SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 July 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

VITAL VIRTUES. tfo. “Festus called out: “Paul, you are quite mad! Your great learning is dri.’ ; ng you insane.'’ “Your Excellency/’ said Paul to Festus, “I am not mad, I am speaking the sober truth.” .(Dr. Moffat’s Translation.) ' —Acts xxvi., 24.

(By

Rev. A. H. Collins,

New Plymouth.)

Vast and deep, incalculable and inescapable, is debt we owe to the men who have been “pilloried on infamy’s high stage” as mad. They have kept the world from mental and moral stagnation. They have been the pioneers and pathfinders in the region of invention, and discovery, and reform. They have blazed the track through the forests of ignorance and sloth, where the trees are men. Moses-like, they have climbed the hill-tops and pointed to prosperous lands they never entered. They have created the forces which made progress possible? As the fires in the heart of the volcano clothed the mountain slopes with verdure and fruit, so passion in the heart of great men has changed the face of the world. But no man can be an enthusiast in things that matter most and escape the charge of madness. Moles that burrow cannot understand eagles that soar. Mediocrity cannot appreciate genius. Prince Tailyrand’s famous saying, “Above all no zeal,” expresses the calculating prudence of Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Yet all really greet movements have been led by men of faith and fervor. Zeal is contagious. It spreads like flame in dry brushwood. It strikes “impossible” out of its vocabulary. What we call the fine arts are simply .passion cooled off into visible shapes. Music is feeling uttering itself in scales and harmonies. As invisible vapors condense into snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasm is chrystallised into Gothic cathedrals!

The Cross was love in action. Ideas of freedom were current in America for generations, and still the slave pen continued and the tyrants’ lash cracked over God’s image carved in ebony, when the idea of freedom was yoked to moral passion in the flaming soul of Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas, the cursed trade in flesh and blood was doomed and damned. “'Give me,” said Wesley, “one hundred men who hate nothing but sin, fear nothing save God, and know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified,, and I will turn the world upside down.’ 15 It was bold, yet not too bold, as the Evangelical Revival proved, and it is still true. “Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing,” as Professor Seeley says in that striking volume “Ecce Home.” OUR GREATEST NEED. Our greatest need is not more knowledge. We all have more knowledge than we apply. Our greatest need is not more intellect, for intellect without heart is like moonlight on a snowdrift —pale, cold, ghostly. Our greatest need is not machinery. We are staggering under the ponderous weight of church machinery. No, our greatest need is more heart, more spiritual passion, in a word, more enthusiasm. You cannot grow flowers in a refrigerator. An ice chamber is a good place for frozen mutton, but it is an uncomfortable dwelling for living sheep! Souls love warmth. Mr. Boreham has a wise, quaint passage on “The Legend of the Fiery Breath”;—!

“Saint Patrick, as in legend told, The morning being very cold, In order to assuage the weather, Collected bits of ice together.” It sounds whimsical, but it points a moral. For do we not sometimes attempt to ameliorate the world’s cold that way? Business can be very nippy cold,as cold as the cash they handle. Society, where men and women gather and try to look pleasant, is sometimes little better than a ceremonial ice chamber. Charity can be very frosty. The poor old world lacks warmth. And the Cliurcli? Well: “In order to assuage the weather Collects the bits of ice together.” But that is not the end of the story. The legend says that Ireland’s patron saint did something else: “Then Patrick breathed upon the pyre And every fragment blazed with fire.” Blazing ice sounds impossible, but in the Spiritual realm it is not so. God can make our cold hearts glow, and “Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing.” lam not speaking as one who has the right to upbraid. I speak to my own cold and faithless heart.

COLD OUR DEADLY MALADY. But the deadly malady of souls is cold. How else can we explain our lack of moral passion, our sinful sloth, out sitting at ease in Zion? Do we really care for the evils that call for challenge and overthrow ? I know that enthusiasm may be spurious. To say a man is an enthusiast is not always to pay him a compliment. Reverence and decency have sometimes to hide their heads in shame for the things done in the name of religion. Strong things are quiet things. The dew makes no noise. Gravitation is silent in its working. "The Lord was 4iot in the earthquake.” We may well ask to be delivered from “zeal without knowledge,” (but we do need the spirit of

