SUNDAY READING

Taranaki Daily News, 13 July 1929, Page 17

SUNDAY READING

By

REV. A. H. COLLINS

give, And make me more than eonqueroi in the strife.

A SHABBY RELIGION.

“Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble.'’ —P.salm C.vii., 28. The whole Psalm is a record of human calamity and Divine deliverance. There are men wandering in pathless deserts,, hungry and faint, and with no city to dwell in. There are prisoners pining in noisome prisons, and shut out from the light of common day. There are sick folk loathing all manner of meats and drawing near to the gate of the grave. There are sailors tossing on the restless sea, reeling to and fro like drunken men, and are at their wits end. In each case the result was the same. These imperilled and exposed men “cried unto the Lord in their trouble,” and man’s extremity was God’c, opportunity. “He bringeth them out of their distresses.” The Psalm reflects the wilderness experience of the twelve tribes.

EPITOMISES MODERN LIFE.

But it has wider meanings. It epitomises our modern life. These things are happening now. Nothing is surer, and nothing calls for louder praise than God’s appearing in times of weakness and peril. Your life must be strangely unlike the life of ordinary mortals if you have not sometimes been at your wits’ end, and been driven to call upon God for help. Your child sickened, and the friendly doctor frankly told you the case was serious, the young life was hanging on a brittle thread and might snap any moment, and your heart rose to God in a storm of petition. By some combination of unfriendly circumstance your business went wrong, and *ruin seemed likely, and you asked God’s counsel and help. A foolish word or hasty action created strained relations which threatened the rupture of a valued friendship, and none save Heavenly Friend could unravel the tangled skein, and your cried to Heaven. There may have been nothing tragic or romantic in your life, no gloomy prison or staggering ship, and yet we are moving amid things that are very brittle.

Alas, how easily tilings go wrong, A sigh too deep or ft kiss too long, Then follows a mist and a drenching rain, And life is never the same again. THE GERMAN RETREAT. ’ The danger may not be personal, but national. When the triumphant German army "was sweeping down on Paris in 1914, then suddenly swerved, and gave up, Lord Roberts was sitting in counsel with Kitchener, and a telegram was handed in telling of the unexpected retreat. Lord Roberts, who was a Godly man, exclaimed, “Only God Almighty could have done this,” and Kitchener said, “Someone must have been praying,” and neither of these men was a pious weakling. The timidity which is afraid to acknowledge such deliverance and the ingratitude which allows their memory to clip, are unworthy of God’s Englishmen. It is out of such experiences we raise our E'benezcrs. Ingratitude between man and man is sin; but is there a sin more grievous than the ingratitude of man to his Maker? NOT HONOURABLE. Yet our text suggests that unworthy as ingratitude is, there is something not lees shameful. To reserve our prayers for hours of danger; only to turn to God when human resources fail, and fly to Him only in an emergency, is surely not honourable, for to do that is to | reduce religion to a social convenience, j You would call it mean in any man to avoid his friend, except when he wanted help. If in prosperous times you cut your friend on the street, and in adversity sought him out and solicited his aid, you would call it mean. But is that honourable between man and God, which would be accounted dishonourable between you and a friend? Is it right to make a convenience of the Almighty? When London was swept by the plague and the death cart rumbled through the streets and the bellman cried, “Bring out your dead!” the hearts of men were shaken. The city churches were thronged. Then came the fire of London, which cleansed the city by consuming thousands of rookeries which bred the plague, and with the staying of the plague the churches were empty, so that it passed into a proverb, “No plague, no paternoster.” No plague, no prayer; no emergency, no religion! I don’t know what you call that, but I call it meanness. It was right for the people to turn to God for help in their dark hour, but it was not right, it was ■mean, to return to their evil ways. A man may be shabby in religion as in anything else, hut if he is shabby in his religion he is shabby indeed.

He puts his threepence in the plate, . Then meekly shuts his eyes, Glad that his weekly rent’s been paid For mansions in the skies.

Tell me, isn't it shabby to make a convenience of religion? Isn’t it shabby to use the Almighty, and not worship Him? Prayer is not a charm. Religion is not a panic remedy.' The cross is not a hre escape. The man who thinks of God as a last resort and forgets Him in prosperous times has a good deal to learn.

John Oxenham recalls the story of a" disreputable sailor, who when his ship was in distress, and the rest of the crew was labouring to save her, fell on his knees and began to pray. But the skipper kicked him back to duty, and with scornful words said, "Keep your prayers for fine weather.”

A POOR RELIGION - .

