SUNDAY COLUMN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 93, 26 April 1913, Page 7

SUNDAY COLUMN.

A STORM ON THE SEA OF GALILEE. The Bishop of London* speaking at one of his Lenten mission meetings from the text, St. Mark iv. 39—“ And Jesus arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still; and the wind ceased, and there was a great calm,” said:— ~“I can picture that scene more vividly to-day than I could when I stood in this pulpit at the last mission. Almost exactly a year ago today I saw first a calm—a beautiful calm- and then a storm on the Sea ol Galilee. First a calm. Ido not suppose it would be possible to have pictured a more beautiful scene than the calm afternoon on which rve rowed down tlie Sea of Galilee that we might, have the wonderful honor of standing on the very beach where our Lord Jesus Christ had stood and preached His sermons. There was not another boat on the lake, and it seemed as if we wdr'e' alone with Christ. Yould could isee the very place Where’Ho had spoken the sermons in this very chapter. You could see the very place where He had spoken cho sermons in this very chapter. You could see the very place where the sower would have moved up and down and sowed his seed, and how easy it was for Voice to fall wherp it would have been Scorched under the burning heat, and other to have fallen on that hard ground, and other where it would have grown. 'hirst the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.’ You will find that this is one of the sermons he preached before the scene occurred if you loon at this chapter.

'“Then we went on farther down on that beautiful evening-—or, rather, up the lake—to see the synagogue in ruins, which probably marks the site of Capernaum. What a wonderful thing if it is—how absolutely wonderful if you are really looking at the very synagogue that the man built oi whom it was said, ‘He deserves well of our nation, for ho hath built us a synagogue,’ and you may be seeing with your own eyes the ruins of that very building. Then we came back with all the sunset lighting up the hills—those peaceful which make the Sea of .Galilee, at any rate to any Christian, one of the most beautiful spots in the world —we came back to the only town left on the lake—Tiberias, and that evening, that perfectly calm, happy evening, will always bo to me a possession for ever. “But what a change next morning! Wo had to go down the lake to catch the Damascus train which passes the foot of the lake, and over those hills which on the night before looked so peaceful came rushing one of those bitter, cold, violent winds. The boat which was dragged along behind the tiny little steamer, tilled with Russian pilgrims peasants, began to fill with water. The waves kept breaking into it, and you could see almost before your e}'es the actual plight in which the Disciples were and when, with their Master apparently indifferent and asleep on a pillow, they awaited what seemed to them certain wreck. We had to pause again and again to hale out the water from tho boat, and it was only after considerable difficulty that tho living freight—probably too great, as a mat ter of fact, for tho boat and the .little steamer —arrived at tho haven where they were to land.”

Rev. F. C. Spun’, of Melbourne, writing in tlie “Australian Baptist,” puts in a plea for the occasional use in public of Dr. Weymouth's “New Testament in Modern Speech.” “Once in London,” lie says, “I road this version o ftho story of the. Prodigal Son to an audience in church. 1 shall never forget the astonished look on the faces of the congregation. They

a new charm in its new dressing.” The Anglican “Church Standard” states that recently the Archbishop of York was to have received a deputation of churchmen who desired the use of unformented grape juice in the Holy Communion. The writer adds: “What the deputation hopes to gain by waiting on the Archbishop of York wo cannot imagine. His Grace has no power to bring their wishes into effect even if he agreed with them; and, though to secure his support would ba to strengthen tiie movement enormously, it is impossible to suppose that the change could ever he made save at the cost of rending the Anglican Communion to its very foundations. The matter of the sacrament is wine; and unfermented grape juice Is not wine; nor have any of the many efforts succeeded in pioving that ‘wine’ in the New Testament does not mean wine, but something else. Rev. R. E. Freeth, writing in the “Southern Cross Log,” the newspaper of the Anglican Melanesian Mission, puts forward the theory “that the Melanesian people are not a primitive race, hut have lapsed into barbarous tendencies from a higher state of culture in the remote past. “As regards cannibalism,” says Mr Freeth, “there are numerous islands and even groups of islands where not only is it unknown, but there are no traces of its ever having been practised. Thus, in places where there is generally speaking, a uniformity, of custom, cannibalism and even traces of cannibalism are not universal. So that this most savage and primitive custom may have crept in locally, at a comparatively late date in the history of the race.” *