THE QUIET HOUR.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 7 February 1925, Page 12

THE QUIET HOUR.

GOING hard for. the top. (By F. H. Gillingham.) An address delivered at the Service broadcast froth S-t. Martin s, on 18 oomeoife has said .life is Uke. an arrow it needs direction, a mark to aim at, and a propelling power It i» not a bad simile, and 1 want to de\e op that* 1 thought. What is the direction of your life, and what are you aiming at S' 1 don’t know to whom lam sP e * 1 v " ing but perhaps to some young man engrossed in sport. We have had a wonderful fortnight In on et ft r has been the Test Match, the . Match and the Eton and Ha no* Match.’ In rowing; there has been Henlev In tennis, there has been Wimbledon, and in sport, the OlympicRaces I daresay we have all em iod the prominent participators in these, and would like to be a Hobbs, or an Abrahams, or a Mile. Let,gen, or a member of that crew from Shrew shurv. It is given only to few to reach these Olympian heights, but rest assured of this you can. make yourself vastl) better than von are at present, il yon keep fit, if you practise hard, ancl n vou stick to it. The heights of great men gained and Were* 3 not obtained by sudden flight, But they while their companions slept, . , , Were toiling upward through the night.

I want however, as a keen sportsman to say this: don’t let sport absorb your whole interest- in life. Ihe apostle was talking sound common sense when he said. “Bodily oxeioise profiteth for a- little time.” Time passes very quickly, and soon comes the day when eye and foot and brain do not work so spontaneously or simultaneously as once they did, and when you are in the prime of life so far as your intellect goes, you are in the sere "and yellow leaf so far as your athletics go, and then, if you have lived for athletics, and athletics alone, your experience will he like the experience of a friend of mine. His name was once on everybody’s lipe, autograph hunters swarm round him, and in a crowd, people would nudge each other and point him, out'; “but now,” said lie, pathetically, “I can go through my old haunts and nobody ever turns his head; I’m a ’has been,’ a fallen star.” Bodily exercise, and athletic fame profit for u little time. Perhaps among my listeners are men whose work is their aim in'life; and here again I take it that if a man keeps,fit and works hard and sticks to it, success will be his. I hate “ca’ canny”; I am not looking at it from the political or Trade Union point of view; much may be said on that side ; but I am looking at it from the individual’s point of view. If a man doesnt’ work his hardest there comes a time when he can’t do so. If a man works second best, lie becomes second rate; and systematically and purposely to be obliged to work below your highest capacity, is to do yourself a permanent and irreparable injury. Most men work hard for money, and money is the legitimate recompense for toil. Money can buy most things; I know what money can buy, or rather it would be more accurate to say'l know what handicap it is to be without it. I am not speaking for myself, but having worked .for twenty , years in industrial centres. I. like other priests, have indelibly impressed upon my memory, the indignities of poverty. If you are working, hard, honestly, and cleanly, then I hope you will be successful in making monCy. There is no'harm in doing that; but when you have been successful, then comes the crux. There is such a lot to be done in the world. There are children 'who want to stay at school longer than fourteen. There are people who would love to have decent homes of their own, with just a hit of garden where a rose can bloom These should be made partly politioa 1 questions. Don’t let the impression get around that it is only those who belong to the Labour Party who care for these things; it is the monopoly of no Party, but the intimate concern of everyone who, has a brain that thinks, a heart that beats, and the means to help—and that does not only mean money. There is, so far as 1 know, only one parable in the Gospe 1 story which speaks of the Judgment Day. In the twenty-fifth chapter o' St. Matthew, we get the parable of tin sheen and goats, and the questions asked there are different from the questions we should expect. There if nothing there about polities or theo’ocrical creeds; there is nothing there about the Protestant or Anglo-Catholic the-e is nothing there about Capital orLabour Ivnt this simple searching test “How did you seize the opportunities that come in the way of every man the new rich end the new poor, the theorist and the academic, hew’ did ,”on seize these opportunities of doine something to help those who haven’t boon so -fortunate as yon.” .Remembo* • v hnt. Kinlino- savs of a. man nnrrmr l Tomlinson, who presents himself nt the "ate of heaven. He is comforted by and Peter says: Stand no, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high ‘The good that ye did for tne sake ol men or ever ye came to die The good that ye did for the sake ol men in little earth so lone,' — And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone. ‘This 1 have read in a book,’, he said, ‘and that was told to me, ■And this I have thought that nnothei man though of a Prince in Muscovy.’ The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade him clear.the path. And Peter twirled the jangling key f in weariness and wrath. ‘Ye have read, yon have heard, ye have thought,’ he said, and the tale if-

yet to run : By the worth of the body that' once y< had, give answer—-what ha’ ye done

I hope you will be successful in-yoiu efforts to get on if that is the mark yon me aiming at, but even that isn’t a full life, is it ? There is an inner life which is crying out for development—there is a character which needs to be built up. A good many peopa still think that Jesus -came to destroy. The religions life appears to be a life ol K iv >ny: up things. But Jesus always answers that He came not to destroy but to fulfil, not to preach the renunciation of capacity, but the consecration of capacity. Here is voui body, with all its vigorous life, it is part of your religion to fill out your body and keep it clean. Not the ascetic mail, but the athletic man is the pnvsieal representative of the Christuui life. Here is your mind with all the intellectual pursuits w’hich engross you here—hut religion comes hot to destroy the intellectual life —it wants, not an empty mind, but a full one. Th perils of this age come not ’from sehol irs but from smatterers—not from those 'who think they know it all. Here, again, are your passions, tempt-

ing you to sin. Are you to destroy them, fleeing from them like tne hermit from the world 'f No! You are not to destroy them, but to direct them to a passionate interest in better tilings. The soul is not saved by having cue force taken, out of it. How smalt a thing we make of the religious life, hiding it in a corner of human nature',serving it in a fragment of the-'week. And here stands .Jesus Christ at the centre of all our activities of body and mind and will and calls for the consecration of the whole life for the all round man—for the fulfilment of capac. ity. .1 began by saying life is like "a*n arrow. it must have its course; it must have its mark. It must have the power to go; and Jesus says, that the Christian lire too, has all three. It has intention; the decision which way to go. It lias determination ; the finding of a truth to reach. It has power; the inner dynamic of the life of Christ. In Him, says Scripture,, is not emptiness, but fulness of life. You have all heard of Irvine and Mallory, two. men whose names are now famous. Whether they ever reached the ton of Mount Everest or not will never be inowh. Some think they were coming down after reaching the top, others think that they had not reached the top before death overtook them, but ;t was said of them by an eye-witness that “when they were last seen they vere going hard for the top.” Whati wonderful epitaph! “when they were ! ast seen they were going hard for the top.” Let us try and do likewise. Our ’im is not Mount Everest, but Jesus Christ. let us “go hard for the top’’— the highest, holiest manhood. “I came not to destroy, but to fulfiil.”