LUSTRE COMES FROM LOVE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 11, 13 January 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

LUSTRE COMES FROM LOVE.

FACE OF CHRIST REFLECTED. The following passages are takon from the chapter on the Imitation of Christ in Miss Maude Roydcn's book, "Here and Hereafter," of which we hope to have a review in this column next week: "Be as good as those who love you think you are. Perhaps there are very many of them, and perhaps they are very dependent on you, and perhaps they are not very interesting people. I have often hoard people say they would rather bo with their superiors—with people greater than themselves. I would rather look up than down, they say. Very natural, but a little selfish. Of course, it is lovely to bo in the society of great and noble people, and if we cannot command such delight in our own circle we should look for it in books, in pictures, in music. People Look Up To You. "To be with our superiors is a joy that is perhaps the greatest joy in the world, but there aro people who are looking up to you, people who by the very fact that they love you are in your power a little bit. You do not know how much they are growing like you. Be as good as you would want them to be, for they are growing like you. I have known people who, years after they had apparently escaped from the influence of someone whom they had loved, who was perhaps not worthy of their love, found that something of that person's influence 6eized them again. Some dark idea of God, some fear of life, which you came to realise, as you learned to think for yourself, wae not true, but whose influence remained perhaps all your life. It remains because you loved, pe.-haps still love, tho person who taught it you. It was not exactly because ho told it to you that you believed it; it was because you loved him, and his thought became part of you. Perhaps you now are doing that to somebody else. How good we ought to be when people trust us with their love.

"Perhaps very few people love you. Perhaps you have a very narrow kind of life. Perhaps only one or two people in the world care about you, and they are not the people you would have chosen. That often happens, especially with those whose circumstances make it difficult for them to see many people or to go about tho world. The people who are near them are not the people they would have chosen, and tho people who give their love to some of you are not the people whose love you feel you can value very much. Oh, but you muet value it, because their lives are in your hands. Are you fit to be trusted with more? Are any of us fit to bo trusted at all with, someone else's love? And if those who care for you are ignorant, or foolish, or have not got talent or character, the fact that they love you ie going to make it possible for them to become like you. If you are strong, they may become strong. If you are brave, they may become brave. It is strange, but yet it is true, that this divine power of love can make shoddy into something fine. That is what we find it hard to believe.

"This Heavenly Miracle."

"Wβ cannot believe that anyone might become better for loving us. It seems incredible, and yet it is eo. There are miracles still, and this heavenly miracle does happen: that the cheap and shoddy, the ignorant and foolish person whose love is given to you and whom you do not value, whom you wish had been somebody else, better worth your love, could, if only you,were strong enough, become strong too. God is in you to create, and is ,in the person who loves you to create. That is why there is still a sense in which ho must 'imitate' Christ. When we love Him perfectly, then we 'know ourselves into one' with Him. That is what St. Paul says, 'If you can perfectly reflect the face of Christ, as in a •mirror, you are transformed to His image. You go from glory to glory.'"