SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 May 1921, Page 11

SUNDAY READING.

GOD’S GOOD MAN. “Behold now I perceive that thia is an holy man of God which passeth by us continually.”—ll. Kings, IV. 9. (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) Elisha’s place in the line of Israel’s prophets is not easy to define. You will not find his name enrolled in the list of those we call “major,” or in the line of these we mistakenly describe as “minor” prophets. His coming and going were less dramatic than the tall, tawny Tishbite. He left no flaming message like Isaiah. The story of Elisha is almost entirely the record of miracles, but his miracles are mostly deeds of beneficence. The chief distinction of this man lies neither in his words nor in his works, but in the life he lived. In the grammar of life the verb to be is more than the verb to do or the verb to suffer. Elisha’s immortality, is iu the immortality of goodness. He refreshed human hearts as the dewdrop the flower. He ruled as the stars sway the sea. The call of a goat-herd on his native alps sets the still air in motion. The vibrant air shakes loose, a single snowflake on some lonely crag, and this in turn affects other snowflakes by its fall. A movement thus begun spreads and grows until the snowflake becomes an avalanche, which goes thundering down the valley, uprooting pine forests, and burying whole villages in a sepulchre of snow. So do great events spring from apparently trifling caaises. Suspend a bell of a hundred tons weight, and if a child stand beneath it and play soft music on a flute, the vibrant air will cause the bell to tremble through all its mass. As bell responds to flute, so does one heart answer to another, nearest, not in space, but in. sympathy. Three hundred years ago a solitary monk found a copy of Holy Scripture, and from it learned the doctrine of “justification by faith,” and later led him to nail his protest against Papal error to the church door at Wittenberg. Mark the sequence of events. Erasmus translated the Scriptures into Latin. LUTHER’S HAMMER;

The translation found its way to Cambridge, and was welcomed for the purity of its diction, and the eyes of Bilney were opened. In this way Luther’s hammer set the air of Europe quivering, until the avalanche of the Protestant Reformation crashed on the Papal power with effects overwhelming. Thus do good men multiply themselves a thou-sand-fold and set in motion influences which tell on the world for generations after they sleep in the graves of their fathers. The secret of immortality is the secret of infectious goodness. Progress in all along the line of sanctified personality. We have wealth and learning; we have organisation and machinery in plenty; and what is needed to make all these effective is simple, unaffected goodness. It isn’t logic that convinces and converts, neither is it rhetoric that wins; it is reason illuminating the eye; it is the heart mounting into the face, and the soul in its purity making life lustrous. An earthquake that shakes half a continent, and engulfs whole cities is an impressive display of Nature in her stormy mood, but the light that falls so silently and benignantly is mightier far. The unheralded and unnoticed ministries of the world are greater than its violent activities. Goodness is one form of omnipotence, and it was in this moral realm Elisha won immortality. “Now I know that this is a holy man of God that passeth by us continually.” Such a tribute from any lips would have been praise indeed; but spoken by an alien in race and religion, this whispered word sounds his deathless down the ringing grooves of time. DEFIES ANALYSIS.

The steps by which the Shunamite woman reached her estimate of the prophet are aot named save in the most casual way. In discharge of his daily task Elisha passed through Shunam and accepted the proffered hospitality. That is all. But there was an indefinable something about God’s good man that lifted him out of the category of other men, and gave him moral distinction. I ao not think he talked much. I am he never put on airs, or played the superior person. He was simple and natural. But he carried hi* atmosphere with him. When he came into the house the rooms seemed to expand, the air seemed more genial, life looked fairer, and when he departed the Shunamite secretly wished he might soon come back again. She found his secret, as blind men discover a bank of violets. No one is able to exactly define personal influence. Speech is heard. Gifts can be estimated. Conduct can be described, but influence —the elusive, thereal, spiritual quality that is mightier than words, or gold, or talents —that defies analysis.This it is that makes it almost impossible to write the biography of the world’s best men. They charmed, helped, soothed, inspired, guided their follows; they moulded men’s character, kept national ideals burning, sustained men’s faith in goodness and in God, and yet when you sit down to put it into words, yoii can no more do it than you .can describe the scent of sweet-briar.

