LIFE THOUGHTS.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 28, 6 October 1894, Page 5

LIFE THOUGHTS.

Where is the way that life dwelleth ? —Job xxxvm. 19.

Jesus said , I am the Light of the World ; he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness , but shall have the liaht of life.- —Johk VIII. 12.

Turn thus into life life real and true, the life of the spirit —all that is within you and which you can appropriate. Do the good you know. Follow the truth you gee. Not words, not admiration, not inaction, but appropriation, transformation into life, —this is the first great lesson of the key to life and fruit. And the process for us must begin here, where God has placed us. We are seeds cast into the soil, but by a Divine Sower. Here, under all the conditions of life, just as they are now, while it is the spring and seed time, and we have the light of life, and the Spirit of God is poured out like the water from the skies.

How the possibilities of our lives open to us under this conception; how the very drudgery of existence takes to itself a nobleness and becomes fraught with an eternal significance ! Dust and ashes in itself, as life often seems, and much of it really is, it can all be transmuted into the imperishable and eternal, —go to fruit that shall be gathered into the heavenly garners. Duty performed is a gain in character whose force can O # never be wholly spent. A sacrifice for righteousness means a large appropriation of righteousness. Love freely given, even to the thankless or to an enemy, becomes a large power of loving. Patience in sickness, endurance in helplessness, fortitude in trial, strengthen the stalk that bears the fruit; and the very fineness of the grain is from the rigor of the climate in which it ripens. For this is the divine power of life, that it can turn its environments into growth and fruitage, and make even of the life we hate for its meagreness and perishableness, for its uncongeniality and chill, good that abides and is kept unto life eternal. Our life begins here a single seed—a tiny seed, it may be. But if it takes to itself what in the divine ordering is provided for it, if it tranforms what is given to it of God into its own life, it does not abide alone. It is transplanted to the other world, not as it here begun. Its powers, its capacities, its acquisitions, and joys are already reduplicated beyond computation, and they go on to multiplied and incalculable harvest. There is indeed, no conceivable limit to the riches of a soul that as once x’esolved, with a resolution that cannot be shaken, to be true to itself —that has really begun to live as God would have it, —as Christ came to teach us how to live. -—Egbert C Smyth-