SUNDAY READING

Taranaki Daily News, 5 October 1929, Page 19 (Supplement)

SUNDAY READING

By

REV. A. H. COLLINS

PAUL THE MYSTIC. “For Christ’s sake I have -learned to count my former gains a loss; indeed, I count anything a loss compared with the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”— Phil, Ift, 7, 8. Saint Paul was a mystic, one of the long, shining rank of those who have refused to yield to the tyranny ..of the temporal, ami lived in the power of the world to come. “To say this will be to condemn him in the. eyes of those who live in the world of physical sensations, and regard the things of the world of spiritual and eternal realities, as the dreams and impractical crochet- < eers.” But wisdom. ii? justified of . her . • children. For as Dr. Rufus Jones reminds us, ,‘ithe mystic is not a peculiarly favottre'd . mortal, who by some ' lucky chance has received into his life : a.wihdfall from some heavenly breadfruit ■ tree while he lay dreaming, of irridescent rainbows. ■,The mystic is a person-who. has cultivated with more strenuous care than others have done the native homing passion of the soul, and developed the outreach of the soul God ward.”. ,The result is that he has .occasions when he feels... himself, answering back to Iris soul s quest, as the sensitised , magnetic needle responds- to the electric storehouse' of _ the sun. If '■ the mystic needed justification, he might find it in the author of our text. The. late Lord Rosebery described Cromwell as “a practical mystic,” and the words might stand for Saint Paul. .It is wellnigh impossible to over-state bur debt, to this apostle, and the driving energy of his life was his sense of God and the things of God. A NEW SENSE OF VALUES. In this passage he supplies‘the clue. He had reached a new sense of life’s true values. He had done what commonsense business men must do in order to succeed, go'through their stock and revise the' price list, and it marks a great epoch in any man’s life when he°courageouslv resolves to revise his price-list, to mark down something priced too high, and raise the price of something reckoned too cheap. A. man’s price-list' is the final statement of . his character.. If you know a man’s estimate of values you know the man, and the revision of life’s values marks a • transformation of.the man, the re-fash-ioning of his life. To transpose the mountains and valleys would alter the face of the country. If you _ reduced Egmont to a molehill, and raised the valleys to a level plain you would set the rivers running in different directions and change the climate of Taranaki. Alter a man’s gense of values, of things high and things low, and you change the man. Revision means regeneration. We build life out of the things we prize most, “for where the treasure'is there will the heart be also.” . Saint Paul says that he had been through his stock and revised the pricelist. Things, he once reckoned valuable he had reduced, and some he had flung out on the scrap heap, and some things that scarcely found a place in his stock, he now held to be, his prized possessions. The reason of his revision was that he had met Jesus Christ, and learned His estimate of things.. He had found “the Pearl of Great Price,” and compared with it, all else looked cheap and common. He had companioned with “the most perfect gentleman that ever walk- - ed the earth/’ and in His fellowship discovered that bad manners are next to mortal sin. Henceforth he accepted Christ as valuator of ■ life’s treasures. Paul revised his stock because Christ renewed Paul’s heart. “I count anything a loss compared with the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Jewels to Thee are gaudy toys, And gold is sordid dust. Keeping to the business figure and following 0 Dr. Jowett’s exposition, we note the° apostle pass through the hardware, department, and began the work of revision. He says: “I persecuted the dairits to strange cities.” “I hailed men and women to prison.” “I was exceeding -fierce against them,” and this he did as part of his religion. ; NOT CHRIST’S WAY. When the first martyr Stephen was stoned to death a young man named Saul guarded the murderer’s clothes. At that stage Paul set high value on. legirono and whips, and force, and prisons and stoning. -.Then he learned this is not Christ’s way, and “force is no remedy,” so' he took the tools of the persecutor and the bigot and cast , them on the rubbish heap, where they rightly belong, and wrote his glorious hymn of love. Next he turned attention to the drapery department. He tells us, “I was a pharisee of the pharisees.” He set great store on fringes and phylactories, and the outward drapery of religion, and was scrupulous about the look of . things. Read Carlyle in “Heroes and Hero-worship” if you would see the philosophy of clothes. Everything has its drapery, its wraps, and “habits,” and outward modes of expression. Churchmen have their robes, Salvationists their jerseys and bonnets, Quakers their broad brims, and Masons their regalia. Religion cannot go naked. But the question is: What price do you put on the drapery? Adoration has its outward expression. Prayer has . its modes. Courtesy cannot dispense with its bows and handshake, mirth garbs itself in light gauzy speech, and the ready rattle of tripping syllables. So throughout the whole programme. The gay world attaches great value to clothes. Its interest centres in the outward, the flashy, the stagey, and the spectacular until we say There can be no kernel in that light nut, The soul of that man is in his clothes. THE PHARISEE A MILLINER. The pharisee was a milliner, and Paul had been a pharisee. “They love to pray at the street corners,” showing off their religious clothes. They fast to ■be seen of men, strutting in fine clothes. “When they do alms they sound a trumpet. They call attention to the drapery. How does it look? What impression does it make? What will the onlookers say? Paul discovered that in the estimate of Christ it was very showy and vary vulgar. Christ stressed reality. He looked at motives. He saw conventionally pure, conventionally nious men, conventional! v garbed ,in religious clothes, and • He pr‘->u‘‘ ! n-t-I tb-m “whited sepul-

