to be able to talk with children or just even hear them talk. There is something so winsome and straightforward—unspoilt heavenliness — about them that it keeps us pure and smooths out the crookedness, for the time being anyway.”

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In Retirement at "Dreamthorpe

Letters

A New Year Greeting.

January 3rd, 1930.

Dear Friends,

Somebody defined a friend as one who knows the worst about you and remains your friend still. Well I do not think you know the worst about me, but you know quite enough bad about me and you are tolerant and do not cast me off. For every irregularity of correspondence is a serious strain on your friendship and I have been taxing it again, not having sent you even a line to wish you the compliments of the season. I did intend doing this, but we have been very busy with one thing and another, and though. I had your names on my list they somehow escaped my notice until now. I remembered them when action was impossible, and when it was possible my memory betrayed me, but I must as usual throw myself on your unwearying forgiveness and we will wipe the slate and start again. Behold how generous lam ! ! !

Let me begin with my good wishes .for the New Year. It is too late for Christmas ones, but there are 362 days of the New Year to come yet. May they come to you both with full hands and everything new and old that

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is good for you, or as St. John prays—“ Beloved I wish above all things that you may prosper and be in health even as your souls prosper.” That might not be a kind prayer for some, for if their prosperity was to be measured by their souls’ size and progress they might not be able to see it. For many are like the man of whom Wendell Holmes tells. He says if an archangel offered to sell his soul for 6d. he would look for one with a hole in it ; but the prayer is safe enough and appropriate enough for you and ought to bring you, if it be fulfilled, great prosperity and health since your chief cultivation is that of your souls, at least when you can forget and forgive the vagaries of the weather man up there who allows us occasionally to rejoice, but always to rejoice with trembling. This summer disputes the cake with last summer for undesirable weather. I think the seasons are changing here. We get our summers now in winter, and vice versa. I am afraid you are keeping the sun all to yourselves up at Honolulu and then blaming us for not taking our robbery with pleasant faces —but enough about the weather. What a god-send it is to make a jumping-off place for shy and reticent people.

Well, it is good to hear you were so near again, bobbing up serenely and unexpectedly like the water rat or water hen ; but, you will observe, I do not compare you with either

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the water rat or water hen —I would’na preshume ” —only to their appearing and disappearing habits.

This must not stretch out into a full dreary letter for we anticipate seeing you shortly. Indeed I am half afraid you may have left Wellington ere it reaches you, but I am taking the chance.

Thank you very much for your kind words re my latest book. I appreciate more than I can say your favourable judgment for I know the capability of the judge. I return the enclosed for which many thanks. It is a good yarn, and he deserved the success he achieved for his venture of faith and labour of love. It is a fine commentary on the sa}dng of Buchan, I think, that when you dig another out of a hole you bury your own troubles there. Well I must stop for it is mail time and I want to get this off at once to catch you if I am fortunate. We both send you our love and rejoice in the prospect of seeing you again, and if you can get the right side of the man who makes the weather for us up there tell him not to pursue you with Wellington samples.

Yours ever,

Rutherford Waddell.

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Jubilee Reflections.

From a Letter acknowledging Congratulations on His Fiftieth Anniversary as a Preacher

. . . I wish I could contemplate my record as you are good enough to describe it. I am only just realising now what I might have been and done, when it is no longer possible. It is surely a proof of the continuity of life —this consciousness of powers unused or misused, with visions of their new possibilities. I suppose it must ever be true that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”

Anyway, in spite of all my failures, God gave me the enriching blessings of good friends —friends who were always kind and generous to me often beyond words. Walter Pater says in his “Appreciations” that criticism generously expands the “saying of an author to the full measure of his intentions,” so they gave me credit for what I wished to do, however I failed in action.

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Children’s Prayers and Autumnal Glories.

Temuka, 1910.

My dear ,

will be thinking that I have forgotten my promise to him but I have not, as the enclosure shows. I have delayed longer than I should have. I remembered my promise sometimes when I could not perform it —in bed, for instance, and when I could, I put off till a more convenient season. It seems a very simple matter, yet in reality I find it difficult to write these prayers. It is much easier writing one for grown-ups than for children. I am not by any means satisfied with them. You are really more competent to do the business for you know their wants and ways and could find the words easily enough, and so if you want to try your own hand just patch up these ones the best way you can. I have tried sometimes to write a prayer myself for church, but always gave it up as impossible. Once I did compose two at the solicitation of Professor Rentoul of Melbourne who, in obedience to the General Assembly instructions, had undertaken to prepare a book of “Devotions or Home Prayers for Australians ” ; but the result was no less unsatisfactory. However, such as it is vou have. I have written two, one for the

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morning and one for the evening, as it is not quite possible to make one cover both needs, and I suppose they will want to pray both times, unless they be like the boy of whom I know, who said his prayer at night but not in the morning, for, he said, if a boy is worth anything he can take care of himself in the daylight !

