THE LATE DR WADDELL

Evening Star, Issue 21091, 2 May 1932, Page 2

THE LATE DR WADDELL

IMPRESSIVE MEMORIAL SERVICE ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR HEWITSON An impressive address, based on the text, “ Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you tho Word of God; whoso faith follows, considering the end of their conversation,” was delivered in St. Andrew’s Church last evening by Professor Hewitson at the memorial service to the late Dr Waddell. There was a crowded congregation. Tho Rev. H. J. Ryburn assisted in tho service, and the choir rendered tho anthem ‘ Tho Sun Shall bo No More Thy Light by Day.’ An appropriate floral decoration testified to an occasion which was further distinguished by a special order of service.

Professor Hewitson said they were not met to pay a public tribute to a prominent citizen and distinguished minister. That had been fitly done already bv the pulpits of their own and other churches, by the daily Press, and by the ‘ Outlook,’ with all of which Dr Waddell had boon closely associated. They had come neither to bury Dr Waddell nor to praise him; not to bury him, but rather to keep him alivo in their hearts; not to pronounce a panegyric over him, for that would bo entirely alien to bis nature and quite contrary to the spirit of that service. What they wanted to do was to remember Dr Waddell as he really was, so that they might unconsciously copy him, or, what was better, be unconsciously moulded to his likeness. He did not think that tho worship, in which they were that night engaged was in the slightest way inconsistent with the worship of God, because he believed implicitly in the divine prophetship of human life. There were men who could be called the spokesmen of God, His interpreters, His prophets. Dr Waddell was one in that he made God in Christ real to other men and women, whom he brought to see in and through himself to learn that tho Cross of Christ was not only the power of God but tho pattern of service. Speaking of his first association with Dr Waddell, the preacher said it went back thirty-seven years to the time when lie met him m the old manse of Knox Church. He had not a single acquaintance in Dunedin, and as ho had been placed in an important and conspicuous position he felt that he was an object or critical observation. He was feeling very timid and alone one day when the door bell rang and someone came to him and said with much laughter that there was a deaf man with a face like a poet’s downstairs wanting to see him. It was Dr Waddell. He had confused her directing an ear trumpet at her, and she had put her ear to it instead of her mouth. When he went down he found Dr Waddell. He was certainly deaf and he had a poet’s face. Before tho conversation of that day was finished he showed that he had a keen sense of the ludicrous, and as tho years went on the speaker said he found his sense of humour to be not a well, but a spring in the desert that flowed incessantly. Around it the earth was green and fresh with flowers, and there were no nettles, nothing ’ that stung, or poisoned or inflamed. And the spring bubbled quietly to the last in the room where he died. His first impressions of Dr Waddell deepened with the years, and he found him a man to be loved for his gifts and graces, a man to bo laughed with, and sometimes at, for his genial humour and his fresh, young heart.

What were his gifts and graces? the preacher asked. He was a leader of men in both thought and action. In some things he was a pioneer in action and in others a worker with pioneers, and they must all have been surprised by the range of his activities as set out in the daily Press. But ho was also a leader in thought. He did not mean that Dr Waddell was a scholar in cither literature or theology. No man in a colonial pastorate could be that. He was, however, well informed in both subjects, to an extent greater than most of his ministerial brethren. He was, in his own words, a sort of “middleman ” who translated the gold of the scholar into the current cpin of the average man. This he did with clearness, impressiveness, and sometimes attractive beauty. He had a religious rather than a theological mind, and was rhetorical rather than logical, practical and ethical rather than metaphysical and theological. His emphasis was not on creeds, and systems of God and man and their relations, but on fellowship with God in Christ and tho issues of that fellowship in character and conduct. It was in that way that he helped men who were oppressed by a minute and militant orthodoxy in days when science was charming her secret from the iatest moon and literary criticism was throwing a disturbing light upon the religious records of tho past. As a preacher of the Word of God, said Professor Hewitson, his mind was full of great passages from the Scriptures. Ho heard the heavens telling the glory of God, and the visible things of creation spoke of eternal power and godhead. Richard Jefferies had been one of his intimates. He had tramped with him over the fields and sheltered with him under the hedgerows. AVordsworth, tho high priest of Nature, and tho good Lord Clifford had learned from the' same teachers as Dr AVaddell:

Their daily teachers had been the woods and rills, The silence that is in tho starry sky, Tho sleep that is among the lonely hills.

ile had stood with Ruskin when, as a youth from a garden terrace in Scliauffliauscn, ho had seen the Alps for the first time in the sunset “ clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the sotting sun. Infinitely beyond all they had ever thought or dreamed. The walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful; not more awful round heaven the walls of sacred death.” All this came out in his sermons and Ids articles. For him it was all preaching the Word of God. Life and literature, too, were to Dr Waddell a part of the Word of God, but the Scriptures of the Old and Mew Testaments contained for him the Word of God in its fullest, most spiritual, and authoritative form. Probably no other minister in this country, "throughout a long ministry, had expounded with such care, such knowledge, and such practical application the Old and Mew Testaments. He was a man of faith, of trust, and fellowship, a man of fidelity, and his faith in God revealed in Christ had a strong element of vonturesomeness, even audacity in it, and it was this faith which gave to his character its groat strength. Ho was ns pliant, as the willow, and also as immovable as tlio oak. and therefore not always an easy man to help. Ho was a man of great sorrows, which were borne with unbroken silence, lie never mentioned his deafness by way of complaint, although it shut him out from the social ways ol men. Ho triumphed over his losses and turned them to gain, winning the sympathy of men and women, and adding a deeper tenderness to their respect

and affection. But the strong wind that had blown and buffeted him all through the long day of life dropped in the late afternoon before the sun set and the clouds that had darkened the heavens thinned out and disappeared. On sunny days he sat on his balcony and looked out over the sea. and when the autumn days came he sat at his fireside, as Browning hoped to do in his beautiful love poem, and read and thought and wrote. Thus, with scarcely any abatement of his astonishing industry, and without the loss of his powers, he worked to the very end. Gleams of his humour glanced out and brightened the room as his day darkened into night. Tor him the prayer was answered, “ The last thoughts of a heart that loves Thee are like the hist, deepest, ruddiest fays of the, setting sun. Thou hast willed, 0 my God. that life should bo beautiful even to the end. Make it to grow and climb like, the plant that lifts its head to Theo for the last time before it seeds and dies.”