The Quiet Hour THE PARABLE OF THE

Mt Benger Mail, 26 October 1938, Page 2

The Quiet Hour

THE PARABLE OF THE

POTTER The days were dark in Israel. The divine purpose seemed overwhelmed by calamity and the ruthlessness of men. No visible hand was outstretched to avoid the doom that threatened the State, the Church, the nation. The prophet Jeremiah stood alarmed amid it all, his faith sore tried, his lifework threatened, his assailants triumphant. And then in the darkest hour an inner prompting impelled him to go down to the potter’s house in the valley of Hinnom.

There upon a rude seat sat the craftsman, with a rough framework of wood before him. Below was a circular slab which he turned with his feet, connected by a spindle with the upper metal wheel on which his work w r as done. “Behold he wrought a w T ork on the wheels.” He had taken a ball of plastic clay and thrown it upon the revolving wheel, keeping it in the centre with one hand while he manipulated it with the other. The substance answered like a living thing to the touch of his skilled fingers and gradually the design hid in the potter’s mind disclosed itself. A vessel for the king’s table, a vase for fruit or flowers, a basin for some homely cottager took shape before the prophet’s eyes. But suddenly there came a wrench, a twist, due to some imperfection in the clay, and the shapely vessel fell in pieces—“it was marred in the hand of the potter,” and the unhappy man sat thwarted and dismayed'. Meaning of the Prompting But only for a moment. His keen eyes flashed with quick resolve. He gathered up once more the same rebellious clay and set the spinning wheels to work. His cunning hands refused discomfiture and “he made it again another vessel as seemed good to the potter to make it.” It was perhaps a not unfamiliar happening in the craft of the potter, but it startled Jeremiah with a new thought. Here was skill that would not be baffled, genius that could transmute failure into a larger success. And in a flash the prophet saw the meaning of the prompting which had brought him to the potter’s house. It was God who had bidden him, and he was to learn that amid all the tumults of the time evil was being countered by forces that must in the end prevail. And with the truth that broke upon his mind there came the great encouraging words, which he rightly took to be a message from on high —'“ Behold, as the clay in the potter’s hand, so are ye in My hand, O house of Israel.”

The courageous faith of the potter has something to say to us all. He despaired neither of his material nor of his own skill to retrieve defeat, and where weaker men would have grown petulant and cast their task aside he by patience and persistence attained 1 his end. There have been found men of like, spirit among us in these recent days, and they are under God, the saviours of the world. Highest Statesmanship Chief among them stands the Prime Minister of Britain, whose name will live for evermore in the annals of peace. The sheer courage of his undertaking recalls the story, told in the Life of Archbishop Davidson, of the discussion in which he took part as to the qualities that mark the highest statesmanship. Lord Balfour, he tells us, summed them up in one vivid sentence —“Being ready to go out in rough weather.” Mr Lionel Curtis warns us that, in spite of the efforts' of statesmen toward international appeasement, “human society will be engulfed in calamities worse than any yet known so long as mere prevention of war is sought as the Jgoal of policy and the crown of achievement,” and he adds “a constructive unselfishness is the end to be sought.” It is the truth of Scripture cast in modern phraseology, and it brings us back to fundamental things and to the folly of superficial remedies for deep-seated diseases. But how is this difficulty and radical change of “constructive unselfishness” to be -wrought? There is but one answer and it becomes ever more clear and indisputable. The hope of the world lies in the rebirth of religion among its peoples and in that regeneration of the individual which Jesus Christ proclaimed as the only way of entrance into the Kingdom of God. Religion is a far more living and urgent thing than it was in the best of our fathers’ days. And k is our hope and confidence that during these recent weeks something has happened in the mind of the world, of its rulers and its peoples, which, though many know it not, is truly an evidence of Christ’s presence in power among us and a forecast of striking victories to come. Woods’ Great Peppermint, Cure Per Bconehical Ooughe, Cold*, l&Hlienza,