chres.” He uttered His parable of the pharisee and the publican. He- watched the widow approach the temple courts. She was plainly gowned and dropped her mite into the treasury, yet Christ rings her praises down the ages. It was a complete reversal of the price-list, and as Saint Paul passed through his drapery department with Jesus by his side I he learned many things. There was a <?ay robe called “mine own righteousness,” and when the Master touched it the garment looked faded and taudry, The shade was quiet and the shape quite plain. It was called “humility.” But. when Jesus saw it His eyes beamed, and Paul knew that His Companion approved the texture and the shape, so the apostle . marked it up, and, writing to one of his friends, he commended that <rarment, saving: #Be clothed with humility.” .. IMITATIONS. There was. yet ■ another department where his jewels;■ were.stocked. The stock was in a sorry plight. Some of the goods were flashy frauds; some were not diamonds at all, but only “French paste,” and some of; the yearls were only pitiful imitations. • • When Paul’s 'Great Companion held them in His pierced-hand .His wounds made these pretentious thjngs look, oh 1 so common. There ;was spurious “zeal, • spurious “charity,” spurious “modesty,” and spurious “truth,”, find the apostle could see the Lord of Reality despised them, and they must go at any price. One of the idols of-the market place is success, but Jesus .-Christ emphasised -faithfulness, but refused to bow the knee to the- “rich; and titled.” It is required of a steward that he be found faithful. “I am anio.ng you as He that serveth.” In the scales of the sanctuary fidelity is the only success, and Christ honours faithfulness, and says “well done” of the man who sleeps in a pauper’s grave and judges the man a failure who rests in a marble tomb and missed Christian manhood. To come under Christ’s estimate of human values is to ■ find “a hew applause for noble failure.” Yet half the' things we seek with desperate and exhausting energy are things ’Christ never sought at all, or put very'low in. the scale of values. His great word was “seek - first the Kingdom of God.,” SET THINGS IN RIGHT FOCUS. I am not girding at wealth, neither am I discounting the value of energy and ambition. But we should see things in their right focus and estimate them according to Jesus Christ’s scale of values. We have gained the conquest of external nature in'many directions. can fly, we can travel at enormous speed. We can talk round the globe. We can sec what is happening on the surface of the sun. We know something about radium and helium. But our conquest of nature does not make us better .men, and Our widening knowledge docs not purify the heart, and our increased riches do not give us spiritual rest. Yet these are our greatest needs, and they may be met. A writer in “The Expository Times” points the moral: Not very long ago the newspapers told us that two men had died and both had begun life as poor boys, both, had left very much treasure behind them, only different kinds of treasure. The papers told the story of one man who had been poor and had worked hard and looked ahead and saved money, and at -his death he had left behind*him about £4,000,000. I do not know how much money that is, but it is a great deal for one man to have to worry about. Then the papers went on to say that in his will the rich, man said he had not left any money to help hospitals and poor people, because he had given away a lot of money while he had been alive. The papers said that he had given £lO,OOO to a hospital here, and £lO,OOO to a hospital there, and that was all. Then the papers told a much finer story. Another man had died—a young man, this one. Between thirty and forty years ago a little boy was ill in a hospital ward in Liverpool. He was very poor. He was very ill. At first he was very, very miserable. He thought that he was going to die, and tlfiit no one cared , whether he did die or live. But soon he began to think differently. He had a comfortable bed and clean clothes. That was rather. nice. He thought he would like to live a bit longer to enjoy the nice bed and the clean clothes. Most wonderful of all, people were kind to him. Nobody kicked him because he was in the way. Nobody cursed him because he needed something. People did things for him as though they, liked doing them, did them as though they thought he was worth it; and the boy thought he would like to live just to have a little more kindness shown him. He soon began to get well, and the kindness kept on. It. got right down inside his heart, and he. said to himself: “When I. grow up, if ever I get a chance, I will do something for the hospitals, just to tell them that I am grateful for their kindness.” LIVING EVERY HOUR. The boy got well and grew up and became the editor of a great London newspaper. He knew that he was not likely to live very long, but he made up his mind that he would live every hour he was here, and, especially, that he would do all he could for boys and girls who were just as miserable and unhappy as he had been, and for hospitals. One day he stood in a long hospital ward in a London hospital where every bed had some one in it whose eyes were bad. The sunlight was pouring in through the windows, but they could not see it. There were lovely flowers on the tables and by the bedsides and no one to see them but the nurses. The patients were in the dark hour ‘ after hour, day after day, night after night. There was nothing they could do to pass the time, nothing tp help them to forget the painj nothing to cheer them up when they were afraid they would never see the sunshine and the flowers again. “I wish I could, do something to help them,” he said. “There are so many of them, so many hospitals full of sick folk, full of people waiting for operations, people in terrible pain, people, tired of lying in bed. I wish I could do something”—then it came to him all in a flash—“ Wireless! Let them listenin.” But that meant a lot of thinking and planning. How were you going to have a -set with three hundred pairs of head-: phones? Who would look.after it.and tune it in? And, above all,.who .would pay for it? So he talked to. wireless

engineers and hospital governors and doctors and all sorts of people. Then ho talked to everybody through his paper; ; “How would you like to be in hospital all day in the dark in pain with nothing to do? Wouldn’t you like to help me put in wireless for these, sick people?” The King .said, “Yes, please,” and the Queen said, “Of course, we should,” and lots of ordinary common people said,. “Rather!” and they sent shillings and half-crowns, and five-pound notes and headphones, and to-day, at every bed in every, hospital in London, there is a pair of ’phones that sick people may listen in or else a loud speaker in the ward. FULFILLED HIS VOWS. And all over the country people said, “We, too, have a hospital. Our sick people should have wireless,” and they did it. It was all because people were kind to a little sick, miserable boy, and he grew up and fulfilled his vows. Even then he was not content. He remembered that there are schools here and there where there are boys and girls who have got into trouble with the police and have been sent to these schools to learn to behave themselves. They ought to have wireless, too, he said. Once more he talked to the people through his paper, and the wireless came. Then, only a few weeks before he died, he remembered the men who keep the lights burning on the lighthouses and light-ships round the coast, and warn vessels to keep away from the rocks, and sometimes do not see a newspaper for five or six weeks at a time. “They also deserve to have wireless,” he said, and once more he talked to people through his newspaper, and the wireless came. Well, he did not have much money in his pocket when he died, but I think ha had great treasure, and the treasure of all the love and kindness he showed and all he did for other people is something which he has not left behind, but something which is his very own for all eternity. Do you remember what Jesus once said? “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth ... but lay up treasure in heaven,” The stories from the newspaper help you to understand what lie mraht.