SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 July 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

VITAL VIRTUES. x I Ko. 4.—“ PATIENCE.” ‘■Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him.” —Psalm xrxvii. 7. (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) If it be true that nations and periods, no less than individuals, have their besetting sins, we need not be in doubt what our besetment is. We are impatient. I am. You are. The age is. Impatient of authority, impatient of mystery, impatient of God. Like a kitten chasing its own tail, we mistake activity for progress, and haste for speed. Effect is everything. Results must be produced instanter. There is a mania for breaking records. People have a morbid dread of not being “up to date.*’ The latest book, however trashy, must be read; the latest fad must be experienced. There is an absence of what Wordsworth called “a wise passiveness.” The folio of patient years is displaced by the pamphlet which stirs curiosity one day, and is forgotten the next. There is very little calm, serene, sedate patience that works and waits and hopes and sings. More than two hundred years ago La Brueyer told his countrymen that “there was no getting anyone to abide at home and in patience possess his soul, and make sure he had a soul. All was hurry and haste. Not to be excitedly busy was to be condemned as idle.”

Carlyle, in picturesque phrase, told Englishmen they were “shooting Niagara.” Dr. Arnold preached a sermon to his Rugby boys against taking in the monthly parts of “Nicholas Nickleby,” and he did it as a protest against systematic excitement! One wonders what the great -schoolmaster would have to say about those whose reading is not a monthly chapter of a modern novel, but three “yellowbacks” a week! An English reviewer gives it as his deliberate judgment that at no moment in the intellectual progress of England has repose been more needful than now, if the literature of the Motherland is to take its place among the great ancestors, whilst Professor Longfellow declares that the dignity of repose is one of the great needs of the hour.

MORBID RESTLESSNESS. The results of this morbid restlessness are as patent as they are painful, and they are manifested in all departments of life. Any doctor knows the effect on its physical side. We are nervy,, necrotic, neurasthenic, hysterical. Fresh impressions, striking on the brain, exhaust our nerve force, and leave us fretted. morbid, peacelees. The same is true in the intellectual world. Our prose is scrappy, turgid, stodgy, and our verse empty, inflated, sentimental. “Plain living and high thinking'’ are gone. Mediation /is a lost art. Social life is imperilled. “Home” is almost a lost vocable. We are lodgers. “Our place” is where we eat and sleep and dress, but not where we live and grow wise. In trade circles you see the trail of the serpent, in advertisements that are neither modest nor true, and because men make haste to be rich they are betrayed in all kinds of mean trickery that damage character and besmirch the soul. But it is in the sphere of religion the blight falls most disastrously. "It is hard." says Dr. Jackson “to be patient with ourselves. It is harder to be patient with others. It is hardest of all to bp patient with God.” With ourselves, mind. We are such a bundle of contradictions! Such an amalgam of zeal and sloth, of courage and cowardice, of noble impulses and poor achievements. Elijah, on Carmel, was just splendid, but under the juniper tree! John the Baptist, before Herod, was epic, but John in prison! Ah! how like ourselves these men were! Patience with others is harder still. The crowd is so fickle, so exacting, so unreasoning and unreasonable, whilst tlifc individual is sometimes so dull, so wilful, so pitifully weak. But patience with God, when His i plans unroll so tardily, dawn creeps so slowly down the hills of time, and the world’s redemption is so long delayed. “The Godless look of things,” cried Fabei. Did not the Quaker poet exclaim : “When I think of the slave trade, T fee] as if I could call down Are from heaven!” “Oh! that I were God Almighty for ten minutes!” cried a temperance enthusiast. “Hl masters good; good seems to change To ill with greatest ease; And, worst of all, the good with good Is at cross purposes.” A MISTAKEN MOOD. We all know the mood. It is very human and very mistaken. But we may

not judge too harshly the men who are snared by it, yet the mood, is bad and the fruits are bitter. The words which are creeping into our language —“hustle,” “speed up,” “get a move on” —are not only vulgar, they are bad symptoms, and they point to the danger of sacrificing the highest and best things to the spirit of impatience. Our pulse is feverish. We live for the moment, but with no spaciousness in our outlook, no maturity in our thinking, no large thoughts, no generous emotions, no great faiths. We don’t give ourselves time to do work that will outlast the flight of years, or cultivate a religion that is dignified and strong.. We are too impatient to be deeply godly, for a deep, soulful religion means self-recollection, self-discipline, self-surrender, time to ponder, and time to pray; in a word, time to practise the presence of God. But men of deep influence are reflective.