I came here last Thursday week and intend returning on Tuesday. I have had a quiet time —too quiet for the kind of eating I have done, and so I have not felt that I have got the most out of the holiday. It is supposed that I am fishing but I have been out only once in all these ten days. The fishing is not as much as you suppose. The weather also has not been uniformly good. Like life, there has been almost a preponderance of grey days, but now and again one that is perfect in its warmth and beauty. The colour has not begun to come into the foliage yet, at least only slightly, but the leaves are falling and the brooks are growing thick with the dead foliage. Summer is over, and autumn is waving its golden flag above the bier. I should like to see the place say three weeks hence. The willows, beeches, poplars, will then be aflame, and set as they are in the background of sombre pinus the sight is one never to be forgotten. The only place I saw it to be surpassed was once in the Rocky Mountains, Glacier House Station, on the

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line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. I never expect to look on a grander or lovelier spectacle until nty eyes open on the Great White Throne with its unimaginable splendour. There is such a lovely little cemetery here, beautifully kept —the walks carpeted with grass and moss, and soft as velvet —and the fence around it is not the repellent übiquitous barbed wire, but a thick close-cropped one of macrocarpa. Pinus and poplars soar up in stately grandeur pointing like angels to the skies, and the lovely willows brood around the yew and cypress. I often go to wander or muse in this place. It makes me almost in love with death.

Impressions of New South Wales

Sydney Sanatorium, N.S.W.,

3rd April, igix.

My dear Collie,

I got your letter just as I was in the midst of my preparations for leaving. I have been intending to write you ever since but have been postponing, as usual. I had in this instance some sense if not reason. The day after I landed here, hay fever took me in charge. It has elected to go down on my

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chest and lungs now, so it locked itself there, and not all the threats and blandishments even of this establishment, in the shape of baths, massage, etc., availed to shift it. It stuck there, keeping me coughing night and day for nearly a fortnight. Then it was pleased to go, but it has left me very limp. I am just now beginning to get on my feet again. I was a bit washed out before I left as I had to arrange all my winter bulletin before I got away —and other things —then the sea and the vile-smelling steamer. The “Warrimoo ” (you may note in your diary) is a splendid boat to avoid. It is quite time it was scrapped as far as the Australian trip is concerned.

I am feeling much better now, however, and quite enjoying the change. Sydney and its suburbs are looking amazingly beautiful. This has been a very wet season —not the like for 50 years —and so everything is looking very fresh and green, like what one would imagine would be a slice out of the Garden of Eden. Even to the snake. The other day in a nearby suburb a little girl came in and complained to her mother that something had bitten her in the garden —a round, curlv thing that ran away, so she described it. Her mother supposed it might be a bee, but next day the poor wee mortal (she was only six) was dead, so I have been on the lookout for these horrid things ever since, but I have

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not come across any of them. However, it adds a new terror to the bush to think you may trample on one of these venomous things anywhere, and in good sooth any additional terror is needless. There is abundance of annoyances without snakes. You could not get a square yard of ground anywhere to sit down upon without being overrun with vile creatures —leaping, crawling, creeping, and stinging. The flies take charge of you by day ; and the mosquitoes, or the “pestilence that walketh by darkness ” (only “walketh ’’ is not the correct word to describe their motions) at night—and so you are prevented from settling down into the belief that this is your rest “Here still I’ll stay” ; but yet in spite of all there is no getting away from the fact that Sydney is amazingly attractive. Everyone knows, of course, about its harbour, but out here the country is lovely. Rolling downs covered with gum trees uncoil themselves as far as the eye can see. One might imagine oneself away in the primeval bush were it not for a red-tiled roof peeping out here and there, and the hiss and smell of motor cars flashing along the dusty roads. There is endless variety and style of architecture. The houses are large and most of them picturesque. All are surrounded by gardens that even at this late season are ablaze with blooms. The roses and honeysuckle have caught the democratic spirit of

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their country and struggle out over the garden fences, saluting the wayfarer with wafts of perfume and visions of beauty. I have been astonished to find these miles and miles of wood so close to Sydney, but they tell me the timber is no good, hardly even to burn, so it is let alone —which is a good thing, for it gives a sylvan loveliness to the landscape, and its perpetual green, sombre a bit though it be, is a pleasure to the eye.

