SUNDAY READING

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1747, 30 August 1905, Page 73

SUNDAY READING

Clergymen and all interested in religious work are invited to send news items and other contributions suitable for publication in this column to “Mizpali/' care of Editor blew Zealand Mail/' Wellington.

IN CLOUDLANDS REALM.

(By a Banker.)

How varied is'the aspect of the firmament above us, ever changing, over diversified and subject to sudden mutations and transformations. Now the entire canopied dome of the heavens is an intensely deep brilliant azure, vying with the sapphire itself in the sptendoni of its hue: unflecked by cloud, save a few scattered wisps and tufts of ieatnery ice spangles—the cirrus, or euri-clouo —suspended far up in the atmosphere in the regions of perpetual, frost. Ui now irregular masses of pure white vapour dazzling in their lustrous splendour, are rapidly fleeting across the sky, soon, as they gather in volume, changing: from snowy white to a murky, threatening blackness, knotting-out xiom view every vestige of that glorious cerulean ether, and shrouding the landscape in gloom. But they pass away on to the distant horizon, where they He banked up in a long black line, the far off letterings of rolling thunder betokening that they are discharging the viaJs of their wrath elsewhere. . , And then appear upon the scene rapidly moving clouds assuming ail man.'M i of grotesque and fantastic shapes, .. .do-antic mis-shapen primeval animal, a very monster of deformity, pursuing a horde of distorted mongrels, hah dragon half sea-serpent; here a regiment of prancing centaurs m regular array; or here a number oi i ounded cloudlets in the semblance,of a flock at rest. But these too pass away, to be succeeded by long straight lines of stratus cloud, hanging suspended low <!mni near the earth, some even resting upon its surface, veiling the vadey bcuesu.h a sharply defined mantle oi cold voile mist. But of all the multiform divers'tiies iri which clomlland so abounds, perhaps the most beautiful, though sometimes almost terrible, of them all is the lurid bank of thunder cloud sometimes Mrn

on the horizon at sunset. Tho sky, immediately above the cloud-bank, is a flaming orange, shading from a livid, glowing voilet into a coppery umber, which, as tho sun sinks deeper and deeper, changes into a eombrous, livid gloom. The cloud itself is a deep purple, but its irregular and oft times serrated edges are on fire in a burning fringe of flashing gold, its lustrous resplendence enhanced and intensified by the dusky gloom of the cloud itself. And then, as the last rays of the disappearing luminary have died out, all these varied hues vanish away, and all is blackness and darkness.

And so with life ; for the blackest and darkest of clouds has most surely and most certainly a golden or a silver lining which soon must permeate the whole and dissipate the darkness if the Sun of Righteousness illumine the;-soul, and by the power of His Spirit reveal the great fact that He, the Redeemer, has opened the gates of Paradise to all who plead with their Heavenly Father His merits and mediation. But if this is postponed to a more convenient time, which probably will never come, the recording angel may utter that terrible doom—- “ The harvest is past, the summer is ended and they are not saved.”