WELCOME WEEK SERMON

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 145, 22 June 1931, Page 6

WELCOME WEEK SERMON

SERVICE AT TRINITY CHURCH. CHRIST A PSYCHOLOGIST. A large congregation listened to a sermon preached by the Rev. E. T. Cox, ALA., last evening in Trinity Methodist Church, when members of the executive of Welcome Week were among those present, in addition to members of the City Council. The preacher took his text from John 16:33: “In the world yo shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” He said the Saviour was the greatest psychologist the world had known. In the darkest hour of His life He gave this kind of good cheer to His disciples. Psychology cally there was nothing wrong with “Welcome Week.” It was another message of good cheer. On of the finest souls who ever dwelt under the Southern Cross was R. L. Stevenson, who prayed that “wo might awake with morning faces and morning hearts—eager to labour, eager to be happy, if happiness be our portion, or, if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to enduro it.” The cheerful man was king of circumstances. To bo cheerful where the tyrannic look of circumstances smiles on us deserves no praise. Wo do not praise the crops for growing nor the tide for its ebb and flow. We do not. therefore, sing the cheerfulness that sails like the steam boats “Weather and other circumstances permitting,” but. that which springs from n will, resolved to sec everything in the light and nothing in the shadow, which is master and not the matter of mundane matters. ’ The olive crown is given to those who, like the Spartans of old. when told that the arrow flights of the Persians would darken skies replied, “Thon so much the better, we shall fight in the shadow.” That was the kind of cheerfulness that was to be desired. The cheerful life was neither a matter of circumstances nor of temperament; it was the life of God. The black hag of care can no longer sit on the shoulders of the man whose cheerfulness is the child of reason not of impulse, whose heart is light because he can trust, not because the sky is blue and the world is smiling. The world goes onward but the man of God goes upward in a voice which says. “Be of good cheer 1 have overcome the world. ”