Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 27, 30 September 1893, Page 4

Sunday at Home.

SCIENCE AND PESSIMISM. (By Archdeacon Farrar.) Let ns take courage. Humanity advances sometimes over the wrecks and ruins, but it advances still, it emerges . more glorious out of the debris, ahd if our bark sinks, it is to another sea. In general, I would, rear these two impregnable bulwarks against the rising flood of pessimistic thought;—religion and duty. Religion convincing us of the existence of a holy providence of God, duty pointing us unerringly to the work of every man. Religion— they w 7 ho would understand it, they who would persuade us to regard it an illusion, are, whether they know it or not, the deadliest enemies of our race. The horrible criminalty of the days of the Cassars, the orgies of the decadent and unbelieving Renaissance, the bloody carnivals of the French Revolution, are sufficent to prove to us that a godless society will ever be a demon society. If life were the arid desert of desolation which unclean French realists represent it to be, then farewell to the stimulus of hope, farewell to the aspirations for the ideal, farewell to the upward struggle towards spiritual standards ! But there is no real fear. The words of the prophet which I chose for my text, the message of Jehovah, “I am God and not man,” is a message of full infinite solace. These prophecies of evil only show us what the world would be if we left God out of sight, what the world be if we deny and forget Him. God is, after all, the mightiest factor in the issue of all events, whether men leave Him out of sight or not. Luther said this long ago. “ Men,” he said, “ make all sorts of fine calculations, and prove all sorts of conclusions, but the Lord God says to them, “ For whom do you hold Me, for a cipher P Do I sit here above in vain and to no purpose? You shall know that I will render of no account your tossing about vanity, and will make false all your recko'nings.” We may face the most nightmare-like prognostications of pessimism if we can say with the two poets of our generation who lie. side by side in yonder graves —if we can say with Tennyson : “ Put thou thy trust in God, That anchor holds.” If we can say with Robert Browning: “ God, Thou art love; I will build my faith on that.” Religion, then, is one exorcist of the demons of fear and misery, and duty is another. The duty of man is the majestic correlative of the faith in God. God may be hidden in the unimaginable splendour of His infinitude, but; His voice is clear, and it is enough for us. It is this : “ This do, and thou shalt die ;” and “ I ought, I can, I will,” is the magnificent hymn of response to the heavenly revelation. This gives to man a dignity which crowns him with glory and honour; strong in his faith in God, strong in the armour of duty, he may enter all the battles, he may defy all storms even “ Though round his head Crashing worlds their ruin spread, Undaunted he will stand.” In an old Latin tragedy by b’eneca, when Medea is told that all hope is gone, that her home is lost, that her husband is faithless, that her wealth is scattered, that nothing is left her, she answers, “ Medea superest “ myself is left me ” —and that is all in all. There is heroic grandeur in that reply. And this is the meaning and true reading of that great passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the writer tells his converts how cheerfully the Christian brethren have borne the spoiling of their goods, “ Yea, moreover, bonds and imprisonment.” Knowing not, it stands in our English version, that they have for themselves a better possession in heaven, though that is also true, but as it is in the true reading: “Ye bore ti e spoiling of your goods, ye bore bends of imprisonment, knowing

that you have yourselves, in your own pure Divine nature, in your own clear conscience, the effulgence of the God-given life within you, knowing that you have yourselves as a better possesssion and an abiding.” Let pessimism, then, do its utmost and prophecy its worst, it shall broduce no extension of our hopes, scarcely even a diminution of our cheerfulness, certainly no relaxation of our duty and our efforts. Are there. dark days before us, before England, before the world ? Well, then, let us be up and doing, and taking our part in them, for, depend upon it, human action and human exercise have a vast deal to say to the increase or decrease of good and evil.