SUNDAY READING

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXXIV, Issue 8849, 30 November 1935, Page 3

SUNDAY READING

THE TRUE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION theological idiom THE WORD AND THE SPIRIT (From a Correspondent) To read the Gospels attentively is to be impressed by our Lord’s power of stating ideas which at the time ■were amazingly novel in speech that was simple and familiar. The contrast with some of the Epistles is clear. In a later age Christians found themselves driven to form a new vocabulary in order to define thqir faith or to describe their spiritual experience. If the use of a special idiom for ,■ theology was necessary, two at least of its results have been unfortunate. Some of the greatest Christian books prove most difficult or even impossible for the general reader, owing to the technical idiom in which they are written. Again, religion is apt to seem forced and artificial when it employs a special vocabulary. In. -parts this usage was due to a mistaken idea of reverence. If we turn, 4or instance, to religious correspondence of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, we are easily repelled by what seems to be the laboured sanctimoniousness of the diction employed. But the writers used it with complete sincerity. They would have thought it as indecorous to use the ordinary weekly speech for sacred themes as to attend church in week-day clothes. Such an idea is refuted by the practice of Christ. Those who listened were often astonished by Hio (doctrine, but they were never- perplexed by its verbal form. So far from being esoteric or technical, the -phrasing was that of everyday speech. Yet, as Jesus used it, this acquired new force. Simple though it was, the language was never <casual or conventional. The words were sacramental, they became the -vehicle of their speaker’s unique personality. He Himself knew that they possessed this vital quality; “‘the words that I speak unto you,’ He said, “they are spirit, and they are life.” He. insisted on the high anoral significance of words. “By thy words,” on another occasion He declared, “thou shall be justified, and by thy words thou shall be condemned.” GLIB PROFESSIONS Well-meaning people would come \o Him with glib professions of devotion or with terms of complaint. He bade them pause to consider • what their words meant. “I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest,” cries one listener; that impetuous sentence is genuine enough, but would he have used it, asks the Master, had he considered all that it implies? Another prefaces his question about eternal life with an almost conventional “Good Master.” But Jesus will not allow a noble, epithet to be used without thought of its meaning. “Why do you call me “good’ ? What sense has the word ior you? Do you know that true goodness is not less than Divine, that ;none is absolutely good except God,” What matters in the use of religious language is the thought and sincerity behind it. »

Our Lord's insistence on a right Tuse of the language of religion has a lasting' importance. To take one evident instance, many people in these days do not value fully the Book of Common Prayer because familiarity with its idiom has led them to give it no more than a formal attention. As a result, public worship is apt. to seem tedious, or perhaps a reposeful time when the thoughts can stray to all manner of '■extraneous themes. Yet few are not sensible of a loss when modern forms of devotion are substituted for those of the Prayer-book. It is ■worth while to ponder the words of ‘the Prayer-book services, and the more that is done the clearer will grow the conviction that here is not (only wonderful charm of cadence and •diction but the fruit of profound spiritual experience. To penetrate Into the meaning of these ancient sentences is to discover that they express beautifully and completely the petition that we desire to make for others and ourselves in the present day. 'They speak the true language ■of religion, which is timeless, being ■vital through every age. Such words, when pondered and rightly msed, can never be formal, because, as Christ said of His own, “they arc spirit, and they are life.”