The Whole Hog

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 306, 17 March 1928, Page 8

The Whole Hog

the quiet corner

(Written for The Sun by the Rev. Charles Chandler, Assistant City Missioner) r is, in our English hymnology, a great deal of obsolete verse. Far too much emphasis has been laid on the miserable-sinner aspect of religion. We need to reverse that process of thought, and to realise with Emerson that: — So nigh is grandeur to our dust , So near is God to man, When duty whispers “Lo, Thou Must!” The youth replies, “I can!” Men are gods, though in the germ, and this cringing before the Omnipotent must go. Let me take, for instance, a line from Newman's immortal hymn: “One step enough for me." 1 icish to affirm that one step is not enough for me. 1 want to go the whole hog, and so do a great many more ivho, at this time, are trying to pierce the veil 'twixt life and death, in order to show a gleam of hope to struggling humanity. It's the “ whole-hoggers" who have .done most in the world. Ho w many brilliant careers have been wrecked by the individual's inability to see a thing through? Having taken the first step, the second remained to be taken, and so on until, mounting the altar stairs which lead to God, the scarred and furrowed veteran could “shoulder his crutch" and tell how his spurs were won; tell how, in the battle of life, lie teas always prepared to go the Whole hog. Too many fall asleep at the gate of their Gethsemane and so lose a race that should have been theirs. It teas said of Jesus, by St. Luke, that "He went a little further" —and that "little further" comprised the difference between success and failure. Had Jesus failed to go the whole hog, the world would still be minus its Supreme Example. By an arrangement entered into with The Sun Mr. Chandler will supply, each Saturday, an article of this nature. Next week, “The Fly in the Ointment.”