THE QUIET HOUR.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 10 January 1925, Page 14

THE QUIET HOUR.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE BEAUTIFUL. We are living in an incredibly beautiful world. Nobody lias the least idea, how beautiful it is. For none of us is holy. To holy eyes this young summer world may be paradise, or a suburb of it. Science, art, and religion have contributed to the enlargement of mail’s appreciation of the beautiful. But everything is nothing. The sheer beauty of the world sometimes makes you scream for joy. And sometimes it forces you to you r knees. “Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world Too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me." What empires our Lord Christ- added to the territory of the beautiful. He made men at home in the world. He made birds and flowers the Father’s messengers of goodwill. The microscope and the ' lens have made notable contributions. With shouts of delight men find beauty in what was before time regarded with aversion. Fabre put us on terms with the insect world. Things that “spin and sing and weave their pretty webs and die” have become exponents of God’s art-. Wlint haunting words these are of Walt Whitman’s: •‘I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of Heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue, And the mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” But some eyes see nothing of all this. The eye of a rattlesnake fixed on an orchid at whose throat » humming bird is posed cm fast-beating wings, what do the blue senses see ? Beauty ? An old Maori in his canoe on the heaving waters at the entrance to Queen Charlotte Sound, with Egmont lifted white above the green deep sea, and the albatross with motionless Ivirfgs curving about him, what did he see? Beauty? Why was Wordsworth so savage with Peter Bell? Because he trampled on thousands of primroses in his zeal for tin pots and for pots of beer, and saw nothing in them. It is a commonplace of psychology that we see only what- we are fit to see. Beauty is not a solid tiling omt there in space. It is the result of a combination' of what is mit there and what is within. If there is something within us that is appreciative and responsive, we can see no beauty. For us there is none. We are that -rattlesnake, that Maori, that old tinker Peter Bell. . It is a great moment in any lite when beauty makes its first appeal. Maclaren. of Manchester, says: “I cannot have been more than six or seven. 1 was taken on an expedition to Gairioch. It must have been a day in summer—warm, bright, quiet. In the perfect stillness that followed the arrival of the steamer I got my first impression of the beauty of Nature. Delight and awe took hold of me.” Ruskin tells his story like this : “I was in the forest of Fontainebleau in France, lying om a. bank bv a cart road, with no prospect whatever but a small aspern tree ngainse the blue sky. Languidly, but not idly. 1 began to draw it. As 1 drew, the languor passed away. Ihe .beautiful lines insisted on being traced. With wonder increasing every moment, J saw that they composed themselves to finer laws than any known to man. ‘He hath made everything beautiful became forme the interpretation of the bond between the human mind and all visible things. I returned along the cart road feeling that it had led me far.” , if you have wakened up, if you have felt, if yon have taken off your hat to the beauty of the world, you are the person to whom these lines are addressed. Through beauty something is being said to us. Through beauty yon are being challenged with God’s problem. That God lias unsolved problems on hand is obvious. The contradicitions of life declare that. The sceptics say that God is either not good or not strong, else His world bad not been stained with sill and marred by pain. But these sceptics, like most of those who construct dilemmas, are impaled on the horns. There is a third alternative, iand in that third lies the courageous interpretation of our faith. The All Holy is Almighty. It was through no defect in Him, but though his perfectness that He freely made us free. His challenge through this strangely beautiful world is this : We are to make it as good as it is beautiful. His problem is to, encourage and to enable us to do it. That is the mission of Christ. —J. J. North.

THE. HUNGER OF THE SOUL. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” —Matt. v. 6. It strikes' us somewhat strangely at first that there should he a beatitude for dissatisfaction. A\ T e know that peace is promised to the Christian, and peace is calm repose and satisfied restfulness. The words “hunger and thirst” appear to suggest expediences incompatible with rest and peace. But when we think a little moire deeply, we see that spiritual hunger must form a part of all true Christian experience. Hunger is a mark of health. It is so in physical life; the loss of appetite indicates disease. So a healthy mind is a hungry one; when one becomes satisfied with one’s attainments, one ceases to grow. The same is true in spiritual life. If wo become satisfied with our faith and love and obedience, and our communion with God, and our concentration to. Christ, we have ceased to grow.. Invalids die often amid plenty —die of starvation; not because they • can get no food, hut because they have no appetite. There are many professing Christians who are starving their souls in the midst of the abundance of spiritual provision, because they have won no hunger. There is nothing for which we should pray more earnestly and more importunately than for spiritual longing and desire. It is indeed the very soul of all true prayer. It is the empty hand reached o.ut to heaven. It is the heart 1 !-; cry ( which God hears with acceptance and answers always with more and more of life. It is* the ascending angel that climbs the radiant ladder to return on the same bright stairway with blessings from God’s very hand. It is the key that unlocks new storehouses of divine goodness and enrichment. It is indeed nothing less than the very life of God In the- human soul, struggling to grow up in us into the fulness of the stature of Christ, Such spiritual hunger never fails of blessing. —J. R. Miller. Ere the snns and moons could wax and wane, Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled The he’avens, God thought on me His child; Obtained a life for me, arrayed Its circumstances every one To the minutest. —Browning.