The religious problems here are big. Browning says "I find it hard to be a Christian," but it is hardest of all in a climate such as this with the temperature up to 80 or 90 degrees and temptations of every kind to seduce flesh and spirit. One wonders indeed that churches manage to flourish at all, but apparently they do. They have just got Jamieson over here in control of their Bible Classes. I was at a reception dinner to him the other day. Curious, the president, and soul of the movement as well as the chairman, was a St. Andrewite —one James Mollison — a fine fellow whom we lost six and twenty years ago ; and Jamieson used to take in his theology in St. Andrew's, too, for a while anyway, so I felt fairly at home in this company. Thev are giving him a very hearty reception and expecting great things.

I have not been doing much reading since I came. I have been, as usual, sampling the second-hand book shops, of which there are

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many. Books are surprisingly cheap here. Angus and Robertson have a cheap sale on just now—any quantity— 30,000 novels formerly 3s. 6d. now is. I got a couple of J. B.’s* books at is. each and some others also.

To a Cousin in Melbourne.

Temuka, 1922.

This has been one of my favourite holiday haunts for years—partly for beauty, partly for fishing—though the latter is, like shooting, becoming too fatiguing for me now. But I still like to come to see if the water runs the same way, and live over again the memories of earlier days ; for "our finest hope is finest memory." But the beauty of the place would charm you if you saw it in spring or autumn. I used to like it best in autumn —used to like autumn best of all the seasons ; but now I want spring. Do we love what we haven't or what we have ? . . .

Well, I don't prefer autumn now, because it is so akin to myself. When we are young we can afford dramatically to affect melancholy and pose, as un homme blase. But when we grow older we have had enough of faded

* John Brierley's atone time popular religious essays

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Rutherford Waddell

summers and withered leaves in real life. So we turn to spring with its promise of hope, of new life, of beauty emerging out of the heart of death. But autumn has its beauty, too. Death can be almost lovelier than life sometimes. I think we get more brilliant colourings in our foliage here than you get in Australia. I remember once being in Sydney in autumn, and I was struck with the absence of crimson in the withered leave-. Autumn does not there march to its grave with the gay banners which it holds aloft in its funeral procession through this countrv.

. But I love autumn, too, in spite of its whisper of death and its ruthlessness in destroying the midsummer pomps. It takes all sorts to make a world ; and the contrasts give a piquancy that uniformity would destroy.

To an Old Dunedin Friend,

Written while on Holiday at Frankton

Lake Wakatipu

Frankton,

November Bth, 1929

Dear

It was characteristically kind and thoughtlid of you to send me a letter. Ido not know whether the surprise or the joy of getting it was the greater, but I think both were great.

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Letters

When one is away from home a letter from old friends, or even new ones, is always welcome. It seems to give one a kind of feeling that one is still bound by ties to the old accustomed place instead of being at a loose end drifting rootless before every strange wandering wind. Well we got here duly. We came up by the Central. We did not hurry. The Central train is a good institution to teach patience. It dawdles along, stopping here and there to gossip by the wayside, and sometimes for no apparent reason, except just to take its breath, or let passengers look out over the landscape ; but the latter would be quite willing to omit that luxury if only they could reach their destination more quickly. We were only an hour and a half, or thereabouts, behind time, but somebody said that patience, perseverance, and sweet oil will get a snail to Jerusalem ! It got us ultimately to Cromwell, from whence we made good time by a bus —certainly quicker, and in some ways more comfortable than the train. Cromwell has grown" much since last I saw it some 40 years ago or more. Its growth is marked more than the Central, which does not seem to me to have changed much as far as the country is concerned. Settlement is visible mainly in the little townships, e.g., Ranfurly or Alexandra ; but otherwise the development about which I had heard so much was not very apparent.

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We have been enjoying our stay here. It is an ideal place for a holiday. It is far from the madding crowd —no trains, trams —an occasional motor car some distance off. No telephones, or telegrams, or radio. Mails and newspapers only thrice a week, and one feels miles away from anywhere. The weather, on which so much depends, has been excellent—high, clear, blue skies dream the sunny hours away. On three sides rise the mountains, snow-capped. The Remarkables have well justified their name. I have never been so close to them before. They really are impressive. One afternoon and night we had fairly heavy rain and in the morning all the hills around had donned mantles of snow which, unlike the ladies’ dresses nowadays, reached right down below the knees, right down to the very foothills and plain. It was a wonderful sight, made all the more so by the mists that crept round about and caressed them in loving adoration. Then the sun came up and by noon the vision had vanished. Only in the gullies and amid the crevasses of the rocks can be seen traces of the snow trying to hide there from the javelins of the sun —a wonderful lesson of the power of warm, gentle forces to overcome the resistance of snow and ice. The strange thing was, though the snow hills were a little bit away, the air was not cold —it felt as if it had been washed —as indeed it was, for it came thrice sifted over

