Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 12, Issue 46, 11 February 1905, Page 12

Sunday at Home.

THE NEW YEAR. (Sermon by the Very Rev. Dean Pigou, cf Bristol.) “ Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.” —Gen. xxxii. i.

At the time to which these words refer Jacob was an exile. Twentyone years had passed since he turned his back on the home of his childhood. We are familiar with the story of his earlier and eventful life. He received a Divine command to return home. Beset with misgivings and fears, he nevertheless is obedient to the Divine command. As he journeys, the ‘ angels of God ’ meet him. It was not his first experience of angelic and reassuring visions. He had seen angels ascending and descending the ladder that reaches from heaven above to earth below, those ‘ ministering spirits ’ who told the houseless wanderer that, little as he may have thought it, there was One who preserved him in his ‘ going out and in his coming in.’ The angels met him again at a great crisis in his life, at a time when he would specially need and appreciate this pledge that, in the plain path of duty and of obedience and with full confidence in God, he would be guided and protected. Ha takes good heart, though untrodden be the way before him.

We stand on the threshold of a New Year. Such a season is to each of us more or less a crisis in cur life. Whatever our past experience is we may be reminded ‘we have not gone this way heretofore.’ At no time probably is there more reflection on the past, more thinking of what lies before us, than there is now. It is good and seasonable for each one of us to be reminded by the departure of the year and the entry of a new, that we have each of us a life to live with its purpose, duties, opportunities, influence, responsibilities ; that we have an immortal soul to be saved ; an allotted period in which to ‘ work out our salvation with fear and trembling ’; a work to be done ere our time for doing it come to an end ; a part to play on life’s stage ; an eternity to face. Bach new-born year brings with it not so much a sense of certainty as of uncertainty. We cannot be certain that we shall be alive on earth next New Year’s Bay. The longer we live amid life’s uncertainties the more we feel that Deo Volente must be a saving clause. It is very trite, bub it is very true, that we do not know what a day may bring forth. Who of us, mentally recalling the past, could have foreseen or guessed much that has come to pass ? We cannot divine futurity. Socalled ‘ spiritualists ’ cannot lift the veil which screens the future from our view. We set out on a new year with projects,-plans, intentions, res Ives, but the thought of uncertainty is a haunting, waylaying thought. We may live or we may not live to see all the plans we propose carried out. How, then, are you and I facing the New Year p Are we each of us going on our way under the cons-ciously-felt guidance and realised protection of God, which his redeemed children from past happy experience feel to be their strength and stay ? There is such a fact as * living without God in the world.’ It seems almost impossible for anyone, to live without God. I am not now thinking of an atheist, though surely he himself must be an omniscient being be-

fore he can say there is bo God. I am not thinking of a considerable number of our fellow men who, while not professed atheists, seem indifferent to all spiritual truth. But I am thinking of not a few within church walls who have a settled, profound belief in the existence of God. It is with them more than an inherited, traditional faith. They would be shocked and paified were they labelled ‘ atheists.’ But we grow up from childhood. The voices of days gone by are hushed in silence. We mix freely with the world. We become by degrees absorbed in its occupations and its rivalries. We become infected with the secularising spirit. We dread singularity. We fear decision for God. We become neglectful of private prayer. Our Bible remains for days unopened aud unread. Holy Communion becomes increasingly seldom. Quiet communion with God becomes foreign to our more active and restless habits. Everything we purpose is not referred to Him. We get to look on things coming and going as a matter of course, if not of chance. We lose touch with God, and, seeking no help, we get no help from Him. We have to go on our way, and no angels meet us. Life is unblessed. Something is wanting to make it happier, to lessen the sense of exile from our true home, to encourage us to feel and realise, not by a ‘ vision of angels,’ but by an indefinable consciousness, that we are being guided and protected. We do not pause to realise that each passing year brings us so much nearer to the great event of going at last into the presence of God. I pray of you, do not live without God ! Do not lose touch with your very best Friend, in Whose favour is life. Pray that he will give yon, by the teaching and illumination of the Holy Ghost, to realise His fatherly love in Christ Jesus, that you may have the happy, cleansed coosciouaness of the adopted child. Then you enter on a new year, and your life, however commonplace it may seem, is hallowed and sanctified; You live confessing the sins of days past, it may be, specially at Holy Communion. He meets you on the way of penitence with the message of forgiveness. He opens some doors of usefulness and gives*you all needful grace. Some fear, misgiving, foreboding haunts your mind. He meets you on the threshold and gives His angels charge concerning you. » Your spiritual life is at a low ebb. He will give you a fresh unction of the Holy Ghost. You cry, ‘ Lord, I believe.. With so much doubting on every side, help Thou mine unbelief,’ and He will increase your faith. He purposes to give you soma added happiness, and He will help you with special grace to receive it thankfully, to fill your heart with praise. And should this year prove to be your last, blessed will be your deathbed and dying hours if, when your journey comes to an end, ministering angels shall meet your departed spirit on its way home, and your death-song be Mahanaim.