SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 December 1921, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

YONDERLAND. "Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions.” —Saint John,. XV, 1-2. (By Rev. A. EL Collins, New Plymouth.) These words are simple, tender, and strong, clear as the sun at noon, deep as the unfathomed sea, welcome as a mothers good-night kiss. They haunt the memory like the music of Sabbath bells that chime across meadows newly mown, when the sinking sun is reddening in the west. Everythig about them —speaker, subject., audience and occasion—help to make the passage one of the most beautiful within the covers of the Bible. What multitudes of sad and sorrowful souls it has comforted! The words breathe quietness, restfulness and hope. As little children hold sea-sheils to their ears, and dream they listen to the splash and murmur of the mighty main, so we take these words and seem to catch the whisper and the thunder of the ocean, the solemn ground swell of the music of Eternity. THE HARD SIDE. And yet, for all their haunting sweetness, there is no denial of the hard side of things. They do not gloss over the ills of life, or the mystery of the Great Beyond. David did not deny the existence of “the Valley of the Shadows.” Great David’s greater Son does not ignore the pain of separation and physical decay. He seeks rather to help us to look at both in a new and better way. The disciples’ sorrow Christ saw to be natural. They could not have cared for the Master as they did and not feel sad at the prospect of His departure. Their '‘ompanioship had been so close, so intimate and so friendly. He was their dear, familiar Friend and Master, and their sorrow sprang out of love. There could not be the one without the other.

The grief we share in the presence of death is natural, and the tears we shed are not jilien to Christian trust. .J®sus never said that sorrow is wrong, or that Christian men and women should be unmoved and untroubled in the presence of pain and loss. It is not the function of religion to make us inhuman. Religion refines and deepens love, makes the heart more and not less senstive, more and not less open to pain. Though it sounds like a paradox, i-t is deeply true to say that oe of the glories of the Christian religion is this,, that it makes deeper and sharper gref possible. Things touch us according to the range and strength of our affection. Fineness of fibre means fulness of feeling. The more life we have, and the finer that life, the more we feel, and religion sensatises the soul. Death must ever be a painful thing to those who remain, for next to the love of God. nothing is more precious than love of mother, father husband, wife, and friend; and when these ties are snapped there must be pain. Grief is the shadow of love, and love cannot lose with indifference. The springs of our fullest, sweetest jnys are the founts of our bitterest sorrow. It is good to rempm'ber when the home is shadowed that the desolation would not be so cruel were it not that human love is such a blessed thing, and if love were less the loss would be less. . THE LIFE BEYOND.

I say, then, that Jesus Christ does not gloss over the hard things of life, and patch our griefs with a shallow phrase. What he does is to suggest a corrective in a new thought of the Great Beyond. He says: “My going away will be a sorrow and a loss, and yet not all sorrow and loss, for there are compensations. 1 shall come to you nnd be with you in another way. Strange as it may seem, I shall be more to you after Easter Day than ever 'before. “It is expedient for you that I go away,’’ and this better thing for you is the better thing for Me. I am going to the Father. My death is My home-going. It is entrance on the larger, fuller life. Death is the release of expanded powers, and the beginning of a new form of'service. Death is freedom. Death is glory everlasting. Death is a thoroughfare, not a terminus. It is not a break or an end. I am forI will not attempt to be wise beyond what is written. But death is going to the Father. Death is going home. This is how Christ habitually regarded it. and it is a blessed way! How l different it is from our way! Wk? have put quite a false emphasis on tne subject, and invested it with glooms and terrors; with nodding plumes and broken pillars, and dirge music, none of which should be. if the Christian doctrine of the future life be true. We think of the doorway,, and it seems dark, and fearsome, and uncanny. Christ thought of the home on tne other side of the door, of the Father’s presence, the blended 'beauty, the rest, the fellowship, the service! THE DIVINE ORDERING. To Him death is part of the Divine ordering of the world, and as patura) a process as the dissolution of the grain of whebt that it may expand and multiply. Death is as natural as birth. I / deed, it is a birth into the larger life; it is resurrection seen from the other side. Christ’s gospM of the Hereafter, made the life beyond so attractive as to be. something to be anticipated. something to be coveted and enjoyed. Kingsley said he regarded the future with reverent curiosity. Hence, quietly, serenely, with His heart in His voice. Jesus said: “Don't be troubled at this temporary severance. In My Father’s home, whither I am going, there are many and roomy dwellings. I am going to get things ready, and when all is prepared. I am coming to receive you unto Myself. It will be heaven to Me. because you arc there ami it will bp heaven to you ,because My Father, and your Father, will be there.” That, in rough paraphrase, is what Jesus said and with W" hope of completeness I venture to underscore some of its leading ideas. “MY FATHER’S HOUSE.” The chief word is “Father.” “In My Father’s house.” The phrase was not I new. It had fallen from His lips before, but here it*comes to perfection, like a rose-bud, bursting into full bloom. God is Father.- Jesus called God by the Name most familiar to the race and He crowded it with the most blessed associations. Father! Poor is the man whose heart has-never thrilled at sound of that word, and Jesus said God is that, purged and glorified. Father! I he first scented drop to fall into the flask of history from the fountain of Christ’s speech was this: “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” The last fragrant drop was this: "Father, jnto Thy hands I commend My Spirit.” The central figure in Yonderland is “our Father.’’ The phrase is an alabaster box of ointment very precious, and the odor of it fiita the world. Fatherhood is indes-

