SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 November 1915, Page 9 (Supplement)

SUNDAY READING.

"ALL SAINTS AND ALL SOULS." SERMON PPvJEACHED BY REV. A. H. OOLVILE, M.A., at St. Mary's Church, New Plymouth, on Sunday, October 31. "Behold all souls are mine."—E:;., 18:4. All Saints' Day is one of the most beautiful festivals of the Christian yea-r. There are well-known saints, such as St. Peter, St. Paul, St. John, and St. Andrew to whom our church gives a special meed of praise and honor, as special honor should always be given to the pioneers. But what we sometimes forget is that the festival of All Saints is unlimited in its scope and range. , It is, we may say, not only ancient, but modern. For every one of these recognised saints of old time there are thousandsof the unknown, "multitudes whom no man can number," who have lived brave, patient, self-forgetting lives, who have no place of their own in any church calendar, but whose names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life—

"The unknown good who rest In God'a still memory folded deep." These too, on All Saints' Day wc remember and honor. But what comes after? What follows the festival of All Saints?

" ALL SOULS' DAY." It is of this day and its meaning, so significant at this present time, that I would speak briefly to you to-night. "Behold, ail souls are mine," saith the Lord. None belong to Satan. None belong to any other. "All souls are mine." They belong to the God Who made them. Not only all saints—that goes without saying—the brave, pure, loving spirits that have passed over; they arc obviously, manifestly His. But all souls, the soiled, the sinning, the degraded, the outcast, the careless, the ignorant, they too are His. He made them. He is responsible for them. He cannot lose them, Wherever they arc at this moment; to whatever distance banished, Be holds them in the hollow of His hand; He trains them, influences them, disciplines, purifies, ultimately restores them because they are 11 s riiildren and He is their Father. His name is Love, and as Jesus has told us, "No man can snatch aught out of our Father'? hand." My friends, if ever in the history of the world, surely at this time, which is to so many a time of sadness and mourning, we arc justified in blending together the two thoughts, all saints and all souls, and remembering the second while we honor and reverence .the first. For a thousand years All Saints' Day has been observed by the Christian Church in England. Before the Reformation the Church, with merciful tenderness, and I believe with a true instinct, observed the day following the festival of All Saints as All Souls' Day, a day oil which to remember and pray for the failures, the sinners, the wanderers who had passed out of life unawakened, unrcpentent, unabsolved with all their imperfections on theij' heads, the ignorant, the unconscious, the greater multitudes whom no man can number vvhc were obviouslj not saints. Most of us remember ihe Eeformation in England with gratitude. That movement was indeed a great liberating and purifying influence. .11 cleansed the Church of a great many superstitions, fallacies and abuses, but with them went certain very precious and beautiful things. The abuses, e.g., that had grown up round the doctrine of purgatory, the masses for the dead, money paid for prayers that souls might be the sooner delivered from torment were lightly condemned by the reformers. Unfortunately, in their zeal men went to the other extreme, and the cruel idea gained ground that physical death fixed for ever the condition of the individual, that on leaving this earth-plane the soul went at once either "to inherit bliss unending, or eternity of woe," either to Heaven or to Hell, and generally to Hell, and there was an end of any more hope of progress; and as a consequence of this belief All .Souls' Day was obliterated from the calendar. Thank God! that now the thoughts of men have widened, religious materialism has lost much of its influence, and

GOO IS .MORE HIGHLY ENTHRONED

in the hearts of true believers as a God of power and a God of love. 1 remember a long time ago in the days of my youth listening to a sermon by an old mission preacher in which he asserted that in the end God was honored and glorified by the damnation of sinners, and that His power was vindicated by the sending to Hell, the banishing to eternal torment of all souls who 011 this earth-plane had resisted His Holy Spirit. It seemed to me even then a crude and awful conception. Now lam sure that it is a crude and awful conception. I am sure that God —and all-powerful and all-loving God—cannot be glorified by failure; nay, that ultimate failure is impossible with Him. lam sure tluvt Christ died for all souls, those who went before Ilim as well as those who came after Him, and when I think of all the souls of men and women who have passed out of life in blindness and ignorance and darkness I remember God's greatness flowing round their incompleteness; I remember God's responsibility for that which He has made; I remember God's love, suffering to the very uttermost, and I cau feel assured that even in the worst case, even though a corrupted soul, as the prophet.says, may have first to die, to pass through the fires of dijatli to be consumed, yet there will be a resurrection, a coming back to life, a coming back to God, for all souls are His, and He has devised the means in Jesus Christ by which "they that are banished bo not outcast from Him.'' Oil! mv friends, when we think of all the millions of souls who have had their habitation 011 this earth, clothed for a time, for a, very brief time, with human bodies; when we think how they have passed out into the unseen, and are passing every day, unconscious, neither knowing nor caring for God, bhndly rebelling against His will, stubbornly rejecting His lave, ignorant of its beauty and its powerwhen \\; think of them,

ARK \VK TO DESPAIR OF THEM? To eel o the cynical words o£ the old pessimist preacher, "As the tree falls so let it Mb"? Are we to believe that a hostile god called the devil has snatched these .trillions out of our Father's hand, and t'uit from the moment they left this world their destiny was fixed and fixed for evil? Personally, I cannot and will not believe it. May I remind you of the lines which clothe the thoughts of all believers in the power and love of God in beautiful language, the lines which give us a real inspiration for All Souls' Day? They are suggested by the text, "Ho went and preached to' ihe spirits in prison":-*

"0 the generations old O'er whom bo church bell tolled, Christless, raising up blind eves To the silence of the skies. For the innumerable dead ]■; my soul disquieted.

lli>;uv4 thou, 0 of little faith What to thee the mountain .saith, Whist i.i whispered in the breeze. 'Cast on God'thy care for these, Doubt for them is doubt of Him.'

