SUNDAY READING

Taranaki Daily News, 28 September 1929, Page 18 (Supplement)

SUNDAY READING

By

BETWIXT THE PULL OF TWO WORLDS. “But I am in a strait betwixt the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is very far better; yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake.” —Phil I. 23. One difficulty in dealing with Saint Paul’s letters is that his mind is so agile and his thought so deep. The intensity of his feeling makes his language seem broken.and incomplete. Besides his mind ranges over so great a variety of subjects, yet his touch is always swift and sure. Ab the child said of the stars, “They are gimlet holes in the floor of Heaven to let the glory through.” So the gimlet of Paul’s simplest words shed light on other worlds. In this chapter the Apostle speaks of some who preached Christ, of faction. Nevertheless he rejoiced in the thought that Christ is preached though the motive was wrong. Paul is in bonds ; and imprisonment for the Gospel, yet he is assured that truth will prevail. He foresees that bonds and violence He ahead, but he desires that whether he dies a martyr or lives on to minister, he may play the roan. Then comes the thought of life and death, and he is in a dilemma which to chose. If he lives on there will be pain and struggle; if he departs this life he will enter on the life which is larger and lovelier, in the presence of Jesus Christ. He feels the pull of two-worlds. Heaven draws like a magnet, but earth has its attractions too, and between these two forces he is tossed and distracted. He is the minister of Christ’s Gospel, and under his ministry churches had been founded, but these ehurches were like children who needed a father’s care, and to leave them would be to expose them to peril and possible extinction. This makes him eager to stay. But he could not be insensible, to the attraction of beiim with Christ and exploring the hidden splendours of the upper world.* If he consulted his own heart this happy warrior would welcome the breaking up of this earthly tabernacle and go home. If he consults the needs of his converts he will stay on to minister to them. So he writes “I am in a strait betwixt the two.” VARYING MOODS OF THE SOUL. The moods of the soul vary, and the Apostle’s mood is one to which few of us are strangers. The thought of life and death is present to all eave the utterly frivolous, but it affects men differently. One man thinks of life and death and desires life. He has his plans, ambitions, drcams. He builds his castles in the air. He wants to build up a prosperous business, give his children a good start.-” One man wants to write a book, another to paint a picture, another to dear his farm. Others have the ambition to render some public service, and see some reform accomplished, and within certain limits the desire is not unworthy or merely selfish. But another man thinks of life and death, and covets the latter. Life has been hard and the fruit bitter. Friends have passed hence. He has lost his fortune, outlived his usefulness, or fallen a prey to some fell disease, andhis cry is “My soul choseth death rather than life; my soul is weary of life.” The mood may not be the best, and yet it is not unintelligible. But for the same man to oscillate between the two moods and feel the attractions of life and death at one and the same time, and not be able to decide between them is not common. A STRIKING CONTRAST. There ie a passage in our great national poet which illustrates the contrast between the Christian and nonChristian view. Hamlet is startled and oppressed with the discovery that his uncle has slain his father and married his mother, and that on him rests the duty of avenging the double crime. The burden weighs him down. He wants to be rid of it, and in a frenzy exclaims: — To l>e or not to*be; that is the question; Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer, The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, dr take up arms against a sea of trouble; And by opposing, end them so to die to sleep No more, and by a sleep to say, we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. But Hamlet recollects that sleep is not always dreamless; sleep is often troubled by dreams and a rude awakening. So lie adds:— In that sleep of death what dreame may come true, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. And lie asks, who would bear the troubles and vexations of life when he could end them, were it not for fear of what may come after? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary lilc, But that the dread of something after death ? The undiscovered country from whose bourne No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear the ills we have Than fly to those we know not of? Thue conscience doth make cowards of us all. The passage supplies a contrast to the Apostle’s way of thinking. Hamlet is a man of the world, thinking of life and the Beyond as a respectable. Pagan might; whereas Saint Paul thinks of the same subject from the Christian standpoint. The one would gladly have done with life, but that he is frightened back by the thought of “something after death.” The other has no shivering dread of the hereafter, but accepts life for the sake of its opportunity and service. The one regards life and death as ills to be escaped, and knows not which is the greater ill; the other thinks of life and death as blessings to be coveted, and is at a loss to know which to desire. For the one death is a sleep in the dark, and for the other it is