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acres of snow fields, yet as I say it did not feel cold—just a little nip, like a delicate sarcasm on the face of beauty which redeems it from being insipidly lovely ; and then the lake sending down a long blue arm as if reaching out to shake hands with you and bid you welcome, and then retiring into the deeps of the Kawarau. The sight of that wakes many emotions in many a breast. . . .

I am not that now which I have been, and the fishing and riding left me stiff and sore and generally on my beam ends for a few days after, so I conclude that age tells and wags its warning finger at me. I do not quarrel with it. Providence has been kind to me beyond most, and has even kept the good wine to the last, but, like you, I wonder sometimes why I am left to potter about, not with a spade, but with a pen and pencil, when so many others young and promising are counted out. Truly life is a mystery which does not lessen with the years. I smile sometimes when I think of the Life Insurances (the A.M.P. and others) that turned down my application 60 years ago. As one and another drop out from my side I wonder when "the post " will come for me—wonder around what corner Death waits in ambush. Well, Hamlet's philosophy is good, "If it be not now, it is to come. If it is to come it will not be now. If it be not now yet it will come." The readiness is all, and at that we may leave it.

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Home.

This Extract, Written after his Return from an Extended Trip, shows the place New Zealand and his own Home Town had in His Heart

March 26, 1928

Well, here we are again ! And if anybody is gladder to see this dear little land than I am I would love to shake hands. We can’t get into our own house till this day week, however. A celebrated American preacher— Bishop Phillips Brooks—has a sermon in one of his books, “The Withheld Completions of Life,” founded on the text “Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now ? ” Well, lam just awaiting the completion of my hopes and joys here, but anticipating eagerly their fulfilment next week (d.v.) in “Dreamthorpe.” My “withheld completion ” can be endured more pleasantly in this place than in many others I have experienced. I don’t want to see any more cities till I go to the New Jerusalem — if ever I get there —unless it be Dunedin which seems to be, at the moment, the vestibule of the celestial one.

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“Or ever the golden bowl be broken

To A FORMER PARISHIONER ON THE DEATH

of His Father

Broad Bay,

April 2nd, 1922.

My dear

So the end has come, and your father "has been gathered to his fathers." I feel I would like to send you a line expressive of my sympathy with you, and yet what can one say ? Death is death, and when it comes not all our poor words can make it other than a sad and terrible wrench, and yet there are many things that in your case must take off the edge of sorrow. Your father had fulfilled his course with joy. He came to his end like the shock of corn in its season. His autumn tide was calm, serene, beautiful. He had that "which should accompany old age, honour, obedience, and troops of friends." His work was done and God graciously took him before he felt the cold and dark and dreariness of winter, not merely the winter of nature but the winter of life. He was saved the long lingering dying out of this lamp of life, a weariness to oneself as well as to those who wait and watch. For him it is well. He has been released from what St. Paul calls "this

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body of humiliation,” and has passed in to that still far country where every heart lays down its load, and the inhabitant no more says I am sick.”

I had a great admiration for your father. He was always so cheery, so straight, so buoyant, so steadfast to duty. He has left you all a fine heritage. You can say with Cowper about both your parents —

"My boast is not that I derive my birth

From loins enthroned, or rulers of the earth ;

But higher far my proud pretensions rise

The child of parents passed into the skies

That is surely the memory that enriches and the hope that sustains. lam often led now to contemplate the ending of my own life, and think of what lies beyond the bourne of death. I look at nature in these autumn days, and see the leaves fall from the trees. I know that for the trees there is another spring, but for the individual leaves there is not, and one is sometimes faced with a doubt about the individual future. Nature seems to preach corporate immortality. The leaves of the summer die and are woven up into the future tree and the forces of nature, and one is led to think sometimes that it might be so with the individual life, that its only future is in the universal existence. "The choir invisible of their immortal dead —who live again in minds made better by their presence."

