SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 October 1921, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

LUMINOUS LIVES. “He was the lamp that burneth and 6-hincth.”—Saint John, V. 35. (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) This is part of the Master’s eulogy of His great Forerunner. John the Baptist was a light w'hich God kindled to guide the Jewish people to the feet of Messiah. He was the herald with loins girt and running ahead of the royal chariot crying “The King, the King!” He prepared the way of the Lord and made His paths straight. Great as he unquestionably was in mental and spiritual gifts and influence, his unique honor, his supreme task was this, that he heralded the Christ. How zealously he fulfilled, hie high calling the four gospels tell. His voice rang like a clarion. His flametipped words convicted the nation of its sin, the sin of having a religion that was only skin deep, and by stirring men’s hearts to penitence, he prepared them for the coming of Jesus Christ, with His words of pardon and His deeds of mercy. . . . But it is not of the great Baptist’s mission I wish to speak. Our Lord’s words supply a parable. John was a lamp that burned and shone, burned and therefore blazed, blazed because he burned. He was luminous because he was ablaze. He glowed because he spent himself like the carbon of an electric lamp. He would have given forth no light had he not consumed, for the consumption of self is the condition of giving light. You see the force of this life parable. It is nor. simply a skilful play on words, it is the enunciation of a great law of life. We must burn to shine.

“God does with us as men with torches do. Not light them for themselves.” John the Baptist illustrated, but did ■ not create, the divine rule. His life was illuminative, it shone like a lamp, and the cost of its was self-consumption. No one can read his story and escape the conviction that- this man influenced other men profoundly. People flockerl to hear him. He touched all classes of society. The Jordan Valley echoed with the piercing heart-cries of repentant and shame-stricken folk; and if you ask the reason, it was because this skin-clad prophet was careless of himself and devoi/*d to his mission. He was no carpet knight, no dainty epicure, no diligent student of the “comfits and cushions”; he was “a good soldier of Jesus Christ prepared to take his share of the suffering, a man who sternly thrust aside appeals io self and sense and sloth. Like Francis of Assissi, he chose poverty as his bride. Zeal for truth and reality consumed him. and he thus became “the flame signal of the Messiah.” No wonder hits body was spare. How could it be otherwise? The zeal of the Lord possessed him. and that self-consumption was the open secret, of hits influence. He might have spared himself and lived longer, but he chose to enjoy “one crowded hour of glorious, life” rather then a multitude of days spent in sloth and idle reverie. He was a lamp that burned and shone. THE WORK THAT TELLS. Now, that law Isolds good in all lands and spheres. You must burn to shine in anything. The work that tells is the work that costs the worker brain sweat and soul sweat. We live in heart-beats and not m movements on the dial plate. The worK that tells is the work that exhausts. Of course I do not mean thei meretricious labor of mere cleverness. The clover man. in the vulgar sense, can turn out work that arrests attention and excites comment. A smart speech, a shallow book, a fervid sermon, may dazzle for the passing hour, but it won’t last. It is easier to manufacture sky-rockets than build ligh't-houses. Paste diamonds are cheap and nasty. But the rule is what costs little is worth little. “I preach four times every Sunday and tnink nothing of it,” said a callow curate with a faint suspicion of down on his receding chin. “Yes, that is what year people say,” was the caustic reply. Another man preaches twics, and at the • •nd cf the day is used up, for he has drained all the forces of he-art and brain into his work. The 'difference- lies- ill the quality of the work done. Have you ever read Carlyle’s “French Revolution”? If not. let me commend it to ! you. It is a shining book, the undying I utterance of a modern prophet, a terriI fic arraignment of society that was rot- ! ten ripe for judgment. The book came I from the author’s heart and brain, i scorching hot like a stream of lava from ! the mouth of a volcano. The book shines | because while Carlyle wrote it his soul was aflame. Do you know F. W. Robertson’s sermons? He died at thirtyfive, but, his mental output was wonderful. and his influence was profound. The reason? Read his life and letters, and you will learn the secret. His sermons were the fruit of mental and spiritual wrestling. He shone because he burned. Let. one more example suffice. Take Stevenson’s assay “Ordered South.” WORK FIRST. It cost him three months to write that brief paper. He toiled terribly, .he “scorned delights and lived laborious days,” and, looking back on the period, this is what he said: “I imagine no one ever had such pains to learn a trade as I had. but I slogged at it day and night, and I frankly believe I have done : more with smaller gifts than almost any [man of letters in the world.” Shining : work is consuming work. I know a skillI ed surgeon in Auckland, who stood in . the front rank of his profession. People turned to him in critical cases. He had a steady hand and a clear eye. He was an enthusiast in cricket and loved the game, but because the game affected his profession he abandoned it. He burned self-gratification and shone in the ministry of healing. If your work is to excel, it will cost you dearly, and t-he higher you pitch the standard the more consuming will it be. Shining work is [ burning work, that is my first point.