THE SECRET OF GREATNESS. Goodness is the secret of greatness, and goodness is “the secret of the Lord” which is with them that fear Him. It is not a question of talent and social status: it is chiefly a question of sanctified personality—a quality of the soul. Some lives of little real importance in the world spread themselves through bulky volumes of trivial details and even vulgar cominon-place; whilst humble and obscufe saints may have all told in a modest page, as a tiny flask holds the essence of 10,000 roses. “Enoch walked with God.” On three occasions only did Christ stretch forth His hand to build a monument, and on each occasion it was to immortalise a deed of simple goodness. Once a disciple gave a cup of cold water to one of God’s little ones, and won everlasting renown. Once a woman broke an alabaster cruse on the head of her Heavenly Friend, and lo! her memory is fragrant as the perfume she shed. ‘ Once, when rich men cast their rattling shekels into the brazen treasury, a poor widow stole, softly as a shadow, and cast her speck of dust, called two mites, and lo! her deed is graven on the tablets of Eternity! The meaning of all this for ourselves should not be misled. Life for most of us offers no opportunity of doing great things. We have not scholarship, or wealth, or genius; but no life, however humble and ‘ obscure, does not present opportunity for self surrender, self conquest, and the cultivation of those Christian virtues , wESch keep faith tweet and make life ' influential.

FOR GOOD OR ILL. God has so made us that wr ttnwl help but influence others for good Wm, From the inner reservoir of humaK sonality flow streams that bligLv ■&£ blacken, like the sweep of the StfNMt or make the wilderness blossom Lila *fte rose. A woman enters a room where the conversation is trivial and gossipy, and instantly the cruel tongues cease to retail slander. Yet she said nothing. A man crosses your path, and though he makes no evil suggestion, you recoil from him as from a lithe and glittering snake, for your instinct tells you he is not a moral man. Elishu Burrett stated the truth in fine phrase when he said: “Just as a little silver ripple, set in motion by a falling pebble, expands from its inch radius to the whole compass of the pool, so there is not a child—an infant Moses—-placed however softly in its bullrush ark upon the sea of time whose existence does not stir a ripple, gyrating outward and onward until it shall have moved across and spanned the whole ocean of God’s eternity, stirring even the river of life and the fountain at ,chich the angels drink.” PERSONAL INFLUENCE. Writers on the subject remind ilfl that personal influence is twofold, it is direct and indirect, it is conscious and unconscious; and, of the two, the second is always the greater. A teacher sets himself to mould the members of hia class, the advocate seeks to win the jury to his side, the statesman strives to commend his policy. But in each ease it is the personal equation that tells. “What you are talks so loudly that I can’t hear what you say.” This does not mean anything mawkish or unreal. Holy and healthy mean the same thing, though in different spheres. Be good means be natural. Wickedness is the most unnatural thing in the universe. It is not a part of the purpose of the Creator or an original part of his creature man. GOD’S INSTRUMENT* There is no need to retire from the world like Basil, or take monastic vows like Jerome, or bend before images like Archbishop Laud, or interlard common speech with pious phrases like the Puritans. Christianity is God’s instrument for making men and women unpretentiously good. “Called to be saints” means called to make Christ Christ visible and credible—called to reproduce His life of spiritual grace and beauty, called to see things with His pure eyes, and called to express, in common life, the virtues which blended in Him in such exquisite and perfect harmony. “The fruit of the spirit is goodness.” Someone has likened a church full of people to a box of unlighted candles. Latent light is there, if they were only kindled and set burning they would be light indeed. The problem of the evangelising of the people of our land will never be solved by preaching. It will-only be solved when each Christian becomes an evangelist in his circle and wine others by his simple, straightforward piety. This was Christ’s way, the way of personal influence. What He seeks for is luminous Christians and living* gospels. Oh! may we join

The Choir invisible Of those immortal dead, who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims, that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars.