SUNDAY READING.

Shannon News, 2 September 1924, Page 4

SUNDAY READING.

PRAYER. O Lord, grant to me so to love Thee •with all my heart and with all my mind and with all my soul, and my neighbour to ''■ r sake, that tlio grace of cuaiu'' ad brotherly love may dwell in ifcv, '.U. all envy, harshness and ill-will may die in me; and fill my heart with feelings of love, kindness and compassion, so that by constantly rejoicing in the happiness and good success of others, by sympathising with them in their sorrows and putting away all harsh judgments and envious thoughts, I may follow Thee who art Thyself the true and perfect Love. —Amen.

Finding Rest. 2. Cor. 1; 2 and 9,

The other morning I stood and looked from a window . of the manse over the hills and as the brightness or the early morning sun shone upon them, they looking exquisite. in their winter tinge. Away in the distance I could see the formation of a track or road, and I felt if I had only had a pair of field glasses I could have seen men winding their way over the steep incline, and passing over the ridge. For one moment they would hav© stood out sharply and then vanish down the other side. This made me wonder what happened to them. Did they simply disappear after their hard climb? Was it all climb and nothing else? Now, what is the secret of rest? The restlessness of the present day is a by-word. We are tossing at sea. We are blown about by evei’y wind and are out of our bearings. We feel that our compass is out of order and it is beyond our skill to repair it.

It is not in on© or two things only that is hardly a phase of life, social intellectual or religious, which is not troubled by unrest. We may say, that this at anyirate is better than stagnation. But that is not the point. No one’wants stagnation. What men do need is something that holds; something that gives them calm in the storm and brings them rest. In one of his essays Matthew Arnold speaks of poetry as giving us something to rest on and he says that in this busy age and under its increasing pressure, this quality of giving the mind something to rest on will come to be more and more appreciated. This is true enough, but one may go further and say that men must have something more to rest on than what the very highest poetry can give.

Suppose we try knowledge in spite of the ancient saying “that much study is a weariness of the flesh.” What meagre help knowledge gives us on the deeper human problems and how little it has to tell us about the final questions, what life is, why we are there, what there is in The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveller returns: — And, how often it rather increases our perplexity than leads us to the secret of rest. It is as though we enlarged our universe only to lose ourselves in the vast spaces. See how much intellectual depreciation there is of the gift of life, and how many learned essays and sermons have been written on the old text “Vanity of Vanities,” The truth is that materialism that has promised so much has broken down, and the great desire for plenty, is not good enough for the many cravings of the human heart. Along these paths men reach disillusionment and enquire of dumb oracles which have no real answers to the burning questions. They are put off with the sham wisdom of agnosticism, or they are told that in the whirl of life, we.are whirled about and no more can be said about it. This is the sum total of much modern wisdom. But man never will be content with these intellectual despairs, however clever their logic and ho matter how movingly they are expressed. Rather than that, he will go back to words like St Augustine’s: “Thou hast made us for Thyself.” Modern pessimism is chiefly the Book of Ecclisiastes and not quite so well written, and its cure is in the four gospels, or one should say in the Divine personality whose life those gospels contain.

There are two things which are at the root of our lack of rest; one is doubt about a Divine order, and the other is the fear that this life is ail. Perhaps we do not reflect how hard the struggle is for most men, and through what experience they pass; we little know how perplexed they are, whether there really is a Divine purpose in the world. They see how obscure and apparently how defeated' the working of God's truth and justice often are. The social wrongs, the inhumanity of men to one another, the triumph of wickedness, the delay of good, the sufferings of the weak and helpless, the long drawn-out agonies of bodily and mental sickness, the disasters of life. —all these things rise up against the idea of a moral order and a beneficent purpose. And it seems to them that God has almost left the world, in fact there often comes out in the secret of their hearts, the doubt if He ever was really in it. And the position is all the harder if the haunting thought is with them .that thore is nothing beyond, no house not made with hands, no glory to b e revealed. They see the fixed courses of the . material universe, how the ire© lies as it falls from the blow of the bushman’s axe and the cir cles of natural law are not broken, and when they read the story of the earth’s past, when nations rise and fall when age after age follows on and one race passes into oblivion as another arises. So. the question thrusts itself into every man’s heart, as he loses sight of faces familiar and dear to him, whether man escapes out of tli e hand of death and lives on: — “What is it u! \ ar J6 we all of us end

■ lost in silence drowned ■’ft; of a meaningless Past?”" ffr Both these question must have an affirmative answer, if wo are really to find rest. They- are closely related questions, The incompleteness of all