Yea, Thy love, 0 Christ arisen, Yearns to meet all souls in prison, Down beneath the shame and loss Sinks the plummet of Thy cros3. Never yet abyss was found Deeper than that cross could sound.'' Aye, it is the power of the Cross of Christ that justilies us in lilting up our hearts in prayer for all the souls of men. I have said that All Souls' Day has a very special significant for both the Church and the world at this present time, and T am speaking of it because I know what is in the hearts and minds of so many people to-day Soma whose best and dearest have given up their lives on the battle-field, in eainp or hospital; others whose men lie sick and wounded far away, very near perhaps 1o the border-line of the unseen, and thousands of others who know that tiio.>'.; dear to them stand in ever-present danger. I know that in tlla background of many minds—sometimes obscured by anxiety for the body—lies the unspoken question,

"WHAT OF THE SOUL?" Ah, that careless lad whom you never could get to take any intercut in religion, who only wenj, to church under pressure to please you; that other who lived the sort of life for which it was necessary that you should try and find excuses, that hoy whom you loved, whose character you would defend so warmly, but whose weaknesses and failings you knew so well. Thank God! there is many a mother all over the world who is assured in her heart that her boy is lit for the presence of Clod, who if the news of his passing came to-morrow could say witli great thankfulness out of the midst of her grief, "How is he numbered with the children of God, and his lot is among the saints." But what of the others? Is every man who dies upon the field of honor to pass at once into "blis3 unending"? The Turks believe that. Kvery Mohammedan who goes into battle is assured that if he is killed the gates of Paradise—a material Paradise —are at once thrown open to him, and he passes to his idea of "bliss unending." The Christian cannot and does not speak so confidently. We can cling to the belief that such a death is the very best way in which a man can pass from this life into the mystery of the unseen. We can treasure the noble words of Macaulay, "How tan man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temple of his gods." We are told on high authority that love can cover a multitude of sins, and that "greater love hath no man than this that a man may lay down his life for his friends." But surely our highest ground for confidence and the surest foundation of our hope for all souls who ■have finished their earthly course in this present war lies in our knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. "Behold, all souls are mine," saith the Lord, No one can snatch them out of our Father's hand. Careless, indifferent, unconscious, passionate. erring, without the knowledge of God, they leave this earth-plane, unfit as yet for unending spiritual b'lss: yet

THEY AliE IX THE HANDS Or A LOVING FATHER, anil we know tliat nothing that is evil can touch thorn to their hurt, no power of darkness can destroy them, for wherever tliey fro lie will bo with them to help then!, to save them to restore; however long their journey, however hard their discipline, He will be close at hand to sustain them. Do not doubt it. Think—you who love strongly, intensely, with all your heart and soul—would voit not fro anywhere and do anything" to help the being you love, if you could? No distance would be too great, no danger too fierce, no difficulty 100 immense to keep you back—if only you could. And God can. All the loves of all the lovers who have ever lived since the world began cannot make up the sum of God's love for one single wayward soul. Think of that, and your own soul will be comforted, strengthened, uplifted, and you will not be afraid to follow with your prayers those who have passed for a time out of your sight. By such prayers, says the poet Tennyson, ''is the whole world bound with gold chains about the feet of God." My friends. I ask you to keep All Souls' bay by the quiet intensity of thought turned towards God for those who have given up their lives in this great struggle, and not to confine your prayers either to those who have died lighting for our cause, but for all souls who have passed, both our own men and those of the foe. I visited the hill called Spion Kop in South Africa a year after the war. The summit of that hill is like a cemetery. Many tombstones covered with inscriptions mark the places where the bodies of our brave men are lying, and here and there among them are rough crosses with the simple words, "Here lies a brave burgher." Side by side lie the bodies of Englishman and Boer. Side by side in our thoughts and prayers we may remember them. We need not follow our foes with enmity beyond the grave. Death should close all accounts. The Latin poet Virgil, who sees the souls of those who have died in battle gathered together in a separate place in the realms of Pluto, represents them as carrying on their struggle there. The Christian may surely have faith in something better. He may well believe that all enmity between brave foes ceases when the souls have passed over the frontier lino. And shall there bo enmity between the living and the dead? Nay; for God is their God ami. ours, and all souls are his, and our faith must be the strongest link in . the golden chain of prayer that binds tile whole world around the feet of God. A leading article in a prominent English religious paper discusses the effect of the war on theology. I have 110 time to go into that to-night, but I do believe that one effect of the war will b"e to restore All Souls' Day to the calendar of our Church, for thousands of English churchmen—indeed all Christians—will feel that they cannot do without it. I do believe that one effect of the war will be to restore to us that part of our old theology which tolls us that we need not and must not cease praying for those who have crossed to the other side of the river, who still live and love and work and pray, whose lives are still bound up with ours in the eternal love of our Father and our God.