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But that does not satisfy the heart that has truly known life. It craves its conscious continuity, and after all, though part of us belongs to the lower nature, the better part does not. It is not our master, we are it's. And we get back finally to the trustworthiness of Him Who promised us a Home beyond this earthly one. Where, we do not know —but it is enough that we are to be with Him, not merely in place but character. He pledges his truth to that —"If it were not so I would have told you." When we came in here we found everything prepared for us in this earthly side, and we may be sure that we shall find a like prepared state beyond this second birth of death. Christ knew all about the beyond, but he has told us little save that it will be home. For those like you who have had happy homes here it is enough to think that what made them this will be conserved and amplified in the one beyond, and what made them sad and sorrowful will be gone for ever. And so, you can contemplate a reunion beyond,

Where in all the bright for ever Sorrow ne’er shall dim the soul

I must not take up more of your time. You will have much leeway to make up. As I think of everything of your father's long, beautiful life —its mellow autumn tide, its joys of having you all close to him, and his great passing in the faith of Christ —the lines

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with which Milton closes his great drama of Samson Agonistes seem most appropriate :

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame ; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

With warmest sympathy to Mrs. and yourself,

Faithfullv vours,

Rutherford Waddell.

Life Here and Hereafter.

Written from U.S.A. in December, 1927, after His Illness which the Specialists had Diagnosed as Signs of Heart Weakness

Talk of miracles ! Think of this brave old thing going night and day for over three score years and ten, never pausing a minute on its job in all that long time. If that is not a miracle it is difficult to know what is. Well, that is the main reason why I am anxious now to get home. Anything may happen any time, and one likes to "die in his nest " if he can. It is disappointing, vet I have no complaints to make. On the contrary lam full of gratitude. Miss Martineau

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said, towards her end, that she had had a noble share of life and was frankly satisfied to have done with it. I, too, have had a noble share of life, but just because of that I don't want to have done with it ; and I can't bring myself to think that one has done with it when it ends here. The longer I live the surer I grow in the faith of life's continuity, though in what form it will continue I have no idea. I leave it all to Him Who said "Igo to prepare a place for you." When He has it ready for me and me for it, then I feel, as that bright optimistic singer, J. Whitcombe Riley, says :

What delightful hosts are they

Life and Love.

Lingering I turn away

This late hour, yet glad enough

They have not withheld from me

Their high hospitality.

So, with face lit with delight,

And all gratitude, I stay

Yet to press their hands and say,

"Thanks! So line a time ! Good-night ! "

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Rutherford Waddell

Light in the Shadowed Way.

To His (or sin in .Melbourne after News

of Her Illness

November, 1930.

Dr. Dale once, in his early ministry, went to visit someone on whom a great sorrow had fallen. So great was the grief that he found himself unable to speak. Words seemed so shallow. He remained silent for a while, then took his hat and went away without saying a word. Afterwards he found out that it was the best thing he could have done at the moment, though he felt that he had acted stupidly. And he remarks that sometimes the best thing we can do in face of deep sorrow is just to be silent, and let the sufferer know that we feel too deeply sympathetic to find adequate words ; for as Tennyson said in a similar case, "Words less than the grief would but make grief more." So if I don't express myself in words adequate to your trial you will understand the reason why. But cheerio ! It is futile to quarrel with the inevitable ! We must meet it with courage and faith, with the faith that creates coin and the courage that reacts upon faith and confirms and strengthens it. And we have every reason to do so. Xo evil can happen to the good —nay more, all things work

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together against the former in confirmation of the latter ; and all history and experience vindicate and verify this. And we have the supreme verification of it in Him Who was made perfect through suffering. That’s how our character is formed, and they who are thus trained are not only the highest of our race but they are its saviours and inspirers. The trees to which the gardener pays most attention are those with largest fruit possibilities : these suffer most from his pruning knife —others he does not bother much about. They are not worth it. So consider your trials not as loss and sorrows, but as a Divine compliment to your worth here and to come

You must try if possible to keep all fear of a recurrence of your trouble out of your thoughts, for, as you know, thoughts have an awkward habit of realising themselves. It is in such circumstances that we feel the imperative need of a “Power not ourselves.” We find this power available for us in all lower needs. Science is discovering its ramifications everywhere about us in the material world, and we slice the mountains and ride the air and make it write our letters and run with us and our messages round the world. And just as surely is there Power, or rather an omnipotent and omniscient One with help waiting to meet our needs in the sphere of mind and life. This hidden One Who has

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come out to us in the person of Christ will stand by us, will hold us up in our weakness, and will see us through our worst and turn it into our best. . . . You must just leave it all in His hands and yourself, too, and He will perfect that which concerneth you ; for, as the old Hebrew prophet says, “He is great in counsel and wonderful in that sort of working that bringeth things to pass.” He may not bring them to pass in the way that we desire. He sometimes answers prayers by taking away the thing that worries and oppresses. More usually He does it by so infilling us with His Own Spirit that we get strength to carry the Cross, and at last make it to carry us. When your bairns wanted this or that and you had to deny them their wish, you took them on your knee and crooned a wee song to them that soothed and comforted and inspired them to face life again. In other words you put yourself into them, and though they may not have understood the reason for the denial they understood you and felt and knew that all was right. And so with Him Who is our Father and Mother all in one. What is it He says ? “As one whom his mother comforteth, so the Lord thy God will comfort thee ” —a lovely promise.

