SUNDAY COLUMN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 79, 30 March 1912, Page 3

SUNDAY COLUMN.

THE PLEA FOR MERCY. (By Rev. Canon Newbolt.) “God be merciful to me a sinner.— Luke 18 :13. Why is it so hard to repent? Why is it so hard to get back? Does God repel His wandering sons? Does the wilderness swallow them up? Do the dust and turmoil of the seeking church smother and crush? Has the prodigal lost the strength -which is to bring him back as he finds that the food of swine is a sorry supply? Is the pubican learning the bitter truth —sin is the punishment of sin? Is he struggling in the grip of habit which is trying to wrenen from him Ins freewill? It is an awful moment when the sinner who has been floating in motionless ease, on the face of a smooth and easy current, wishes to turn and begins to fear that he cannot. The stream is against him, has ho gone too far? His companions, habits, and cravings all drag him hack; he makes no progress; he is exhausted, and already, there sounds in his ear the faint roar, where the cataract, smoother and swifter than ever, leaps down the precipice and breaks in foaming waves on the rocks below, into which lie seems to be drawn with irresistible strength. I. Wo should anxiously watch the banks of life. Are we going backward, are these things which we passed at our Confirmation now reappearing? Those things which, we left liehind at our first Communion, now asserting themselves with startling clearness? Is the point for which we were then making high up on the

river, more distant and more dim? Are there things in your life which are not necessaries of which you say, “1 cannot resist them. 1 cannot do without them?” If you are in the grip of currents which at any moment may whirl you into the midstream of death, and which must in any case retard your progress forward. It is the bitter cry of the sinner wbo feels that he is forfeiting freedom. He is finding out that which he never realised before what is implied by the doctrine of the Atonement—all the suffering was caused by sin. 11. Do we know how we stand before Almighty God? Do wo know what the recording angel has in his book against us? Are wo trusting to that miserable delusion that the things which we bide from our neighbours, and oven from ourselves, can be hidden from the face of Almighty God ? Some men’s sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment, and some they follow after. Our Lord represents, as one of the terrors of the last day, the element of surprise when at last the soul finds out its true condition. “God bo merciful to me a sinner” may be a very useful confession, if we moan it, but not of it is only another way of saying, “I am a sinner and I know it, I am a sinner and I don’t suppose 1 shall ever lie anything else, and I hope God wont be hard upon me, because after all there are plenty worse than I am, and man at best is frail.” ’ HI. Repentence crowned by amendment. And our Lord would exhibit the publican as one who would crown his repentence by amendment. “He goes down to his house justified rather vhan the other.” Don’t let us 'make a mistake. Just as some people think they imitate the poor widow if they give a farthing to the collection, so they think they imitate the publican if they say they are sinners while they look upon good works as a dangerous form of sin. To ask God to be merciful to us sinners does not mean that He should let ns go on sinning and kindly overlook it, in consideration of a touching posture of a humble word. But it does mean "that He accepts the sorrowful sighing over a shameful part as an earnest desire of a good life for the future, and if a conversation which, looking at the merits of Jesus Christ-in all humility may say, “I am not ashamed of what 1 have been, being by God’s grace what I am.” The sense of sin, we are told, is absent largely from this generation; if so it is a serious thing, for it means the negation of all progress and the absence of all excellence. A man can never be a musician who has lost his delicate sense of tone, so that- he does not know' what is meant by being out of tune." A riian can never be a great painter who has lost all sense of anatomical fitness and' proportion. A man can never be a great scholar wbo has lost all ear for delicate distinctions and all love for accuracy. And so to have no, sense of sin means that life has lost its correcting standard and its steadying sense of excellence. The German tragedian has taken the genesis of deadly sin and shown -its fearful working in the lives of those affected by it. We see the dying out of sunlight from 1 life, the comfort from religion, the dignity from character, the wrecking of all finer instincts, and the gradual gathering up of the unrelieved misery which follows its consummation. * TABLOIDS. He does the most for God’s great world who does his best in his own little world. There is ’no disappointment to those whose will is buried in the will of God. Lord help me .from day to day 1 In 1 such a self-forgetful way, That even when 1 kneel to pray My prayer shall be for—others. Help me in all the work I do To ever be sincere and trite, And know that all I do for yon Must needs be done for—others.