SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVII, Issue 273, 17 October 1927, Page 9

SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION

There was a largo attendance at St. Andrew’s Church yesterday afternoon when the annual distribution of the Palmerston North Sunday School Union’s prizes was held. Rev. H. T. Peat presided. Mr G. H. Stiles, superintendent of St. Paul’s Sunday School, assisted Mr T. It. Hodder in tho distribution of the prizes. ltev. Mr Inglis opened the proceedings with prayer, while ltev. J. Milburn Stewart recited tho concluding prayer. During tho service, Rev. J. Ernest Parsons delivered an address to the children, taking as his subject, “Jesus, the model of your life.” Taking the children back to the time of tho early Romans, Mr Parsons described how the fathers of that period always placed before their children statues of the great men of the Empire, the painters, the poets, the soldiers, who had taken their share in making the Roman Empire the great and powerful one it was. So,' in this way, the parents had put before their children tho ideals which they wanted them to imitate; and so it could bo with the children of to-day. And they' could not do better than take as their model Jesus Christ, who was tho greatest man who ever lived, the only man in the 'world’s history who was faultless, and therefore the only man in history who could provide an ideal for every child to follow. George Tyndale, Mr Parsons went on, had modelled Jesus in terra-cotta, and with Him were three little children. The wonder of the whole statue was, however, that the three children were depicted as entirely unafraid, and that there was on Jesus’s face a beautiful expression of kindness—which was one ideal provided by Jesus, an ideal which every child could, and should, try its best to live up to. Jesus had been kind always. Then Jesus could be taken as a model of courage—an example was the way He had set His face to Jerusalem when Ho had known that there crucifixion awaited Him, as was described in the New Testament. Here tho children had before them a wonderful example to follow, though it would be difficult. It was not only wanted that children should love good, but that they should hato anything that was bad. And, lastly, Jesus, could be taken as a model of helpfulness—look at tho thousands and thousands of people Jesus had helped when He had been on earth. So, Mr Parsons urged the children, it was all very well for anyone to stand aside and give advice, but what Jesus wanted every child to do was to go and give a hand to everyone needing help. And how could Jesus be copied? Rev. Parsons concluded. In much the same way as writing was copied in a school copybook—by closely looking at the example. The trouble was that it often occurred in life as it did in the school copybook—we looked at each other, or we looked at own writing instead of always looking at the model.