TRUE HAPPINESS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 917, 10 March 1930, Page 14

TRUE HAPPINESS

MERCY TO SAMOANS URGED SERMON AT ONEHUNGA “After 2,000 years of gospel preaching,” said the Rev. John Craig, in the Oneliunga Presbyterian Church last evening, “the majority of men living in Christian lands today show by their practised creeds that they do not believe that a man’s life consists not in the abundance of his possessions.” Christ, he said, certainly taught that material things of this life were necessary, and we knew that the existing unequal distribution of wealth made the lives of thousands a prolonged martyrdom, but men had not yet learned that material possessions were not the ultimate source of happiness. Not until the world saw those who professed religion exemplifying it in their practical lives would the world be convinced of the reality of the teachings of Christ. Mr. Craig founded his address on Isaiah lv., 7: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto Jehovah and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.” Many men, he said, did give up outward lives of dishonesty, immorality and falsity, from fundamental motives, but their inner attitude to life remained unchanged. They often overlooked the governing principal that true religion could only he attained by a complete change of thought in the individual. A man’s creed did not consist in mere lip profession of any particular type of religion, but rather Sn the inner thought which determined his working attitude to God, to moral evil and to the material things- of life. Any man who honestly believed in his heart that God was a moral entity who must punish wrong-doing, would not treat moral evil as a light thing. Any man who believed that the spiritual was of greater importance than the material would not display by every action of his life that the source of happiness consisted in material possessions. It had been demonstrated over and over again that the accumulation of this world’s riches only led to misery and that real happiness was often associated with poverty. Alluding to the mercy of God shown to the repentant, Mr. Craig drew a contrast between God’s mercy and the policy adopted by early New Zealand administrators toward (he Maori race and more recently toward the Samoans. The practice of mercy, he said, lent dignity both to the judge who bestowed it and to the criminal who received it.

Neglect of the time and place to apply mercy had been the cause of our first clash with the Maori race in 1842 and had led to a breach between our people and theirs which had not even yet been completely healed notwithstanding the merciful efforts of Sir George Grey. Further, the Samoan problem, which had assumed a dark and dangerous aspect, might easily have been solved with dignity to New Zealand by the opportune application of mercy, born of a close and sympathetic study of the traditions and customs of a race over whom this country had been given political control.

LESSON SERMON ON MAN “Man” was the subject of the lessonsermon in First Church of Christ, Scientist, of Auckland, yesterday. The golden text was from Psalms, Ixv., 4: “Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto Thee, that he may dwell in Thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of Thy house, even of Tb.y holy temple.” Among the citations was the following from the Bible: “Ana God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepetb upon the earth. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” (Gen. i., 26-27.) The lesson-sermon also included the following passage from the Christian Science textbook: “Man is idea, the image of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God’s image and likeness; the conscious identity of being as found in Science that which possesses nq life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker.”