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And again in November, 1931

“They are at their wits’ end : then they cry unto the Lord.’’ Well, we all get there sooner or later. We all reach a condition when we don’t know what to do —when our own resources and those of others fail us. “How hospitable then the face of our old neighbour, God.” And it is lovely to think that even when we turn to Him when we can do no better, He bringeth us out of our distresses. ... Do you know this little poem of William Canton’s ?

I walked with one whose child had lately died ;

We passed the little folk in the street at play.

When, suddenly, a clear voice "Father!" cried;

The man turned quick and glad ; sighed ; moved away,

I spoke not, but 'twas given me to discern

The love that watches through the eternal years ;

God surely must so start, and quickly turn,

Whene'er the cry of "Father" strikes His ears.

And when we have the assurance of that, not in word but in act, —in His revelation of Himself to us in Christ, we must believe, or die. If only we could keep hold of Paul’s grand persuasion that nothing can separate us from His love—not ours to Him but His to us—then nothing could dismay us, neither death nor life, etc., etc., all down the long, strong list of antagonists which he marshals. But there ! You will begin to think I am getting preachy. But I am not addressing you from an Olympian height where I myself

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dwell calm and serene. I know the difficulty of being and doing what I am saying. But I also know there is no other stay or strength for weak mortals in our frail barques out on the storm-vext seas of life.

317

Index

" Adam Bcde," 39 et seq., 112.

Alexander, Wm., Archbishop of Armagh, quoted, 122.

Allen, J. Lane, 123.

Anderson, Miss (See Davies, Mrs. H.), 110.

Anderson, Mrs. G., 268.

Angus and Robertson, 283.

Arnold, Matthew, 87. 118, 122, 144.

Autumn, Coming of, 278.

Autumn, Reflections on, 284.

Barrie, Sir J. M., 119, 122.

Barlow, Jane, 119, 122.

Beecher, Henry Ward, 78.

Bonar, Dr. Horatius, 138.

Brierley, John, 283.

Bright, John, 97.

Brooks, Phillips. 45, 75, 288.

Brown, Dr. John, 43.

Browning, Robert, 118, 122, 161, 282.

Burn, A., 68.

Burns, Robert, 82.

Cairns. Principal John, 8.

Cameron, Rev. A., 55.

Cameron, A. C, M.C., 15.

Cameron, Mrs. W. R., 68.

Canton, William, 297.

Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 72, 120.

Chisholm, Rev. James, 95, 127.

Christabel, Appointment of Sister, 62.

Clough, A. H., 118.

Cohen, Mark, 65, 107.

Collie, Professor J., M.A., Letter c to, 267, 279.

Currie, Dr. S. W., 44, 94.

Curzon-Siggers, Canon, 68.

Dale, R. W., 294.

Davidson, Dr. A. 8.. 10.

Davidson, Dr. A. 8., Referred to, 16.

Davies, Mrs. H., 110.

Davies, Rev. Professor R. E., 64.

Death and the Hereafter, 87, 289.

Deerstalking, 136.

Don, Rev. Alexander, 61.

" Dreamthorp," 113, 159.

" Dreamthorpe," 159.

Duncdin. the vestibule of the Celestial City, 288.

Dutton, Rev. D., 58.

Dyke, Henry Van, 72.

Dynamic of Service, The," 108.

Eliot, George, 32, 39 et seq., 112, 113, 115, 118, 122.

Elmsl'ie, Dr., 48, 57.'

Emerson, R. W., 114.

" Evan Harrington," 272.

" Evening Star," 14, 59, 65, 67, 73, 77, 113, 123 et seq.

Fenwick, Sir George, 65, 100, 103, 104.

Ferguson, Sir H. Lindo, 269.

"Fiddles of God, The," 88, 124, 130, 152.

Fishing, Ethics of, 134.

" Fifty Years Syne," 127.

Fitchett, Dean, 68.

Fitchett, Dr. W. H., 136.

" Forsyte Saga," 271,

Frankton, Fishing at, 131.

