THE GOLDEN RULE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 263, 5 November 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE GOLDEN RULE.

WHEN WE "TARRY" FOR THE WEAK

(By S.)

Nineteen centuries ago the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not always the impressive, symbolic rite it is with us. Too often it was part of a substantial meal that was made unseemly by a scramble for food in which some got too much and others too little. That was why St. Paul composed the great passage on the Lord's Supper that we come upon in his first epistle to the Corinthians, and that was why he bade his readers, when seated at table, to "tarry one for another." Though we may have no need of the exhortation in connection with our own observance of the ordinance, there is, in it, advice that may be none the less pertinent and profitable to us. What about our relations with the children ? How many people who are no longer young take 110 interest in tiiem or their books or their games? How many are out of touch with them, and never take the slightest interest in what interests them ? Is that as _it should be? Take, again, youth and inexperience. Surely if any people should be winsome and kindly and tactful to those verging on manhood and womanhood, it is mature and experienced Christian men and women. Yet, how many of them have created a gulf between themselves and these young folk, and repel, rather than attract them, forgetting how crude and inexperienced they themselves were once, and liow they longed for the sympathy and kindly interest, and encouragement of their elders. It is as bad for us as it is for them if we have got into a world of our own, in which there is no room for the young. Nothing is more likely to make them break away from the restraints of the home and the Church.

Take, once more, those we call weak brethren. There are all sorts of people in every Church, and, among them, weak brethren.. Do we realise this, and realise that, as Henry Ward Beeclier used caustically to say, a church is not a, museum of perfect beings? Surely it is a hospital for people who are wounded and bruised, an asylum for people who need loving care and nursing. In our gardens we have delicate, fragile plants, as well as hardy annuals,- and weak, clinging plants, as well as strong and sturdy ones. But we do not look on them with careless and indifferent eyes. We are not out of patience with them. It is these delicate and fragile shoots with which we take the most pains, staking, sheltering and nursing them with the utmost care.

Let us then tarry for the weak brethren .in our churches and out of them. Instead of criticising them .and finding fault with them and driving them away from us, let us remember that charity covers a multitude of sins, and bear with them and try )to make them feel at home with ns and develop strength and worth. We never show ourselves more like Him of Whom it is said that He did not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax than when we "tarry" for the weak.