NOTES IN PASSING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 137, 11 June 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

NOTES IN PASSING.

"It is not always the big things that are successful." —Kagawa.

"Difficulties are the things that show •what men are."— Epictctus.

"Abba" would be the first word Jesus learnt from his mother ae she nursed Him and talked to Him in baby language. It corresponded to our "dadda, and°it is touching to remember that in the hour of his greatest agony on the Cross it was the word His tongue sought.

The Rev. J. H. Ritson, D.D., in an article published in the June number of the "Bible in the World," writes that a lady once sent a letter to the Bible House etating that she understood they kept the original manuscript of the Scriptures. The writer asked him to look up David's own copy and let him know whether or not he divided Psalm 42 and 43.

"The Urgency of Present Day African Problems" is the subject dealt with by the Rev. W. J. Platt in the June number of "The Bible in the World." Mr. Platt, who is the Bible Society's secretary for Equatorial Africa, states: "One of the most able missionaries it was ever my privilege to know was a Roman Catholic priest, a man of considerable scholarship in things European, who was never satisfied until he had acquainted himself with the African viewpoint on the important things of life. Ho was convinced that the life-organisation and clan-cohesion of Old Africa offered to the missionary a very real basis for the building up of the Christian Church."

The opening verses-of the 29th Psalm, says a writer in a "Home Church Magazine," may be read as if the Psalmist intended to say: "However important you people are, you must all bow down in deep humility before God. You can make your big noises: but what are they compared to His tremendous thunders? You may be important folks in your little way: but what are you in the presence of God! It is your duty—and, indeed, your privilege—to acknowledge frankly His greatness and your own littleness. l r or in the matter of 'glory and strength' God is everything and you are nothing. It is He that killeth and He that maketh alive: it is Hβ Who exalts or makes low."

Among other benefits conferred, Lewis Carroll added eoino excellent words to the dictionary — two in particular, "chortle" and "galumphing" (says the "Observer"). The odd thing is that, though both words were written as nonsense, they convey a perfectly clear idea of their meaning. No one has ever had the slightest doubt about "he chortled in his joy," and was it not one of the popular objections to Mr. Hardman's Haig fitatue that the horse was a galumphing beast? All sorts of people have drawn upon the two "Alices' , for illustration or moral; none, perhaps, more surprisingly than Sir Arthur Eddington, who finds in the "slilhy toves" and their gyring and gimbMng a quaint analogy to the structure of the atom; '"there is the same suggestion of activity, there is the same indefiniteness as to the nature of tho activity and what it is that is acting." In politics, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain once made a great platform effect by quoting the words, "Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, but never jam to-day." It is quite possible somebody may have preached a sermon on them.