But is is of life more than deeds our text speaks. You surely must know \Vhat it is to meet with luminous lives. May be you have one such in your, home. Have you ever tried to discover the secret'of the shining face and those deft fingers? If so, you have discovered that their possessor was consuming self in some ministry of helpfulness, until the heart mounted up into the face and made the face shine like a porphyry vase lit from within. Not to travel outside familiar examples, isn’t it true of motherhood ? Ask any ten men you meet who made the deepest impression on their lives, and nine out of the ten will answer in two words, “My mother.” Fathers are all very well in their way, but .thetf touch id rsrugh fttoi

blundering. If God’s angels ever visit the- earth they come disguised as our mothers. But what is the secret of their influence? Is it not this, they shine because they consume in patient, tender, self-forgetting service. So with ov.r

public gnert. Once let it be suspected that a man is seeking place and power for selfish ends, and that man’s influence will be gone. He will not shine because he. does not consume. Why is it that the islands of these warm southern seas provide markets for the western nations ? Because men like Bishop Patterson surrendered brilliant prospects in England I«» labor amid the natives of the Pacific, and twice plunged into the wafers of the coral reefs, amid sharks and stingarees, to escape the flight of poisoned arrows, the slightest scratch of which would have been horrible death, and was at last clubbed to death by the very men for whom he had risked his life. The result? This was the result: MOST NOBLE EXAMPLE. The memory of his saintly life so haurfted the conscience of his murderers that they laid the young martyr in an open boat, to float away on the bright blue waves, with hands crossed on his breast and a palm branch in his hand. And there he lies in the white light immortal! He burned and he shines. Why did the representatives of five nations come together to destroy the slave trade in Africa? Because one day Westminster Abbey was crowded with the flower of English chivalry, in the midst of whom stood two black men. “God’s image carved in ebony,” men who had carried the body of David Livingstone through the African jungle, and there, in the great minster, the faithful Susi and Chamma told of the hero who, worn thin as parchment through thirty attacks of fever, refused Stanley's request,, and turned back to Ujiji, to make his ninth attempt to discover the source of the Nile ami track the slave trader to his lair, only to die in the forest, with no white man near, no hand of sister, or wife, or son, to cool his fevered brow or close his glazed eye. Faithful to the last, he wrote those lines with his dying [hand:, “All I can add in my solitude I is this, may heaven’s rich blessing come [ down an every one who would help to I heal the open sore of the world.” Ten j years after that prayer for Africa was I penned, Africa made greater progress than in the previous ten centuries! He burned and he shone. If I ended there you would instinctively feel the noblost example of all had been left out. Jesus Christ died in the prime of life, died at thirts-three. If men had not crucified Him He could not have lived long. The keenness of the sword-blade would have worn away the scabbard. Day after day His life was burnt up in zeal for the glory of God in the saving of men. Virtue went out of Him. Died aged thirty-three! Yet His foes said He looked like a man of fifty. I Died in the prime of life, yet Saint [ John saw Him in vision with hair white jas snow! What a comment on a life I that was tragically toilsome and tragic- • ally short. Oh! how he burned, but | how He shined! The bramble crown ■ whose spikes ran red has blossomed and filled the world with its fragrance. “0 Lord, that I could waste myself for others, With no needs of my own. That ! could pour myself into my brothers, And live for them alone.”