Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 21, 19 August 1893, Page 6

Sunday at Home.

STRIVE TO DESERVE LOVE. (By the Bishop of Salisbury in Lloyds weekly). “ I came down from heaven not to do my own ■will, hut the will of him that sent me." John vi., 38. So uracil pain and sorrow is in the •world, and has to. be borne by so many, that a good man has constantly to habituate his will to the thought of bearing pain and sorrow willingly and gladly, whether as a help to, others or as an integral part of his own earthly discipline. He will then be constantly oh his guard against trusting the instinct of self-preserva-tion too implicitly. He will remember that a short life is not necessarily an unhappy or ignoble one, or a long one necessarily blessed. He will recollect that eight days after His birth the Saviour Himself suffered the pain that was a proof of His sympathy with fallen humanity, a mark of discipline and self-sacrifice. This is an experience that even the youngest is capable of appreciating and making his own. Remember that Christ took our nature in a poor home and under a stern discipline. Remember that there are hundreds, thousands of Children, as inn; c snt a ourselves, who suffer pain as their necessary lot; and keep your faculties, your eyes and ears and heart, all alive, that you may be able some day to help them. And you will be able to help them, if you bear childish troubles, loneliness, disappointments, discomforts, sickness, pain, the trial of seeing others loved or rewarded more than youx-selves, as part of God’s will for you, as helping you to be more like Chx-ist. You may be able to do little for others just yet, but you may grow up to it if you are hardy and brave, just as a tender bending sapling, in the open ground, grows to be a beam to support a house or a timber in a mighty ship. Hothouse plants are pretty but useless. Even the vine with us is more for ornament and pleasure than actual use. Do not be hothouse plants, but give yourself up to the bracing discipline of open life, as it may be sent to you, and believe that it is happiest for you. On the other hand, children, as well as grown up people, may easily fall into a very different attidude towards life. If we believe that we have come into the world to do our own will and pleasure —and forget to think about the will of God —we shall seize upon the instincts of self-pre-servation and self-development as the main guides of life. Those of us especially who have an eager aesthetic nature, loving beauty and harmony for their own sakes, will tend so to fashion and order life that the echoes of pain and sorrow from other lives may be softened by distance, that we may be not called upon to suffer anything that can be avoided. In this way it may be easily possible for a person to be habituated from early youth, and without any consciousness of sin or wilful wrongdoing, to an atmosphere of serene and unbroken selfishness, to accept it as a second nature which is a law unto itself; and, what is even worse, to bring others to accejrt it, and to expect nothing better or nobler from them. Let us then bear all the natural troubles that life brings to us, not with the hope of merely hardening our character, so as to attain a stoic calm or indifference, but with the intention and desire to attain a more Christ-like sympathy. We must perforce sometimes cry out in anguish praying that the pain and sorrow may be removed from us. Do not doubt that an answer will be given to such prayers, and not only an answer, but the best, the most loving answer. Yet not, perhaps, the answer that we immediately expect or desire. Strive to deserve love, but be not surprised or indignant or irritable if you do not gain it. There is probably no better test of real goodness than for a man to go on loving and doing acts of 'love iff spite of failure to win it; and

real goodness cannot be lost" in its efforts. If such persfererance come from submission of the will to God, if it be acccording to His will, sooner or later the desire must have its way. For God’s will is perfect unselfish love; and such love must triumph.