burning —a calm, sustained, intense transforming moral awakening, a Bion for God, a passion for truth, a pas-* eion for the world’s redemption, I almost afraid to use the word, lest’you should think I mean “a brainstorm of emotionalism.” But we do need'a Divine arousal that would set life tingling with new life. ENTHUSIASM. What ie enthusiasm? Literally, it means “spirit filled.” The enthusiast is “the God intoxicated man.” When a man glows with sacred ardour it is because another Spirit breathes through his life, uplifts, expands and quickens his powers and faculties, as when the sweeping wind plays on the stretched strings of the Aeolian harp and wakes them to music. Without enthusiasm of some noble sort a man is dead while he lives. , Without the sun in the heavens the earth would freeze at its heart and swing in the firmament cold and dead, and without moral passion the world would lapse into universal death. Think what Italy had been without Sayfl narola, whose voice they choked in death because he thundered against corruption! Think how the cramp of intolerable tyranny had tortured .the souls of men but for’Wycliffe, who gave the Bible to Englishmen! Tfiink what great truths had been smothered but for Huss, who accepted the crown of martyrdom! Think, too, what a sink of loathly abominations Europe had been but for that Luther dared! Yet all these were written down “mad.” But “wisdom is justified of her children.” Paul was not mad; the madness lay with Festus. A DIVINE QUALITY. This Divine quality has Tested on men of every rank and creed and calling, on Zenzendorf the missionary, on Gallileo the reformer, on Milton the poet, on Shaftesbury the philanthropist, on Cobden the politician, on Spurgeon the preacher. But there is one calling which has been singuarly fruitful in the making of enthusiasts. Some years ago a young Woman of refinement and genius gained sudden fame in America. After years of hardship ad struggle, she found herself the idol of brilliant authors. Her trials were ovef. The ball was at her feet. She sat queen of American society. -Then the fashionable world was startled to learn that Fanny Forrester had consented to wed Adonaram Judson, and plunge with him into the very heart of heathendom, and burrHife down to the socket in making Christ known to a nation of idolators! She went to Burmah, and lived there till flesh could endure the strain no longer. Simpering society women called her “mad.” Mrs. Judson heard the taunt, and, summoning her brilliant literary gifts, she sat down and wrote, with flaming soul, her essay on “The Madness of the Missionary Enterprise,” a pamphlet which turned pleasure-loving, money-grubbing society upside down, and left the charge of madness on the other side.

Read the story of Gilmore of Mongolia reading the Psalms on the camel track; the story of Paton in communion with God under the murderous spear of the island chiefs; the story of Williams dying of starvation in Patagonia, yet writing in his diary, “I am happy beyond the power of words to tell”; the story of Eliot fording rivers and not knowing the • luxury of dry clothes tor days and nights together, yet describing his labors this way: “They have been poor, lean and small doings, and I will be the first man to fling a stone at them all”; the story of Livingstone, reviewing his life so apostolic, and saying of it, “I never made a sacrifice.” There you have the speech of the enthusiast with heart and lip aflame. We admire and praise these men, but I am not sure we have ‘ the right to do the one or the other. For it is neither admiration nor praise, but imitation, that is demanded.

WHAT WE CAN DO. IT I know we cannot make ourselves enthusiasts any more than we can make ourselves poets, and there must be no pretence. Nevertheless, we are not as helpless as we seem. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” and we cannot control the heavenly breeze; but we can seek the uplands where the wind lists to blow. I mean, of course, we can dwell on those great truths that feed enthusiasm ;_we can champion thpse great causes that create moral passion. In order to feel we must know, in order to know we must ponder, and enthusiasm comes with conviction. “While I mused the fire kindled, then spake I with my tpngue.” One cannot grow enthusiastic over trifles, though some seem to manage it, as witness the sports field. I have seen five, or ten thousand, people swept clean out of themselves as they listened to Gladstone, or Bright, expound some public question, and no one encored because these grave citizens cheered and stamped, and flung their hats in the air.

I don’t frown on enthusiasm on the playground or in the political arena. Not at all. If a game is worth playing it is worth putting vim into it. But why so hot there, and so cold towards the best things? Why cheer and shout so lustily yonder and be dumb as a graven image in church? Isn’t it amazing that, with a religion that deals with life and death, with sorrow and sin, with time and Eternity, we should be so frigid! Cold at Calvary! Lethargic while any day may be our last! Oh! it is not exaeter theology we need; it is deeper and more serious thinking, and fuller surrender to the things we accept without demur, but do not believe to the marrow of our bones. But, again to quote Professor Seeley: “Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing.” In the common room at Oxford hangs a picture of Henry Martin. Dr. Charles Simeon used to stand before that picture and murmur: “There! See that blessed man. No one looks at me as he does. He never takes his eyes off me, and he seems to be saying: “Be serious. Be earnest. Don’t trifle.” Then Simeon would bow to "the picture and say: “I will be serious. J will be earnest. I won’t trifle.” But a greater than Henry Martin is here, and Tie speaks in graver tones. Oh! how the face of Christ smites sloth and coldness dumb—

“How can T, Lord, withhold Life's brightest hours From Thee: or gathered gold Or any powers? How can I keep one precious thing from Thee AVhen Thou hast given Thine own dear Self for me?” Oh! let us creep back to Jesus Christ. Royal and tender and mighty is His grace, and it will command our hearts more effectually than law; it will give a momentum to life that nothing else can impart. All the love of Eternity is focussed in Calvary, and it is there that cold hearts begin to beat. The open secret of enthusiasm is to live with Jesus Chrifitj