COUNCIL AT CHURCH

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 124, 29 May 1933, Page 5

COUNCIL AT CHURCH

SERVICE AT ST. JOHN'S

In observance of an old English and Scottish custom, the Mayor, Mr. T. C. A. Hislop, and a number of members of the recently elected City Council, attended St. John's Presbyterian Church yesterday morning. . The Rev. J. R. Blanchard spoke of "The Way of Service." To many seriouslj'minded people, he said, it was becoming increasingly clear that the way of Jesus could not be ignored. If men of all lands were to get on together and were to keep the crumbling world intact and were to master the forces that threatened to drag them down they must have a greater faith in each other. "They must have a larger hope in the future-of humanity, and, above all, a fuller measure of that other quality which vaunteth not itself and seeketh not its own, which thinketh no evil of others, and is not easily provoked, and which in terms of the way of Jesus is known as love," said the preacher. "Faith! Hope! Love! These are the fundamental forces to which God is driving us all. They are the key forces without which men's efforts for the welfare and peace of the world cannot be effective. They are governing forces of the way of Jesus. And if they are to control the human situation as it requires they should control it, men must turn to the way of Jesus to discover their secret. That is the conviction which is coming to many minds. Facts are forcing men to recognise and acknowledge the necessity of the way of Jesus." After speaking of the too frequent manifestations of selfishness and the goal of personal gain, Mr. Blanchard continued: "Too often has the world been without noticeable conscience over the fact that so many have been denied an opportunity of service and that many others have had work to do of a nature, and under conditions, which made it impossible for them to conceive of it as a service. Too often has it soothed its conscience by exalting the giving of one's spare time or spare money to some philanthropy as 'social service/ which has generally meant acting as an ambulance to pick up tho casualties of evils which the world has been too callously selfish to remove. Thus has the way of Jesus been ignored. And today, by the bitter goads of sharp necessity, God is driving the world back to the way of service as Jesus conceived it and lived it."