SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 77, 9 July 1910, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

•'WHAT ARE THESE WOl/NDS IX THIXE HANDS;" (Sermon by Robertson Xicol). " And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Thou shall he answer, Those with which 1 was wounded in the house of my I friends."—Zeeh. xiii., 0.

There is nothing in the world so arresting as pain. Its outward tokens j challenge a question and provoke an ; answer. The deep wounds of the soul i »e can only tell, as a rule, by the marks j they leave on the body. Every human I henig. is a secret to ail the rest unless i for outward inescapable manifestations. !N e are all islanded. Each harbors that which he can never bear to talk of. There is a dower that will not live save "i the most silent and secret places of the heart. Yet the inward has a more or less imperfect expression in the outward. What we see. indicates what we

cannot see and even explains it. The anguished eyes into which we look drive path of light into the questioning soul. Time leaves its mark, or. rather, perhaps we should say, chiselling* and seourgings that have befallen us in time leave theirs. He was not exactly old. he said to himself the next morning as he beheld his face in the glass. And he looked considerably younger than he was. But there was history in his facedistinct chapters of it; his'brow was not that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in the forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by past troubles. He remembered the coming of tin's pale, wiry hair; it had been brought by the illness in Borne when lie had wished each night that he might never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin, they had resulted from those months of despondency when all seemed going against his art. his strength, his happiness. When life is young and grace is fresh, it seems as if no record were kept of the years. But as by degrees we are tried by unkindness, hurt by injustice, blasted by bereavement, we come to know that our life from the beginning is a dying life, and the signs and prophecies of death make themselves more and more visible. The natural swim is

against us. Then especially we are awakened by the outward gravings of sorrow. We seek to pierce the secret. What are these wounds in thine hands? Who inflicted them? Why did they come? We know that the full answer would reveal life's last mystery. And at last we come to understand that life, which, to the eye of the flesh, is always growing downward, may to the eye of the spirit he as steadily growing upward. As for the lives that-are really Christian,) it is in pain that they reach their truest! and their best. I

The appeal of the Gross is the commanding appeal of meek and mute suffering. "Oh all ye that pass by, behold and see whether there is an3 T sorrow like unto my sorrow." Because a sorrow is supreme, it rivets and Axes the gaze. The sorrow of the cross is silent, but, as one of the fathers said, the silence is a clamorous silence, detaining us, refusing to let us go till we have listened. In the lower phases of human passion we have felt the same inexplicable grasp. SomefimelTon the street we have been compelled to pause at the sight of some wrecked figure now part of the driftwood of humanity. What is! the story of that ruined beauty which is causing some nameless transgressor? The question strikes us nearer and with a heavy blow when it concerns our own. The death of the parents may be a revelation to their children. They never really saw them until they were lying cold. Then they knew something of the long, unspoken, miserable anxieties that channelled the dead faces in furrows for tea*'?. Then they _knew why the back .was so bent. It was for them, "Fighting our battles thou vert so marred." The I hour of recognition is the hour of a new] birth. So Jesus on His Cross is the j Gospel, in His awful anguish, in His; meek submission, reviled and reviling not again. To behold Him so is the beginning of faith. Can we read the parable? What does it all mean? He is the sufferer, that we know; He is an innocent sufferer, that also we know. Why did he suffer? Slowly the answer comes—He died for me, and to know that is to know all. The Gospel is no dogma; the fiospel is Jesus Christ set fovtli \ crucified between the thieves. There is a theology of the Atonement, but it can never be taught to profit until the first step is taken, the beholding of the Crucified Redeemer. Beholding Him and taking the vision home as the revelation "of His sacrifice for the guilty, the heart gives liberty to the teacher who would guide it further. It says, being broken •'.Show me the mvsterv of His Cross."

When our Lord appeared to His disdisdples after the Resurrection, He showed them His hands and His side. By this time He was on the other side of death. From the Resurrection to the Ascension was a short step compared to that between Good Friday and Easter. That step had been taken and He was revealed as a conqueror. He had slain the enmity between God and His sinning brethren. That enmity was now a vanquished and broken thing. Henceforth the note of power—the power of His Resurrection — rings loudly through the Xew Testament. The strength that God set at work in Christ -when He raised Him from the dead is the theme of believers from now to the end of time. But that strength was the power of victorious and accepted sorrow. He carried through the grave the strong, full, everlasting indications of sorrow. His wounds were no more burning, but their record remained, and will remain, in the scars that are the seal of victory. He came through the grave with the life whole in Him. But what a life was that! Of all the live* mat had ever appeared in the world this was the life that most deserved to be cherished, completed, followed, worshipped. It was the life rejected, purified, perse-, cuted and slain. He had plucked the j victory out of the depths of ignominy j and abandonment. It is not enough to say that after the Cross, the suffering, the blood, the patience, there came the life and power. The life and power were i there through all the endurance, thoughi they blazed" forth in their glory at the resurrection. Long after, St. Paul spoke of having in himself the answer of death. That is, when he was asked, "How is all this going to end?" he could only say out of his' extreme need, "In death." But Jesus had always within Him the answer of life, as well as the answer of; death. He refused to despair, refused' to be wearied and daunted, even when men most vehemently rejected Him. He was always dying through His years in Palestine,' but" he was always being raised again. And so His Apostle bore about in the body of the dying of the Lord •Jesus, that' the life also of Jesus might be seen clear in the same. So Good Friday and Faster are not so far apart as they seem. He carried Good Friday into Easter and there was Easter in Good Friday. He showed them His hands and His side. It was as mucin as to say to them, "In this new land! where all is peace and triumph, yon are] safe with me. These wounds are foun-j tains of grace, the titles of My glory, j and the seals of My power to save. For you the rains will descend a little while, and the winds beat, but I have not forgotten the storm that Mrsi tm~Me." In Heaven, where He and His redeemed are together and at rest for ever, He appears to them as a lamb a^ttlias been slain. This iswha^hJ^^kjj^ the clJHfl^Hj^^^^^H tin' Clie^^^^^^^^^^^H ins i^^^l^^^^^H dlie tvibuU^^^^^^^^^^^^H ■hc'U ncv^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^J a lamb i^^^^^^^^^^^^^l ,%* has disj^^^^^^^^M

' riches that He bears ihe tnu-es. I: is ! the power and the witness of victorious and availing sorrow that are his through the eternal years, lie has oiler-' cd up one sacrifice for sius for ever, and the memory of that sacrifice is green, and its tokens are never out of the eyes of those it lias brought home to (bid. What "seeming of slaying" that was we can never tell here, but we know that it awakens and re-awakens the new soil"', that it seals the assurance that in Him all the promises of Uod are yea. Wherefore Jet us not live among the tombs; lot us be caught up to meet the Lord in the air.