tractable. In the nature of things it is indestrustible. Fatherhood is not a contract. It is one of the inevitabilities of life. If I am your Son now, how can you ever make it otherwise? I may be unworthy of you . You may wish to disown Me. But your Fatherhood is one o fthe facts of the universe, and to some of us it is inconceivable that God should ever want to destroy such a fact. Sin is disobedience to “our Father.” Repentance is returning to “our Father.” Salvation is reconciliation to “our Father.” Death is going to “our Father.” Yonderland is the home of “Our Father.” HEAVEN OUR FATHERLAND. Next to this and worthy to stand beside it, is the word home. “Heaven is our fatherland and Hffaven is our home.” Could there be a simpler, sweeter, truer word? The' after-lifrf; the true, unhurt, unfading life is home. One reason why we shrink from the thought of death is the supposed loneliness of it. Friends go with us as far as they can on the last long mile; but our feet touch the margin of the river, •they can go no further. But the Yonder land is home! We are in the Father’s hands in death, as in life. Ideally, home means love and fellowship at its best. It means society, confidence, harmony, union. We feel safer, freer, happier at home than anywhere else, and the blessed dead are at home. Their’s is no lonely lot. They are with the Lord, and in company with ‘the spirits of just men made perfect.” We know little about Yonder land, and speculation is vain, but we know enough to make us think of it without dread, for if God is Father and Heaven is home there it will not be so strange or so different as we sometimes dream. Death is not the evil we imagine, and the living dead are living the larger, fuller, richer life with the Father at home. “MANY MANSIONS.” One thing more. Is it too much to say that spaciousness and variety are also suggested“ Many mansions”! For Yonder land is so cramped and narrow prison house, the abode of a select few. “The ways of men are narrow, but the Gates of Heaven are wide.” The Arabs have a legend which tells of a tent set up in the king’s courtyard and it filled the place, but when the tent was removed to the plain it covered that also. “Many rooms,” saifl the Master, and His words rebuke the narrowness of sects, and creeds, and isms. “Twelve gates” is Saint John's picture of the Eternal City; gates facing all points of the compass, and we should read the parable. Why should we shake o.nr head because*of those who cannot honestly dot our i’s and cross our t’s? Why should we find any satisfaction in limiting the number of the saved? Yonderland will have many surprises, and amongst them will be its roominess, and the multitude of the redeemed, and the greatest surprise of all will be that we are there. From all lands and along different roads, from homes of light and the regions of the shadow; from east and west, from north and south, Christ will bring many sons to glory until His great heart sees of “the travail of His ; soul and is satisfied.” ‘After this I looked, and lo! a great multitude.” Milions! millions! millions! and this home of the blessed and the free is the place of service. “Y’ou have preached your last sermon.” said one to Frederick Denison Maurice, as he was dying. “Aye,” he said, “but only my last sermon in this life.” He believed he was going through the veil to preach to men. I believe it, too, though I .can’t give chapter and verse for it. “His servants serve Him

and they shall see His Face and live.” Our dead live and serve! Sing it out brave hearts in courageous faith. In the words of Dr. Alexxander McLaren, that prince of biblical expositors, “every man that has died is at this instant in the full possession of all his faculties, in the intensest exercise of all his capacities, standing somewhere in God’s presence, and feeling in every fibre of his being that life which comes after death is not unreal but more real; not less great, but more great; not less intense and full, but more intense and full, than the mingled life which lived here on earth, was a centre of life, surrounded by a crust and circumference of mortality.” Now, the Master said this for th? comfort of the twelve, and for our comfort, too. But He said it for our guidance as well. For the atmosphere of the Yonderland is to be the atmosphere of our daily lives. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” here and yonder. Then let it fade,’ this dream of earth. When I have done my life work here, Or long or short as seemeth best. What matters, so God’s will appears? I will not fear to launch my bark Upon the darkly rolling flood; ’Tis but to pierce the mist—and then How beautiful to be with God!