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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 6, 7 February 1901, Page 7

Religion is simply the way home to the Father. There is energy of moral suasion in a good man's life, passing the highest efforts of an orator's genius. One of the hardest weeds to uproot is selfishness. Nothing can do thii but ' the expulsive power of a new affliction.' If instead of a gem or even a flower, we would cast the gift of a noble thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as God's angels must give. There in only one person in the world to whom we may be severe. There is one who deserves it, and on whom we may vent all our severity, and that person is our own self. Frank explanations with friends in case of affronts sometimes save a perishing friendship, and even place it on a firmer basis than at first ; but secret discontentment always ends badly. The best that is in a man is his real self. In the future for man beyond this world it is the good that is in him that will lire. The other side of him ia on this earth ; it is that he will leave behind him. Dogmatic truth ia the key, and the soul of man is the lock. The proof of the key is the opening of the lock ; and if it does that, all other evidence of its authenticity is superflous, and all attempts to disprove it are absurd in the eyes of a sensible person. The colored Bunsets and the starry heavens, the beautiful mountains and the shining seas, the fragrant woods and the painted flower9 — they are not half so beautiful as a soul that is serving Jesus out of love, in the wear and tear of common, unpoetic life. Because conscience ceases to remonstrate and remorse to torment, men think the exemption permanent. They do not know that at any moment, in some unforseen emergency, this abased faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated from the soul than heat from fire. It is a sublime moment in any man's career when, rising to the full dignity of his manhood, he utters forth his whole personality in complete, glorious self-attainment and self-surrender in the prayer, ' Thy will be done,' for in that prayer he dedicates himself wholly to the doing of God's will of righteousness, to a lasting warfare with evil in all its phrases and forms, and with all the energy of which he is master, reinforced by the eternal strength. A really sublime moment is that when the last ray of light breaks in upon the soul and marshals into a single group all the scattered, disconnected truths there. There is such a vast differenoe between the moment which follows and the moment which precedes this one, between what we were before and what we are after, that the word grace has been invented to convey the idea of this magic stroke, of this light from on high. I fancy I see a man groping his way blindfolded ; the bandage is gradually withdrawn ; he has a glimmering of daylight, and at the moment when the hand kerchief falls he stands in the broad sunlight.