Religious Life

Southland Times, Issue 24231, 14 September 1940, Page 11

Religious Life

By

ICHTHUS

NO EXIT

The motor associations have done good and useful service with their system of road sighs. Every motorist —or everyone who used to be a motorist in the days when it was possible to get petrol—knows that. Often when travelling I have pleasantly occupied my thoughts qn the road-signs we passed. All kinds of things they said to me. When I encounter the signs “One-Way Bridge” and “One-Way Traffic” I invariably think of the Hon. Walter Nash and his trade and financial restrictions. It is overhead railway crossings that suggest Mr Semple. Is not the overhead crossing just north of the Rakaia Bridge on the' flat Canterbury Plains known far and wide as Mount Semple? Recently, I was in a part of our district where I had not been before, and Was uncertain which of several turns I ought to take.' One small road seemed to lead in the right direction, but it was clearly marked “NO EXIT.” I had, of course, seen that sign in other places, but this time it stuck in my mind and refused to be forgotten. In fact, it simply insisted on getting into print. It was no longer merely a motor association road sign: it had become symbolic, one of Heaven’s road signs for the wayfarer through “NO EXIT!” I almost thought I heard*a voice from the Unseen crying the words in my ears. It might have been Jeremiah or Ezekiel or another of the ancient prophets proclaiming throughout the land the word of the Lord.

BLIND ALLEYS In at least one of our cities when a street has no outlet it bears at its entry the sign “BLIND STREET.” Well, there are plenty of blind streets in life: “blind alleys” is the modern phrase for them. Yesterday I saw a rather pathetic sight. It was a pile of blackened timber and roofing iron and a heap of bricks on a spot that used to be a landmark and a sort of gathering place of the clans. There, for more years than I can remember, linking us back with the earliest days of the province, had stood a blacksmith’s shop. Farmers came with their plough-shares to be re-pointed and horses to be shod. Wagoners stopped to get a repair done. The bellows blew, and the anvil rang, and men exchanged the news of the day, and talked crops, and prices, and local politics, and settled the affairs of the country. Now it is all over. Time has changed the ancient order. The motor has replaced the horse, the tractor draws the plough, the car has come in the place of the horse and trap, and the motor lorry does the work of the wagon. Just down the road in the village stands a thriving motor works. Blacksmithing, alas, has become a “blind-alley.” Over the trade of the blacksmith, as an older generation knew it and loved it, stands the sign “No Exit.”

If you go down to our sea-ports and walk about the wharves and the waterfront, you will be vividly aware, if you have any memory and imagination, of a great change. Where are the picturesque old sailing ships gone? The tall spars, the spread of sail, the network of rigging, with all the air of old romance that clung about the sailing-ship, all is gone. Its day has passed. The humming motor engine is fast displacing the clanking steam-engine, and both have displaced the winds of the world. The sailing-ship is almost entirely gone from the face of the seven seas. That gallant people, the Finns, made a sort of valiant last stand. But over windborne sea traffic the sign was written: “Blind Alley. No Exit.” Southland was once the oat granary of New Zealand. But horses went, and dairy-farming came. And the grower of oats had to reconsider his mode of farming. For the writing was on pie wall. Over the old-time oat-growing industry of Southland the sign was up: “No Exit.”

I think I can see that sign today over a Europe at war. The smoke and the dust and the yellow glare rise high over London, Hamburg, Berlin: and the air is full of the whining roar of bombbers and fighters and bursting shells. But above it all, written on the heavens themselves, is a sign the madman of Berchtesgarden might read had he eyes to see. Perhaps, indeed, he does see it today. Over Nazidom the sign is written, and the omen speaks: “No Exit.”

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT Quite so. But there is more to our life than these outward matters. Largely they may bulk as one looks out over the vista of life. But it is mostly bulk. They are only the necessary externals of man’s life. His real life after all is within, in the spirit of man himself. His thoughts, his feelings, his will, his conscience, his relations with other lives and the teeming life in the world around him, his character, his religion —in short, his soul—these are the real life of us alh Has the sign not some meaning and message there for what is deepest in us? I think it has. The blight of our time is secularism. That is the modern word, but it means simply that man has shut down on the life of the spirit. He has turned for the sources of his life from what is within him to what is without. The needle of his compass swings only to the material. It is the blindest of all blind alleys. There is no future there. A man may waste, his life and his splendid powers on it, and when all is over there are

some blackened timbers, and a_heap of dust. “No Exit.”

And that, of course, raises the larger issue: an issue that must always for us all be the largest issue, shut our eyes as we will. Is this a “no-exit” world? Is life itself a blind alley? Is all the beauty, the goodness and the love, all the marvellous intelligence of design found in the least as in the greatest—in the tiniest leaf or insect as in the mightiest sun—all the age-long struggle and aspiration and toil of the generations, and all the creative purpose that began and guides the procession of life through the ages—is it all to end in a desert of nothingness? Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. For myself I have no uncertainty. I find such a conclusiori wholly irrational; it is as little consistent with what we know of the Creation as it is with faith. I find more sense and reality, as well as that which inspires and uplifts the soul, in that great saying of Peter: “All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the Word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the Word which by the Gospel is preached unto you.” No; life is not a blind alley marked with the sign, “no exit.” It is the Main Highway, and for all its sharp turns and dark tunnels, for all the roaring torrents and steep ascents and descents, it leads up at last to the gates of the City of Life.