SELF-SCRUTINY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 17, 20 January 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

SELF-SCRUTINY.

" THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT." The following is taken from a sermon by Principal J.'artin, of New College, Edinburgh. The sermon was based on Romans xiii., 12: "Let us put on the armour of light":—

"I believe it is a comparatively rare thing to find a man perfectly honest and true with himself. Most men are afraid to look themselves steadily in the face. What selfknowledge they possess has been gained hurriedly and at odd moments by stolen glances, as it were. Also through

vanity, or levity, or otherwise, they contrive to hoodwink and delude themselves a good deal here, the result being, sooner or later, the bringing of disaster on their lives, from which they might have been saved simply by being true.

"Anyone who wishes may find abundant examples of this in the ordinary life around him. How often, for instance, men contrive to misjudge themselves as to the work they should attempt and the place they should aspire to in the world. Probably they are not really so much deceived, but not every man has strength of character enough to listen to his inward monitor and to shape his life accordingly. In the clamour of his vanity and ambition the voice of liis wiser self is drowned, and foolishly he soars after an elevation Nature never meant him for. Tho result eventually is a collapse, perhaps in disgrace, at all events in mortification and confusion. Learn to Think "Soberly." "It is a point of wisdom that a man should learn to think 'soberly' of himself, 'as he ought to think.' Many lay themselves open to the most bitter of all their experiences in life by beii:g too vain or too cowardly to confess the truth about the abilities and the disabilities of the nature God has given them, and the kind of life and achievement to which they have been called. But it is even more important that we should notice how the tendency I am speaking of is too deep-seated in human nature to be confined to the ordinary life of men. It goes on with them into the life of faith as well, too often to blight and mar everything. There are Christians, I suppose, who have learned to be wonderfully faithful with themselves, marking their own shortcomings very strictly, and lending themselves with something like completeness of purpose to all God's will; and to them, perhaps, what I am about to say scarcely applies. But the average Christian, I fear, is not so thorough as this. As a rule there is no such spiritual integrity in him. Very often he has a secret suspicion that the kind of life he is living is not just the full and proper Christian life, that there id something amiss with it, something lacking; which, nevertheless, he will not inquire into too closely.

Guiding One's Own Life. "Probably ho feels lie is not an illustration of the genuine disciple of Jesus Christ; probably there are certain great truths taught by Christ which he does not disbelieve, "but does not pay sufficient heed to in the forming of his view of the world, or in the guiding of his life; probably certain great aids have been given him, and, most of all, the most familiar of all, the Word of God, a place at His footstool, the ministry of the Spirit, which he has never yet made anything like full proof of, and yet lip. is content to let the matter rest thtr>2 meanwhile. So he goes about like a man who has the secret feeling that a serious malady is at work in him, but is afraid to consult his physician. Are there not too many of us Christians whose lives arc haunted by suspicions of this sort? We feel that God has given ns in Jesus Christ something very much more and better than anything we know about as yet, and we con hardly expect to be at peace with ourselves until we have settled just what that is, unless, indwd, we mean this half-and-half dealing with Jesus Christ to go on always—in which case thsre is a sad spiritual future before us. An.l from all this we should be saved entirely were we but sincere with ourselves and go into the spiritual warfare clothed in the armour of light."