A PREACHER OF NOTE.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1606, 25 November 1912, Page 5

A PREACHER OF NOTE.

REV. HENRY HOWARD, OF ADELAIDE. The services at Wesley : Church on Sunday were conducted by the Rev. Henry Howard, of Adelaide, who preached eloquent and forceful sermons to large-and attentive congregations, preaching in the morning on tho prayer of Balaam: "Let .me die the death of the righteous and let my last end be like his." Mr. Howard referred to Sir Richard Owen's reconstruction from a single bone of the skeleton of an extinct and then unknown animal, and observed that, if Balaam's prayer ■ were all we know of him, we should-build upon it a hypothetical Balaam who would be* admired by everybody. But, knowing something of Balaam, we were ablo to interpret the prayer of that knowledge, and find it to be the utterance of a man who wanted the gains of godliness without its discipline the pleasures of sin without its pains. The life and the prayer were in hopeless discord. He was praying in one direction and living in another. What he desired was not a change in his own moral direction, but in the direction of moral law. Prayer, which did not accord with conduct, was a mockery. >. Why so many prayers remained unanswered was that life was not keyed-up to prayer. At the evening service Mr. Howard preached from St. Peter: "Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, whiat manner of persons ought ye to be." Reading .for his lesson the narrative of the earthquake at Philippi, he said that was an illustration of his text. Peter's teaching was not in accordance with the thought of his day, which regarded the earth as the most stable of material things. Modern scienoe, however, was in harmony with Peter's teaching. Materialism robbed man of the great incentive to right living. If man believed that he would die like a dog, and that that was tho end of him, ho would live like a dog. , If Christianity w*re true, and there were a life that supplemented the present life, man would live with that other life in view. The difference between the Materialist and the Christian was that the one believed in tho dissolution of all things; the other believed in the restoration of all things. The great catastrophes of nature cleared our vision so that we saw that, material things could be shaken.

Mr. Howard will lecture to-night in Wesley Hall on the subject: "People I, have met."