"LORNA DOONE."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 12, 14 June 1913, Page 10

"LORNA DOONE."

REV. R. J. CAMPBELL'S REFERENCES. The Rev. R. J. Campbell, M.A., preaching at the City Temple, London, made interesting use of a passage in the famous story, "Lorna Doone." He said (as reported in the Christian Commonwealth) : "Miss Evelyn Underbill, in her new book, 'The Mystic Way'—l advise you to read it—argues with much cogency, and certainly with great suggestiveness, that what Jesus brought to the world was a new consciousness of reality, an immediate experience of the eternal, a higher kind of life than had ever been known before. It had been glimpsed before by great spiritual seers, but never actually lived. She says Jesus was able to put His followers in possession of this priceless boon, and that faith was the one indispensable requisite for obtaining it. Once the new life became theirs, it went on growing and deepening, and the world meant less and less to them; their joys and sorrows mainly had relation to another plane; their strug--1 gles and aspirations were all directed to spiritual ends; they lived, in fact, in an utterly different sphere from that of the geenral run of mankind. LORNA J S NARROW WORLD. "Now, this I believe to be in the main true; I am trying to live my own life by means, of it, and with all my heart to urge it upon you. Everybody has read Blackmore's fascinating romance, 'Lorna Doone.' You remember how Lorna was brought up in a strange, narrow, lawless world, to which her kinsfolk belonged, and how little she knew of the standards of conduct and ways of living in the world outside her native Devonshire valley. And you remember, too, how she was initiated into the life of that larger world by the coming of all over from it; as love arose in her heart, so somehow the new understanding came too. Then for a long time she had to live in both worlds, and felt herself torn this way and that when she found how inconsistent they were with each other: - But when the evening gathers down,

and the sky is spread with sadness, 1 and the day has spent itself, then a : cloud of lonely trouble falls, like night, I upon me. I cannot see the things I [ quest for of a world beyond me; I I cannot join the peace and quiet of the I depth above me; neither have I any ! pleasure in the brightness of the stars. What I want to know is something none of them can tell me—what am I, J and why set here, and when shall I be with them? I see that you are J surprised a little at this my curiosity, j Perhaps such questions never spring ' in any wholesome spirit. But they 1 are in the depths of mine, and I canI not be quit of them. Meantime, all around me is violence and robbery, i coarse delight and savage pain, reckless joke, and hopeless death. Is it any ! wonder that I cannot sink with these, Ithat I cannot so forget my soul, as to live the life of brutes, and die the death more horrible because it dreams ) of waking? There is none to lead me j forward, there is none to teacii me ( right; young as I am, I live beneath j a curse that lasts for ever. FAITH IX HER LOVER.

"But her faith in her lover saved her; she could not and would not conform to the lower, though she had to go on living it until deliverance came; she lived always by the higher. The world of the outlaws had no hold on her, had no attraction to otl'er her. and though in it she was not of it. But neither was she afraid of it, nor anxious to leave it; she felt she had a duty therein; but it had no power over her essential life—that was all dead. In this we have a figure of tlie experience of the Christian soul. We belong to two worlds, the world of sense and the world of spirit. We adjust ourselves habitually to the former, ignoring or only vaguely aware of the presence of the latter, till Christ awakens within us the consciousness that relates us to it. Then if becomes a question which will prevail over the other, and sometimes the struggle is fierce and prolonged, until at length the spiritual gains the mastery. And once our interests are based on that secure foundation the perturbations of the sense world are comparatively harmless; everything is seen from the standpoint of eternity. 'He that believeth shall not make haste.'"