Religious Life

Southland Times, Issue 24592, 14 November 1941, Page 7

Religious Life

By

ICHTHUS

Fire! Fire!

Recently I had occasion to travel north by the early morning train. Passing through Gore my eye was caught by a gap in the Main Street immediately opposite the railway station, where some business premises had been destroyed by fire. All that was left was a dismal ruin: a burned-out wall still stood, and lying about were some heaps of smoke-blackened bricks. All the other walls and the roof were gone, and the dreary ruins lay open to the sky and the weather. It set me thinking of the mysterious element of fire. What is fire? Materially, so a chemist or a physicist might tell us, it is a strange phenomenon that always attends certain chemical changes. Yet that would leave us still asking, ‘ But what actually is fire?” And who could answer? Fire has been associated with human life from the dawn. The Greeks said that Prometheus brought it down from heaven. We cannot conceive human life, or imagine a world, without fire. It has made human life and civilization possible. It is one of our greatest boons—and one of our deadliest enemies. It is our daily servant and helper—and our implacable foe. What images that little word of four letters conjures up: the striking of a match and the fiery burning sun; the friendly hearth and an erupting volcano, the light by which I write these words and Europe’s blazing cities. Philosophers, poets, prophets, scientists, manufacturers, farmers, housewives, and the common man, they are all concerned with it. Little wonder if my mind ran on over such a subject. All that can be said here is very little, and we must order our thoughts. A GOOD SERVANT That is the first point to make. How much we owe to the beneficient and faithful service of our friend, the fire. With it we light our way, warm our homes, cook our food, smelt our iron, shape our tools and drive the engines of our production and transport. It has been said that civilization began when a man and a woman lighted a fire and sat down beside it. There was the genesis of the home. It was fire that made possible the industrial age which gave Britain her wealth and expansion. Fire fashioned her tools and machines and, displacing the wind, drove her ships with greater efficiency across the seven seas. An early school of Greek philosophers held that fire is the primary substance of which the universe is composed. Certainly it could be argued that it is the element which has fashioned the Empire to which we belong. Our lives are as it were, set in a matrix of fire; our daily life centres in the fact of fire. The first thing I do every morning is to strike a match and set it to the kitchen fire. And my last duty every night is to set the fire ready for kindling in the morning. Do I go out with the tractor to plough? Fire made it and the plough. Fire drives it. The seed I sow will not germinate without the radiant heat of that central fountain of fire, the burning sun. I come into dinner and it has been cooked by fire. I sit down after dinner to smoke a pipe. That, too, is fire. Over the way my neighbour is cutting his gorse hedges. He piles the cuttings in heaps and bums them with fire. Last week the life of his wife was saved by a timely, skilful operation. The surgeon deserves all credit for his skill. But he could not have performed the operation without his instruments. And fire fashioned them. Were I a poet I should write a sonnet at least in praise of fire. Were I a minister, leading the prayers of my people, sometimes I would give thanks for our friendly helper and good servant, fire. A BAD ENEMY But fire must always be servant and not master. It must be held sternly and rigorously in thrall. It must never be allowed to escape the leash. Long years ago, when I was but a boy, I heard a sermon I have never forgotten. It was based on an Old Testament text and its title ran, “Captain’s foot on the neck of a King.” Well, fire is a king on whose neck the captain’s foot must ever be set. You lift that foot for a single moment at your peril. The Bible says that man was made in the image of God with dominion over the creatures. Fire is one of the creatures that must always be kept under strictest dominion. Give this good servant but a moment’s lease and he becomes a mad, ravaging destroyer. His lust knows no bounds. His appetite grows by what it feeds on. He will serve in a home and family for generations. Then in a night he will leap up and destroy master, mistress, and children. He will eat up the house of which for so many years he has been the magic centre. He will devour the whole city, and lay waste whole lands. All the work of long, long centuries he will lay in ashes in a night. Our choicest beauty, the treasure and the glory of our race, he will destroy pitilessly, with crackling laughter. OTHER FIRES On such a theme one’s pen runs on. I must turn to ourselves. “The proper study of mankind is man.” He, too, is a creature of fire. Actually, electricity—that is the word we use for a mystery the real nature of which eludes us—electricity leaps along our nerves and crackles from our hair. Ah, but those other fires that flame and burn within us! Love, the desire for knowledge, aspiration, ambition, anger, will, conscience and all the appetites. How strangely these two aspects of fire work out in us. What a poor thing is man when he has no fire in him! What a dismal ruin when the fierce fires within him, escaping control, have burned him up! God give us fire, fierce, and continuing. But God give us to control and direct our fire that it be always our servant and never our master. The thought strikes me that perhaps there is more in the much-criticized Biblical hell than meets the eye. If we let the fires within us take charge what do they make but hell? Let the fires within us loose, till they roar away beyond control, and is it strange that the end should be described as a pit of fire, endlessly destroying, burning in greedy consuming lust, that is forevei’ unslaked? I recall, also, that it is fire that cleanses and purifies, and is the ultimate test of worth. It is written in the good Book that when Moses first met God what he saw was a bush that burned and was not consumed, that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that “Our God is a consuming fire,” and that John speaks of “One who shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” “Behold,” as again the Bible says, “behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.”