Oliver Cromwell was never too busy to seek God, as witness his letters and speeches. Gladstone, during the most strenuous session of Parliament, found time to read the lessons in the parish church, and daily turned aside to kneel and pray in the Abbey at Westminster before he entered the House of Commons. If we have no time to come together to worship and pray, it means we haven’t time to live, and so surely as we allow’ other things to crowd out the habits that minister to our immortal ■part, just so surely do we lay waste our powers and loose grip on the things unseen and eternal. One of the commonest complaints is “I haven’t time,” yet our days are as long as the days of Moses, as long as the days of Jesus; it’s the use we make of them that marks the difference.

SEEK TIME. We have ail the time there fe; see that you have time to be good men and women. I am making no plea for a drab and joyless life, a life of drowsing and dreaming. There are some things we should make speed to do. We should hasten to end unhappy feuds, hasten to gather stores of knowledge and wisdom, hasten to carry laughter and hope to other lives, hasten to praise God for His goodness, and make our Christian discipleship real and brave, for time flies, and we shall not pass this way again. But for the sake of our health, our work, our religion, we should east out the demon of impatience and take time to be holy. Some of the gravest problems of modern religion are due to shallow thinking, half-formed convictions, and superficial changes. People are hurried into making professions they do not understand, and mistake the quiver of the nerve for the regeneration of the soul. The result is disappointment and heartache, for such converts lack depth and. steadiness and endurance. “Much haste is half-sister to delay.”

TO CORRECT IMPATIENCE. To correct impatience, I remind you that our God is'the God of Patience. He takes time to produce the results He seeks. We have given up the fancy of the creation of the universe in a week of six days. We have come to understand that countless ages have passed in the evolution of the habitable globe, and the coming of human life. Man is not yet made; he is only in the making. “All around him shadows still, While the races flower and fade, Prophets’ eyes may catch a glory Slowly gaining on the shade, Till the people all are one, And their voices blend in choric Hallelejah to the Maker, It is finished, man is made.” So everywhere. Nature is never in a hurry. She refuses to be “hustled” by her too impatient children. She insists on taking twenty-four hours to turn round. Seed will sprout no sooner, and fruit ripen no quicker, for al! our fret and fume. Nothing that is solid can be got in the twinkling of an eye, and as you rise in the scale of values the development is slotver. Mushrooms grow in a night, moss greens the stone in a week, strawberries ask for weeks, oaks a century. The time between snowdrift and red berry is brief, but ma» is so noble, and his character so sublime, that it demahds not this brief earth-like alone, but eternity for its unfolding. “Tt doth not yet appear what we shall be.”

THE SLOW GROWTH OF TRUTH.

The growth of truth is slow. Erasmus and Melanthon sowed the seeds of modern learning, but two centuries passed ere God’s angels gathered the harvest. In a pussion of pity, Cobden wore out his life, toiling for the repeal of lhe corn laws, and when victory came the laurel rested on other bfbws. Cobden died for the cotton spinners as truly as if he had slit his veins. One day, Pee) rose in the House of Commons and sail; “I have been wrong. I now ask Parliament to repeal the law for which I have stood.” Then the storm burst, and Sir Robert left the House, amid cries of “Coward” and Traitor.” But in losing office he jvon a nation’s love. “God speed, social reformers,” say I, but oh! my masters, “ye have need of patience,” for the labor problem will never be finally settled until the last man shall lie down and sleep his last long, dreamless sleep.

“Hushing every muttered murmur, Let your fortitude the firmer Gird your soul with strength. While no treachery near her lurking Patience, in her perfect working, Will be queen at length.”

The Gospel of Saint Luke has this record: “’And Jesus Himself, when He began to teach,, was about thirty years old.” Of these thirty years we know little, save that they were years of obedience to His parents, apprenticeship to a trade, and hard, unremitting toil, as preparation for His matchless ministry! The greatest Moral and Spiritual Genius of the race did not approach His task until He had gathered knowledge and experience which only toil could give, and until reflection and communion assured Him of His Divine vocation. Never did man act more decisively when His our had come, but the long wait transf vmed the Galilean - mechanic into the I' ophet of the Highest and the Christ of God. The Flower unfolded in a day, b it, only after thirty years of drawing nourishment from the soil and sunshine and the sweet air of Heaven! What a lesson in patience! The patience of the Christ!