THEOLOGY IN OUTLINE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 291, 9 December 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

THEOLOGY IN OUTLINE.

REFLECTIONS ON MAN'S SOUL. 111.

; Pys.)

Wo believe in Jesus. We do not believe in Him to be convinced there is a God. For reasons already stated wo would believe in God whether He had come into tho world or not. Men and women believed there was a God long before He wae born. We believe in Jesus because of the testimony of accredited witnesses. Wo believe in i Him also because it is in Him we see and know God, because all we could imagine God to be if He were to come to earth and live on it, we find in Him, so that, believing in Him, we feel no need for a further and higher revelation of God. And, though we do not fully understand it in its causes and consequences, we believe that His death of agony and humiliation was for our sakes, completes His revelation of God, and is the core of the Christian religion. We believe in Him, further, because, by trusting and learning and obeying Him, wo experience the highest joy and peace. And, yet again, because we see the remarkable moral change for the better that comes over all who come under His spell—new vision, new moral strength, a new' morality, a new enthusiasm, a new experience of heart —in a word, as St. Paul puts it, a righteousness and peace and joy we do not find in others. Then we believe in the immortality of tho centre and moving power within us we call the soul. Here is what someone has said pn the subject. I quote at because, even apart from the teaching of Jesus, it is an argument that suffices many. My body," he eays, "is growing older, but my senses, my feelings, my perceptions, my sympathies, my thinking processes are as young as they were 50 years ago. That is as clear to me as my ageing body. And, since that part of me which is most valuable is as young now as it was then, I consider it a hint to me of {he immortality of the 'self in me. And does not science tell us that nothing in the material world is ever lost, that however much anything may alter its appearance, its physical or chemical properties, it cannot be destroyed? That, indeed, is the foundation of tho science of chemistry. Why, then, wo ask ourselves, should our soul, the finest and most wonderful thing in creation, be destroyed or lost? Wise and thoughtful men all down the ages have refused to be content with the thought that they were like the brutes that perish. Even when our forefathers vet "struggled with the mammoth and the cave bear in the wilderness of an uncultivated world," it was their belief that death was not the end of men. And, because we believe in God ami in Jesus and in-our immortality, we believe in our eternal'union with God and with Jesus. .„ . Unhurt amidst the wars of elements. The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.