REV. A. H. COLLINS

passing out of darkness into high eternal moon. ST. PAUL’S BELIEF. *j» Our text has this further use. ■ For whatever we may think of the future life, Saint Paul believed in the immediate conscious life of the soul in the presence of Christ, and that life transcends our . present experience. It is “very far better.” Paul does Hot call it “death” at all, and in this he is in harmony with the New Testament, where the sou] is said to "fall on sleep,’’ to “enter into rest,” to be “absent from the body and l>e present with t|ie Lord.” The Apostle regards his own death as “a departure,” as being “offered up.” To him the decay of physical powers was as the pulling up of the tent pegs, and the folding up of the tent, in which the traveller slept for the night. It was a departure to “a place prepared for you,” but the soul would not be homeless. Death was not even a temporary suspension of activity, but an exodus from one state of living, conscious, active life, into another' state of sustained,’ more conscious and keen life. Matthew Arnold's lines are not true of Jesus Christ -. — •' 1 . Lo, He is dead, far off He lies. In the lone Syrian town;' And on His grave with shining eyes. The Syrian stars look down.' JESUS ALIVE TO-DAY.' Neither are the words true 5 of Saint Paul. Jesus is alive to-day, and the key of the grave hangs at His girdle, and “Where I am, there shall ye be also,” is Christ’s word for His 'people. To be ‘‘with Christ which is very far better.” In what sense ;“better?” I can only hint at the answer. Better in the purity ; of the soul. Better in the range of our knowledge. Better in the occupation that will engage our released and expanded powers. Better in the depth and endurance of our immeasurable blessedness. In the presence of Christ the cup of life will be full forever. Time writes no wrinkles on the brow of the redeemed. Everything lives and lives for aye. The rivers are rivers of life, the trees are the trees of life, the crowns are the crowns of life. Nothing fades, nothing dies, for death itself is dead. These are only suggestions of the meaning ef the phrase, ‘With Christ which is very far better.” NOTHING MORBID OR UNREAL. One thing that impresses me is the sobriety and the sanity of the whole passage, and indeed of the whole of the New Testament on the subject of life, and life’s after-shine. There is nothing morbid or unreal. You will look to Paul’s writings in vain for belittling and disparaging language about the world and life, or for sentimental and mawkish words about heaven. To the apostle life is a beautiful . and sacramental gift, “earth is not grey but rosy.”. The world is not -vile, for God made it and pronounced it “good.” If heaven is better than earth, how splendid it must be! Man is not vile; he is the creature of eternity and infinity. The world is not getting worse, hut better and better. The human rare is on the inarch, and our songs are of the moving. Out of the darkness of the night, The world 'rolls into light, ’ It is day-dawn everywhere. THE HEAVEN OF JESUS. And the heaven of Jesus is not a state of ecstacy, and dreaming and luxurious indolence; it is homelike, and festive, for it is the place of service and eternal progression. Saint Paul’s desire to live was not to gain something for himself, but for the sake of others who needed him to live, and Saint Paul’s desire to depart was not in order to escape trial and struggle, and enjoy eternal rapture, but to find the larger, fuller, freer life in the company of Christ. It was not absorption but expansion he desired. It is not easy to hold the balance and escape bondage to sense' and time, to see life steadily and enjoy God’s good gifts. Neither is it easy to be devout and yet not pietistic. But it is an insult Ho- the Creator to say nasty things about the world He has made, and believe the majority of the- race is doomed to destruction, and it is a shocking travesty on the meaning of the cross. But it is a profane thing to regard life as the chance to make a pile and live a comfortable, selfcentred life. Life is for service. Measure thy life by loss, not gain, Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine provident. For love standeth in love's sacrifice. SOME PLAIN WORDS. Dr. Henry Howard, addressing a New York audience, used these plain words: “It is only in great crises of panic or disorder, of disease or death, that the great things of life are forced upon our reluctant vision. In these revealing moments the great basic verities are laid bare, the veil of the visible gets rudely rent, and the spiritual makes its appeal to us in voices which demand to be heard. An appeal, alas! too often rendered futile in advance, because it is made io faculties that have deteriorated through long disuse.. "Tn dealing with such matters we require a totally different kind of keenness from that which is called for in the market and the exchange., “You city men, with your finely-train-ed faculty for high "finance, you who are gifted with an almost uncanny prescience in regard to wheat and wool, coal and iron, steel and oil,'stocks and shares, options and futures, gluts and shortages; you who “Know the seasons when to take Occasion by the hand and make The bounds of commerce wider yet.” will be slow to believe me when I tell you that all your cuteness' and Wall Street wit which make distant exchanges wait for the word' that may shake or stabilise the markets of the world, all this high-power proficiency, this big business capacity, which makes you captains of industry and princes of commerce in the world of men, will not advance you one single step in things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. In these matters of tihe spirit, in spite of all your cleverness, you could be your own little child —‘for of such is the Kingdom of "Heaven —

while the simplest homesteader on the land whose heart is right with God and has learned to hold communion with the Unseen Holy would leave you leagues behind. “A business proposition such as you could settle at a moment’s thought as easily and as automatically as you pull up your socks, would, of course, daze him into a deaf and dumb bewilderment; but, on the other hand, what would bo ABC to him in the realm of spiritual perception and interpretation would plunge you into hopeless perplexity, without the shadow of a clue.” We, like .Saint Paul, stand betwixt the pull of two worlds—the world of physical sensations, and the world .of the Holy and the ideal. It is not a rational use of life to yield to the one and ignore the other. We should "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things which are God’s.” For though not easy it is possible in no cryptical sense to "make the best of both worlds;” it is possible

to rejoice in God’s handiwork, and live a life glad and free, yet enter into that bright world no foe can invade, and from which no'friend departs. 1