AN EASTERN EPITHET

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 502, 3 November 1928, Page 8

AN EASTERN EPITHET

THE QUIET CORNER

(Written for THE SUN by the Rev. Charles Chandler , Assistant. City Missioner.J The mission tent teas filled. Two thousand people, (of which number 1 was onej had come to hear a famous evangelist, who counted the souls that he had been instrumental in winning as a heathen warrior counts his scalps. After many choruses had been sung, the burly messenger started to evangelise his audience. He referred to life in the Orient, and then proceeded to describe the abhorrence with which an Easterner views a dead dog. To call an Oriental a dead dog is to look for serious trouble. Men have been slain for less. The evangelist then went on to say that we should so humble ourselves before God, that we appear, in our own eyes, as dead dogs. That sort of evangelism is icrong. It is insulting God’s most wonderful piece of handiwork. We must reverse that order, and appear in our own eyes as “ little lower than the angels,” or, as Browning expresses the same idea, “gods, though in the germ.” We must not go through life like “bastards or interlopers,” bui as Godconscious, self-respecting immortals. Too many Christians are going through life with an inferiority complex, and. whenever we meet these folk, it is our plain Christian duty to kiss the Blarney Stone quite freely, and shower them xcith spiritual bouquets, until they are fragrant icith the perfume of the frankincense of love. These shrunken souls, like evaporated apples, need to be soaked in the water of life, and brought back to their proper .size. They need to be spiritually inflated, not with conceit, but with the breath of the Almighty; lifted up into the consciousness, not of their oicn merit, but of their own inborn divinity. They must be brought to realise that they are sparks, fresh from the anvil of God, and not just putrefying puppies lying scorching in the sun. XEXT WEEK: GILDING THE LILY