PULPIT MESSAGES

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 43, 14 November 1932, Page 10

PULPIT MESSAGES

Wellington Churches THE CHRISTIAN HOPE ‘Ultimate Decency of Things’ Preaching at the Vivian Street Baptist Church, the Rev. L. J. Boulton Smith took as his text Rom. 8, 28: “All things work together for good to them that love God, etc.” Robert Louis Stevenson once made a rather startling statement to the effect that if by some chance he should find himself in hell he would still cling to his belief in the ultimate decency of things. This statement was but an expression of the invincible optimism which characterised the valiant Scot all his days, said Mr. Smith. It was an optimism which he carried through a life of physical disability without once dipping his colours. Now the belief of Stevienson, whom his brilliant but fiercely radical contemporary Henley dubbed the “shorter catechist,” was derived from an early grounding in Scottish Calvinism. He was gripped by a belief in the sovereignty of goodness. To-day when the social order in which we were living was so painfully chaotic and things which had stood for centuries seemed almost to pass away—leaving nothing to take their place—it was necessary to have a certain faith in the “ultimate decency of things.” Such a belief was by no means akin to the ostrich-like hiding of one’s head in a bog of texts which characterised some people.

“No one can read this text without being conscious of many things that are fiercely hostile to it,” continued Mr. Smith. “One is aware, for instance, of a frown on the face of Nature. She is frequently quite sinister in her bearing, and raises many doubts against the Christian belief of a prevailing good purpose. Even the stars in their courses, if to-day they do not fight against us—often seem indifferent to humanity’s plight “Nature, with all her grandeur and might, seems cold and supercilious toward man. In his mettlesome little book, ‘Star, Atoms and God,’ Dr. Kirk says: ‘lt is not always safe to look at the midnight sky. Those distant points we call the stars have more than once burned the sense of “nothingness” into man and left him desolate and helpless amid the baffling mysteries of this mortal life.’ Many in certain moods have experienced this, with the result their Christian faith has wavered. Then, other movements in Nature, earthquakes in Messina and Napier; a death-dealing famine in India or * devastating plague in Southern Europe, rise up against this expression of the Christian hope. “Catastrophe often drives men sadly away from faith. Thus it happens that to believe in the ultimate decency of things often seems to some people almost Impossible. We see the dark problem of life which Professor D. S. Cairns speaks of: Nature has produced a nobler being than herself. She brought him into life, and now seems to be "incessantly seeking at once to nurture and destroy him.’ Just here the Christian contends that he does not affirm any hope of the ultimate decency of things because of what he sees in Nature, but because of what he has found in Christ.

"Nature never had an evangel for the deepest needs of men. The man in Christ sees all things through the eyes of Him who triumphed over the sorrows and sufferings of life. He snatches victory out of seeming defeat by resolutely holding that in God love all things work together for highest good.”