Friendship, 273.

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Rutherford Waddell

Gibb, Dr. James, 58, 61

Glenarm, Antrim, 21.

Glover, Dr. T. R., 10.

Core, Bishop, 85.

Gow, Rev. John, 50.

Cow, Walter, 68.

Grey, Lord, of Falloden, 132.

Hardy, Thomas, 272.

1 1,11 't\ , I 111 Ml 1,1 -, i.l C. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 82, 126.

Hegel and Hegelianism, 34.

Hewitson, Prof. Win., 8.A., 72, 77, 84, 107, 140, 144.

Hodge's " Systematic Theology," 32.

Holmes, O. W, 163, 274.

Humour in the Pulpit, 78.

Hutton, R. H., 42.

Inglis, G. F., 8.A., 15.

frving, Edward, 6.

Jamieson, Rev. J. C, 282.

Jefferies, Richard, 119, 122.

Johnson, J. A., 11=. 133.

Kipling, Rudyard, 131

League of Nations Union. 7.

"Life," 136.

Life, Continuity of, 167-8, 289, 292.

Lincoln- Prebbleton Charge, 50.

Literature and Life, 271. 272.

Macaulay. Dr. Matthew. Referred to, 39.

McCully, Rev., 48, 133.

nald, (ieorge, 122, 160.

Macdonald, T. M.. 268.

Malet, Lucas, li.i.

Martineau. Harriet, 292.

" Memories and 117, 120.

Meredith, George, 81, 272.

Methodist Local Preacher, Dr. Waddell a, 160.

Meynell, Alice, 271

Michelsen, Rev. 0., 108.

Milton, Joint, 292. '

Missionaries supported by St. Andrew’s, 110.

Mollison, James, 282.

Morice, Rev. G, 152.

Mv Pathway to Christ," 24, 33, 3.5.

New South Wales, Impressions of, 279-283.

New Year Greeting, A, 273.

Nicoll, Sir Robertson, 53.

Oliver, Rev. W. C, 136. "n, r-»_:i.. 1.; ~

"Otago Daily Times," 65, 94. 96, 104. 114.

Thr Outlook," 14, 59. 127, 151. 270.

101, £.f\3. Page, W. H. 43.

Park, J. A. 150

Pater, Walter, 276.

Patcrson. A. S., 90.

Patterson, J. G., IS.

Paul, J. T. 94. 96. 104.

Pomahaka, Adventure at. 133.

Porter, Rev. R., 62.

" Possibilities and Prospects of N.Z. Literature, The." 82.

Prayers, Writing of, 211.

Preaching, Urgency in, 76.

Primate, The, 6S.

Raleigh, Dr. Alexander. 165

Reid, Captain Maync, 21.

Kemarkahlcs, Description i f. 286.

Kcntoul, Professor. 111.

Revival of 1839, 25.

300

Index

Riley, James Whitcombe, 293. “ Robert Elsmere,” 84. “ Romance of God, The,” 85. Rogers, Mrs. D. H., 68. Rossetti, Christina, 122. Rossetti’s “ Lost Days,” 29. Ruskin, John, 85, 99, 120. Rutherford, Samuel, 21.

" Robert Elsmere," 84.

" Romance of God, The," 85.

Rogers, Mrs. D. H., 68.

Rossctti, Christina, 122.

Rossetti's " Lost Days," 29.

Ruskin, John, 85, 99, 120.

Rutherford, Samuel, 21

St. Andrew’s Church and Missions, 110. St. Patrick, 21. St. Paul’s Church, Christchurch, 49. Salmond, Dr., 56. Salmond, Principal, 16. Saunders, Rev. Wm, 65, 137. Scott, Sir Walter, 272,

St. Patrick, 21

X AIL ICK, CI. St. Paul's Church, Christ-

church, 49.

Salmond, Dr., 56.

Salmond, Principal, 16.

Saunders, Rev. Wm., 65, 137.

Scott,' Sir Walter. 272.

Sea, Description of, 137. Smith, Alexander, 112, 121, 122, 126. Smith, Sir G. A., 80.

Smith, Alexander, 112, 121, 122, 126.

Smith, Sir G. A., 80.

Smith, Walter C., 9. Spragg, Silas, 94. Spring, Message of, 132, 2834 (see also note on p. 227). Spurgeon, C. H., 47, 48.

Spragg, Silas, 94.

Spring, Message of, 132, 2834 (see also note on p. 227).

Spurgeon, C. H., 47, 48.

Stevenson, R. L., 123.

Stewart, W. Downie, M.H.R., 100.

