TIGHT-ROPE WALKING

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 490, 20 October 1928, Page 8

TIGHT-ROPE WALKING

THE QUIET CORNER

(W 7it ten for THE SUN by the Rev. Charles Chandler, Assistant City Missioner .) A cousin of mine, several times removed , was finally removed for good, through falling from a tight-rope. The recollection of that incident impresses upon me, as nothing else can, that tight-rope walking is a dangerous business. It's so hard to keep one's balance . Now let us soar for a moment to the religious and spiritual plane further to consider the matter of tight-ropes. Walking the spiritual tight-rope is far more dangerous, a?uZ the keeping of one's balance thereon is next to impossible. Such a lot of folk are trying to do it to-day. One meets them in every walk of life . Having met them, the conversation drifts on to religion and philosophy , and it is then that they tell us about the tight-rope they are walking. Their boast is that they are completely unorthodox, and so it is that upon the tight-rope of tlieir own strange “ism,” they effect some sort of a balance between rationality and the mental hospital. Having scorned established belief, they are cheerfully adrift upon the sea of their own religious experience. (Hie may loin the open-mouthed approbation of the multitude by walking to Heaven on a tight-rope; but give me the touch of the simple folk, who do not presume to scan too deeply the icays of God. 1 like a little bit of “psychic phenomena,” but let me have one foot upon the beaten track of orthodoxy. 1 believe, with St. Paul, that the unseen is the real; but, at the same time, I like the thought of William Cory Johnson:

You say there is no substance here, One great reality above! Back from that void I shrink with fear, And, childlike, hide myself in love. In the scientific realm, the investigator cannot turn his back on the combined knowledge of past ages. In discovering the circulation of the blood, Harvey has contributed to all that has yet to be discovered about human anatomy. So. in the spiritual realm, we are debtors to St f Paul and Aquinas, and, while Theology, like Economics , may be a “dismal science,” still, we had better not get the tight-rope out of the cupboard, until we feel that we have the strength to keep our mental equilibrium against the power of that faith which was once delivered to the saints. Next Week: SAFETY LAST