THE HAND OF GOD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 307, 28 December 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE HAND OF GOD.

HOW MANKIND MAY BE LEAD. (By JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, D.D.) Of Lincoln it was said, God covered his eyes with one hand and led him with the other. It is a parable of our race. We none of us see the way, but are led along a dim path. It were idle to ask to see the distant scene. One step is enough for us. Louis Vives tells of a man who passed safely over a plank that lay acrosa a great Hood of water in the daVk; and next day, when he saw the danger in which he had been, lie turned white with fear. How often we have looked back and shuddered at the snares and pitfalls along our way. Then we realise how much we owe to the hand that led and the heart that planned. Even then we do not see all the perils that beset us, many of which are mercifully hidden from our eyes. No wonder Newman sang: So long Thy power has led me, Sure it still will lead me on. So it has been with the long story of our race. Along what devious, winding ways it has been led, going it knew not where. Carlyle wondered how the race managed to stumble forward, and lie could not make it out. Never did mankind sit down and deliberately resolve to move forward. Always, it is a few, great, lovely, lonely souls who run forward and see the light and return to lead the multitude on. Thus we advance, divinely led and blindly following. Sargent, in his painting in the Boston Library, shows us the hand of God, quick, powerful, gentle, holding in a. mesh of shining threads the mass of early ideas of faith, and slowly lifting it upward into the light and the truth. Even so the artist read the history of faith, and he read it right—written by the hand of God. Many a man has lived after the manner of the old grammarian in the Browning poem. Careless, gay, pleasureloving, undistinguished, he went his way through his morning years, Till, 10, the little touch, And youth was gone. Only a little touch, hardly more than a tap on the shoulder, but it made all the difference. Somewhere in the thirties it came—perhaps as an illness, a > defeat, the death of a loved one, a cherished plan turned awry —and life suddenly became serious. It was the hand of God. Happy is he who, like the old grammarian, works heroically and leaves a shining tradition, despite the wasted years and the little time left to toil ere the night comct'n. Oh, that little touch—if only we knew who it is and would obey it!

For, give ourselves to Him we must in the end. Men do not willingly die; they are taken. Death stops us. It stops our race. Men are engaged in their labour or about their play; they are at home or far away—and they are suddenly stopped. A hand is put forth from the unseen and leads them away from the lovely scenes of the early life, with its colour, its music, its dear custom of living together —out into a vast eternity. They follow a strange path of the soul, worn by the footsteps of a multitude gone before. No one can detain them. They are in the hands of Cod who made them, and who will make them what they ought to be. Why not yield to Him now? All our hope is in His unfailing love. O Sau.l, it shall be A face like my face that receives thee; a man like me, Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever ; a hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of a new life to thee ! See the Christ stand!