NO FALSE VALUES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 31, 6 February 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

NO FALSE VALUES.

THE SHOP OF . LIFE. This extract is taken from a sermon preached nearly a year ago in a Congregational Church in one of the smaller towns in England. It is on the price of living. The preacher was the minister, the, Kev. J. E. Evans, B.A.:— Life is not an easy thing. It is ft privileged form of existence for which we have to pay the price. If we do not pay the price we miss that amount of its glory whose price' we have tried to shirk. In the shop of life there are no false values—no bargains. We pav the full price for every virtue and every grace wo gain; or to change the figure wo may soy that life is a echool in which wo fail to learn if we try to dodge the lessons. It is an opportunity which we are required to seize: it is a challenge which we take up. If we neglect' to do these things C,od does not cast fire down from heaven to consume us. He just allows life to carry on its natural course and leave us without its glories, and grandeur.

There was «. friend I had not met for years—he was a < - hum of mv youthful 'days—a fine moral youth, "with keen intellectual faculties and noble spiritual interests. He was older than I. so I used to look up to him as something of*s. hero. After years of absence he let mo know that he was coming into my neighbourhood. I was delighted and was very eager to see the fine man that ho had" become—alas! When he appeared I had a terrific shock. I saw in him a far inferior man than the person I used to know and admire. He hod in the- intervening years taken life easily; he bad shirked bis responsibilities "and cmldled himself: he had gradually allowed the ever-pressing material interests to encroach upon his thought and time, and had drifted from the robust church life that was his in the earlier years. Po I looked upon a deadened soul as I met him —I was going to say a. murdered soul: I might trulv have said so. because it was his own want of watchfulness and vigour that bad allowed the soul to decay and lose its graces.