Stout, Sir Robert, 66, 103.

Sunday-school Teachers, 108.

Technical Classes Association, 107. Temuka, 277, 283. Tennyson, Alfred, 43, 81, 87, 118, 122. Thoreau, H. D., 119. Trout Fishing, 133, 278. Trout Fishing, Ethics of, 134 Turner, J. W. M , 85.

Tcmuka, 277, 283.

Tennyson, Alfred, 43, 81, 87, 118, 122.

Thoreau, H. D., 119.

Trout Fishing, 133, 278.

*<v*ui. i ■"■'■"6, rwu. Trout Fishing, Ethics of, 134.

Turner, J. W. M, 85.

“ Vital Issues,” 154. “Voyage of Life, The,” 84, 87. Waddell, Dr. Rutherford

"Voyage of Life, The," 84, 87.

Waddcll, Dr. Rutherford

Birth, 21. Parentage, 21. Death of mother of, 22. Early training of, 22. School days of, 22. Starts work, 24. Religious development of, 24 et scq. Influence of brother, 28.

Parentage, 21.

Death of mother of, 22.

Early training of, 22.

School days of, 22.

Starts work, 24.

Religious development of, 24 et scg.

Influence of brother, 28.

Studies for ministry, 31

Search for truth, 32.

Ol.aiLll IUI 11UIII, J£,. Attracted to Unitarianism, 3?.

Spiritual victory and peace, 36.

Influence of English lit erature, 38.

Influence of "Adam Bede on, 39.

A rejected candidate for ministry, 47.

Arrives in New Zealand, 48.

Inducted to Lincoln-Piib-bleton, 50.

Receives call to St. Andrew's, 51.

Deafness of, 6, 8, 54, 86, 125, 145-148, 272.

First long leave of absence of, 55.

Orthodoxy of, doubted, 57.

Appointed Editor " The

Christian Outlook," 59.

Strenuous work of, 60.

Second long leave of, 61

.jci-viili "Jilt; iCdVC ui, ui. Degree of D.D. conferred upon, 61.

Visits the Homeland, 63.

T IJHJ LUV. llUlllUailU, WiJ. Strain of Great War on, 64.

320

321

Rutherford Waddell

Waddell, Dr. Rutherford — Continued.

Resigns his charge, 64.

Bids farewell to St. Andrew’s, 64.

As a preacher, 70 et seq.

Pulpit preparation of, 71

Estimate of, as preacher, 74 et seq.

Humour in pulpit, 78.

Hymns, love of, 87.

Views of, on the hereafter, 87.

As a speaker to children, 90.

Fights the sweating evil, 93.

First President Tailoresses' Union, 104.

Writes message to Labour Party, 106.

First advocate of the " indeterminate sentence," 106.

Promotes technical classes, 107.

Encourages religious education, 107.

A leader in missionary enterprise, 108.

Supports League of Nations' Union, 7

Literary lectures of, 113 et seq.

As an essayist, 122.

" Evening Star" articles of, 123.

A lover of nature, 129.

As a pedestrian, 134.

As a descriptive writer, 137.

Inspires admiration and affection, 140.

As a friend, 142.

Cheerfulness of, 142.

Romantic sense of honour of, 143.

(ientlencss and strength of, 144.

As a visitor to the sick, 9.

Asceticism of, 144.

Sense of humour of, 145 el seq.

Modesty of, 153.

Simplicity of faith of, 154.

Tribute of Dunedin Presbytery to, 155.

Retires to “ a Suburban Balcony,” 157.

Exercises a wider ministry, 159.

Passing of, 160.

A preacher of comfort, 164.

A helper of men's faith. 166.

Children, his love for, 272.

Jubilee as preacher, 276.

Friends, his tribute to. 276.

Sydney, Visit to, 279.

Life Insurance, refused for, 287.

Home, His love of, 288.

Waddell, Mrs.. 55, : 6, 158. 269.

Waddell, Mrs. (Sister ChristabeO, 62. 112. 15a

Wakatipu. Letter from Lake. 284.

Walker Street Mission, 93.

Watson. Sir William. 166.

Watts. Dr. Robert. 32.

Whittier, J. G. 88

Wilson. Chas., 108.

"With Rod and Gun in

Maoriland," 136.

Whyte, Dr. Alexander. 78.

Printed for A. H. Reed, Bookseller and Publisher, 33 Jetty Street, Dunedin and 182 Wakefield Street, Wellington, by— COUI.LS SOMERVILLE WILKIE LIMITED, Printers, Dunedin, New Zealand; also at Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland.