For Sunday

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 291, 8 December 1928, Page 18 (Supplement)

For Sunday

THE LAW OF LOVE! Love has only one law—insistent, disturbing, inexorable—and that law is sacrifice. That is at once Jove’s high ideal and the test of its reality and its value. Without it there can only be the shadow, a wistful sentimentalism often losing itself in disillusion and despair. Where love is there is an object of reverence.of worship, claiming its constant offering. If the object be worthy of the heart’s devotion, then love has found a shrine where it may bring its best and richest treasures, and lay them down as a glad offering, asking and finding only one reward, and that, the joy of giving. If the object be unworthy, then a rude awakenirfg awaits the unhappy devoteeWhat arc the objects on which men set their affections? Some men set their hearts on money and the amassing of wealth. The lust of gold consumes them as a fever fires the blood. For the gaining of it. they sacrifice health and friends and the wide 'fellowships of men which would lay a claim to their kindly and courageous loyalty. They may not be conscious that they have lost cagte with their fellowmen, for their increasing hoard gives them a power to command, and their bidding is done. In the pass ing of the years, they are unconscious of the process of withdrawal which thciy avarice has been working within them, and they cannot understand the intolerable loneliness which gradually settled upon their very souls. But they make their sacrifice of the best things and their idol of gold turns to clay. “Whore your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” was a true saying, and if our t sure is only that which can be coni: t ■>! in earthen vessels, however great -I'cso vessels may be, we are bankrupt for life has lost its spiritual quality and we are bereft of the helpful ministries it should hold for us.

Some men sot their hearts upon some discovery or the perfecting of some piece*of work and in the endeavour to achieve their purpose, they sacrifice even life itself. There was a doctor in China, ministering to the people who were stricken by some dread disease. He located the deadly germ and, taking some into his own body, he hurried home that the course of the disease might be observed by specialists and some cure found for those whom he was socking to help. Is that not typical of what is happening in many a field of research and discovery and exploration? Men set their hearts on the achievement of some distant ideal and count no saerilmc too great to offer for its :al'.o. It is love’s law and Ove’s demand. You have hoard the oft-repeated story of the artist who tried and tried again, by the blending of iiis pigments, to find the colour he desired for the 1 ’’ effect of his picture. It was to be a brilliant red. One 3ay he found it, and when the picture was completed he, too, was found —dead, before his easel. For the perfecting of his picture he nad given his own life’s blood. That is a parable with a wide field of illustration in human experience. Have you ever considered how much suffering and sorrow and sin there are in the world? That is only one side of tho picture. Th" other side is in the work of thos£ who desire to remove these things and make life better and happier. The work of statesman and philanthropist, of doctor and painter and poet, of teacher and preacher, is all work into which men put their life and their heart’s blood. And strangely enough, they find joy in the sacrifice.

Jesus of Nazareth was a great artist, a great interpreter of life, for He intercepted God to man, and man to Himself. He lifted the vision to Eternity: He looked into the secret places of the heart. He did it all with power, and yet it was all so calm, so sure, so effortless. There was the touch of the perfect artist about Him for He knew that love was the very essence of life and that love must make its sacrifice. He enunciated His theme in this startling paradox, “Whosoever will lose his life, shall save it to life everlasting.” His conception.of life was not soft and effeminate. He was not a theorist standing aloof in a safe seclusion, enunciating tho principles of right living. His conception is rugged and strong. He was in tho forefront of the battle where the wounds are received and sacrifices greatest. His challenge rings out—“ Take up thy Cross and follow Me.” Any man who lacks that high enthusiasm for a great cause, for truth and righteousness, and* that radiant spirit of sacrifice in which he spends himself to the uttermost for men, has missed the challenge and the meaning. •Such love as His, with its law of sacri-

fice, waters the desert places of human experience and causes fail flowers of joy and peace to spring in the hearts of men. “Dig channels for the streams of Love And let them broadly run And love hath overflowing streams To fill them every one. But if at any time thou cease Those channels to provide Tho very streams of Love for thee, Will soon be parched and dried. For we must share if we would keep That good thing from above; Ceasing to give, we cease to have— Such, is the law,of Love.” THINK AND THANK. ALBERT SCHWEITZER’S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE. Some twenty years ago, theologians found themselves startled, shocked, yet gripped -withal, by the daring of a young Alsatian scholar, Albert Schweitzer, in his famous book, “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.” In its concluding paragraph, he paints the vision he himself had gained of the Christ. “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, came to those who knew Him He speaks to us tho same word, ‘Follow thou Me!’ and sets us the tasks which He had to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn, in their own experience, who He is.” Later, we hear of the author as a pioneer medical missionary in the heart of Equatorial Africa. To-day his fame is becoming world-wide as the man of amazing paradoxes, of bewildering energies—theologian, musician, philosopher, doctor, and navvy, equally at dome driving in piles for the hospital, performing an operation, or writing a “Philosophy of Civilisation.” What is he like? We crowded tho Friends’ House in Euston Road recently to see. My first sight dates back, indeed, some six years; the glimpse of a massive head framed in dark hair, silhouetted against the organ loft of the AbbeySchweitzer the musician, rapt in the art that is for him “both worship ami sacrament.” True it is that there is much in Schweitzer’s writings, in his methods of work, that give us pause, that we would wish otherwise. His trail is, indeed, a lonely one, and the work he is doing cannot but suffer from the fact that it is largely that of the individual. He himself would be the first to acknowledge it. But it wore best to follow his lead and seek to accept the mysterious ways in which the Christ leads men and and reveals Himself through them, rather than to understand. “We must go back,’’ he says, “to the point where we can feel again the heroic in Jesus. Before that mysterious Person . . . we must be forced to lay on our faces in the dust, without daring even to wish to understand His nature. Only then can the heroic in our Christianity . . . be again renewed.” “Think and thank”; this is his message to-day. Think, go on thinking, wrestle with the mysteries of human life until you have won through to reasoned convictions, have obtained a philosophy whereby you may truly live. Our age is decadent for lack of such thought. To do that we must be ready to go into the solitudes; dare we face them? One recalls the discipline of lonelinss through which so many heroes have boon called to pass, and the striking similarity of outlook engendered. The attitude of Grenfell, pioneer doctor of Labrador, for instance, is in many respects, that of him of Lambarene. But while tho call to the jungle or the ice-floe is to the few, for us the many there is the call of Retreat. a wilderness wherein to renew the heroic in our lives Had we that courage, then would come the. thanksgiving. The appeal Dr Schweitzer is making to the public today is based on what he describes as the ‘.‘Fellowship of tho mark of pain.” Who among us but has suffered, and found solace through medical skill? Realising that, we should be ready to see that others find like solace. Ho confines himself almost entirely to the sphere of physical pain and disease. But, as we have indicated, seeing that his own philosophy of life is so utterly Christ-centred, wo dare not accuse either him or his methods of being “unspiritual.” We of that greatest of oil Fellowships, truly that of the “Mark of Pain,” we. tho members of Christ Crucified, signed with His Cross, may well take his words to heart. Freely we have received, of solace and healing; have we as freely given?—M.G-S. in the Church Times.