The Sabbath

Waikato Times, Volume 102, Issue 17131, 18 June 1927, Page 18 (Supplement)

The Sabbath

THE CHEAT.

I cheated a good friend yesterday, Kept what was his and went my way, Wronged him by silence—for in haste I let a glad thought go to waste. I had a word of cheer to speak, To strengthen him when he grew weak, To send him smiling on his way— But what I thought I didn’t say. \ He would have richer been to know That deed of his had pleased me so, But oh, I failed to let him see How much his conquest meant to me. I cheated him of words of praise Which would have cheered his troubled days, In this a faithful friend I wronged By keeping what to him belonged. The pj-aise was his by right to hear, To him belonged my word of cheer; In silence, though, from him I turned And cheated him of what he’d earned. —From “The Light of Faith.” I SAFED AND THE PATENT CLEANSER The daughter of Keturah spake unto me, and said, Father, there is a Spot upon thy Coat, and it must bo re- j moved. j And she said, I will get my bottles of Compound, and remove the Spot. And she brought her Patent Cleanser, but the Spot came not out. And she said, I will try Carbona. And she tried Carbona, but the Spot remained as it had been. And she said, I wilt try Benzine. And she tried Benzine, but it made no impression upon the Spot. And I said, I will remove this Goat, and send it to the Tailor, and I will wear another until this cometh back. And she said, Wait a minute. I have one thing more to try. For this did I learn from my Mother. And she washed the Spot with Clear Warm Water, and the Spot came out, and the Garment was as it had been New. And I said, That is worth knowing, and now I remember that thy Mother did so likewise. And she said, It doth soipetimes happen so, that a Spot which none of the New and Patent Compounds will bring out will come Clear and Clean if it be washed with Clean Water. And I said, How often do we waste effort going afar for Remedies in cure of ills that would yield to Very Simple Treatment, and with the means at hand. Yea, I considered all the Patent Systems of making the world better, and how many they be, and what learned names they lake unto themselves, while the Main Thing that is needed is that the hearts of men shall be washed from Evil Thinking and Selfishness and Wrong Behaviour. And I remembered that there is no Bajm in Gilead that can assure us a cure for the Leopard-spotted character which men procure for themselves. But that a very simple way is at hand for making men right and white and clean. And I would that men would find it, for it is not far from'Every One of them. j A SLOGAN FOR THIS GENERATION. f ! The Inter-collegian, the magazine of the American S.C.M., lately contained a great article by Reinhold Niebuhr. ‘‘The real enemy of religion never has been scepticism; the real enemy of religion is cynicism. Our real difficulties are not intellectual difficulties, * >««rsU difficulties. The questiou

is not whether God Is intellectually worthy of us, but whether we are morally worthy of God. The question is not whether we can harmonise the concept of a loving God with a ruthless nature, but whether we can harmonise the concept of a loving God with the sort of ruthless civilisation which we have built. For it is not possible to believe that personality is at the heart of things if we do not believe in personality. It is not possible to believe that goodness is at the heart of things if we do not strive after goodness, if we believe that the ethical life is both impossible and unnecessary. The unbelief of our day is not the unbelief of scepticism, but of cynicism, and comes on the whole out of a civilisation which outrages personality by its machinery, and which has in general given up any faith in an ethical life.

“First of all, our religion is a religion of power. We cannot see God because we worship power. That curious sense of frustration that every man has coming out of his confusion, and which, properly led, leads to repentance—that curious sense of frustration that every modern man has, he overcomes by grasping more power and saying, “See how big I ami” Primitive man picked up a stick and said, “Now admire me!" When modern man suffers a loss of self-esteem, he buys a bigger car and “steps on it." That picture of a man sitting in a car and “stepping on it” is the picture of modern civilisation.

“We have not realised sufficiently that our faith must be relevant to our moral experience, and that finally a civilisation which is built upon the worship of power will destroy our faith, the faith of the man who suffers because of us, and even the faith of the detached observer. “Sometimes it seems to me as if western civilisation had only two religions —nationalism and communism—and Christianity were existing only by virtue of a covert or overt connivance with nationalism. “The student generation which preceded us deceived its spiritual power from the great adventure of foreign missions. It was willing to expatriate itself from America in order to build the kingdom of God in the far ends of the earth. “But the student generation before us has simply set us a new task. Our business is to Christianise the nominally Christian. Western civilisation, you see, has become a missionary territory, and it is our business to expatriate ourselves not only from America, but from the world, and lo learn again what those simple words mean: ‘Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye rather transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The price that we will have to pay for knowing God is to dissociate ourselves from that part of the world of man which is only a projection of the world of nature. Part of this world that we have been idealising is nothing but the world of nature. We have prided ourselves upon conquering nature. What we did was to arm nature —the nature in us, and as we discover that this world of man is just a part of n-n,,-,, pnd (hat some of its historic incidents are just the fight of herds, out iviui another, we realise that the price that we pay for fellowship with a good God is complete dissociation from that kind of a world. Of course, that means the Cross.

“The slogan of the preceding generation of students was, ‘The evangelisation of the world in this generation.’ I do not say that this new slogan was not also theirs, but in a particular sense our slogan must be, ‘lf any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and fQIIOW rrva,,’ »