Surely the skipper was right in principle. Foul weather prayers are not worth much. An emergency religion is a poor religion. I would set no bounds to the mercy of God —none. I do not deny the reality of death-bed repentances, but I remember how one dying man was,asked if he was afraid to die, answered, “No, not afraid, 'but I am ashamed.” Salvation is wider and worthier than escape from doom, and creeping into safety. Salvation means service, growth in character, expansion of powers. Salvation is not being put somewhere, it is being made something. You must not misconstrue my meaning. I would not wound but win. If you are at your wits’ end, you should rise and call upon God, and Ho will not turn away from your prayer. But in the name of all that ig honour-

able do not keep religion for an emergency. You need God’s help to live and serve, more than in your last mortal hour. Teach me to live! ’Tis easier far to <Uc Gently and silently to pass away, On earth's long night to close the heavy eye And waken in the realms of <dorlous day. Teach me that harder lesson, how to live, To serve Thee in the darkest paths of lite; Arm me for conflict now, fresh vigour

THE NATURAL WAY

Religion is not for an ' emergency alone; it is the soul’s natural way of living. A man without religion is like a spirited horse without bit or bridle, or shall I say like a ship without captain or compass. Yet there are people who imagine they could do well enough if Bibles and churches and ministers were sunk in the sea. It is as if a man with a broken leg should think to better himself by thrusting .doctors and their splints out of doors. They did not 'break his leg, but only propose to set it, and under the poorest of them the limb will do better than if the fractured bone were left unsplinted. Yet some regard religion as an unfriendly influence, while for others it is like a stop in an organ, which can be pulled out or shut off at will. On Sunday morning we pull it out and for a time the music sounds, but on Sunday evening we push it in, and have no more use for it till the week is ended. Religion is our Sunday stop.

We arc not of those— With whom the melodies abide, Of the everlasting chime; Who carry music in their heart, Through dusky lane and wrangling mart. Plying their task with busier feet Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.

At the close of her. evening prayers a child said, “Good-bye God; good-bve Jesus. I’m going to Boston to-morrow.” That is a shabby religion.

TO ESCAPE HELL.

There are few men, even amongst the most -worldly, who do not expect to be converted before they die; but it is a selfish, mean, sordid conversion, they want just to escape hell, and to secure heaven. Such a man says, “I have had my pleasures, and the flame has gone out in the fire-place of my heart. I have taken all the good on one side; now I must turn about, if I would take i all the good on the other.” They desire just experience enough to make a key to turn the lock of the gate of the celestial city. They wish “a hope,” just as men get a title to an estate. No matter whether they improve the property or not, if they have the title safe. A “hope” is to them like a passport, which one keeps quietly in his pocket till the time for the journey, and then produces it; or like life-preservers, which hang useless around the vessel until the hour of danger comes, when the captain calls upon every passenger to save himself, and then they are taken down, and blown up, and each man, with his hope under his arm, strikes out for the land; Land so. such men would keep their religious hope hanging until death comes, and then, take it down and inflate it, that it may buoy them up, and float them over the dark river to the heavenly shore. What a shabby religion! " I am not using the language of accusation but of friendly remonstrance when I say that w r e who preach are in part to blame. We have stressed the idea of rewards and punishments too much, and too lightly the rights of God to our reasonable service. Hence the desires and cravings we call religion arc egoistic; our longings are for rest and safety rather than for God. The idea most prevailing in prayer, and hymns, and pulpit appeals, is for private salvation, comfort and happiness, here and hereafter. The selfishness we carry into religion is seen in the reaction, for the need of God vanishes with the dread of hell. Prayer is narrowed down to asking for healing of the body and the soul, and the efficacy of prayer is regarded and judged by receiving such things. God bless me and my wife, .Our Jock and his wife, We four and no more.”

A WRONG VIEWPOINT,

We pray our family may prosper, our business grow, our church increase, and our Empire expand. We sing ‘‘Rule Britannia” rather than “Come Kingdom of our God.” Even when we look forward to heaven, it is not of our nearer approach and our fuller likeness to God, we think most, but the cessation of care and strife. Few of us enter into the mind of the Arabian mystic who prayed, “If I worship Thee, 0 God, for fear of hell, send me to hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of heaven, deny me heaven, but if I worship Thee for Thyself, withhold not from me the Eternal Beauty”; or of the Christian poet who sang:

“Not Thy gifts I seek 0 Lord; Not Thy gifts, but Thee. What were all Thy boundless store, Without Thyself? What less or more ? Not Thy gifts, but Thee.”

A BLIGHTING VICE.

Selfishness, in any of its protean forms, is a blighting vice, and it comes stealthily, but selfishness in religion is really a‘contradict ion in terms, yet who that scans his own heart does not find it lurking there and knows it is un-Divine? The Christian God desires the welfare of all men everywhere; his love is boundless in extent and individual in application; his purpose of good sweeps through creation, comprehending every child of his and labouring for a transformed society on earth and in the ■heavens. This, as Paul says, is “the eternal purpose which he purposed in ! Christ.” Nothing that we ever dreamed of good for any man or f° r tlie ra€e ias touched the garment’s hem of the good which He purposes and toward which He works. He is not an individual after the fashion of a pagan deity, who, like | Baal, must be awakened from his sleep

and. besought to do gopd deeds for men. Rather every dim and flickering desire our hearts ever have known for mankind’s good has been lighted at the central fire of his eternal passion for the salvation of his children. As Whittier sang it: “All that I feel of pity Thou hast known Before I was; my best is all Thy own. From Thy great heart of goodness mine but draws "Wishes and prayers; but thou, 0 Lord, wilt do, In thine own time, by ways I cannot see, AH that I feel when I am nearest Thee!”

Such is the Christian God. Beware a shabby religion.