SUNDAY COLUMN

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 40, 26 November 1938, Page 3

SUNDAY COLUMN

NEWS OF THE CHURCHES.

(Conducted by the Ashburton Ministers’ Association). A PRAYER. O God, forasmuch as without Thee we are not able to please Thee, mercifully grant that Thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts. May we seek what is true, sec what is beautiful, love what is pure, and follow what is right, for the sake of Him Who is Truth and Loveliness, Purity and Righteousness, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

God gives us always strength enough and sense enough for wliat He wanes us to do. If we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are not happy ourselves. —J. Ruskin.

True, we can mover be at peace till we have performed the highest duty of all till we have arisen and gone to our Father; but the performance of smaller duties —yfes, oven of the smalest —will do more to give us temporary repose, will act more as healthful anodynes, than the greatest joys that can come to us from any other quafter. —Goorge Macdona 1 d. THE CROSS CARRIED. Son of Man, wliat hardness was Tliinie! Thine ever was a carried cross. Thou never hadst where to lay Thy head in rest. The multitude thronged Thee with their trifling sorrows when a might grief was at Thine own door. They complained that the wine had run down in Cana when Thou wort thirsting for a draught of love. They murmured at the scant bread ot the wilderness when Thou wort hungering for a human heart. They wept the withering of a slender gourd when Thou avert weeping over the millions of Nineveh. And yet, Thou nu'i pity on the gourd. While deep was calling unto djeep within Thee, Thou didst not fqrget the shallow stream The voice of Thy ocean drowned not the murmur of my brook. Mv puny cry was overheard by Thy soul in its sorrows, and Thou earnest into my world, carrying Thy cross. Let me follow Thlee. Let me carry my cross into my brother's world. —Dr. George Matheson. THE INHERITANCE OF FAITH In the emphasis which with good reason Protestantism has laid on the individual, we sometimes forget that religion has a* corporate as well as an individual life. it is not simply a matter between the lonely soul and God God’s mercy to me. Jhe Christian lias his place in a great society which icaches in one unbroken line through sixty generatons:

One family we dwell in Him, One Church, above beneath.

And in certain, narrow and limited ways we remember these things and profit by them. A son bis saintly mother —the Bible in which she read, the faith which gave her life its quiet strength and though neither may ever be to him wliat they were to her, yet for her sake lie can never think of them save with reverenqe. A great man makes his boast in the Lord, and the- mere example- of his faith will some times avail to save multitudes from siipfiing their cables in the night of fear. In a hundred ways we live by each other’s faith and bold each other up.

But the argumtent lias a much wider reach than those simple illustrations may suggest. The Christian religion is not a thing of yesterday, it belongs to the ages and the generations; and while, of course, that is not sufficient reason for believing it true, it is a reason, for not lightly sotting it aside. Whatever has been long respected is probably respectable. A grey-headed truth has always claims upon our voverenco. “The God of our fathers” speaks always as one having authority. A Swiss guide will sometimes cut upoir his alpenstock the names of the chief

heights which lie lias climbed with its aid. And the faith which claims our assent lias in like fashion been put to the proof. It comes- to us sealed within and without with the names of those who have tried and proven its power. Vo receive it at the hands of men who can say: 1 hat which we have heard, that which we beheld,, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life, declare wo unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us. Again lie it said, this can be no substitute for our own faith, but it may be a mighty .reinforcement of it. \ve may be driven and pushed by doubt until even our surest experiences,begin to seem like idle phantoms of the brain; but when all around us we find men and women by the score who confirm our seeing and hearing by theirs, faith may lift up its head and laugh at its fears. There is a striking passage in one of James Smetham’s “Letters,” in which, after speaking of his own experience “inwardly as great and as simple a fact as the facts of seeing and hearing”—lie goes on to say: “And I. have met with such scores and hundreds who strike hands with me in life and death on these great matters that it is settled ‘without controversy’ to me.”

Our fathers trusted in Tiioo: Tlie-v trusted, and Thou didst deliver

them — when with full understanding w<e can say that, faith is on the way to its own claim and confession, Mv Lord and my GocL —George Jackson.