SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 August 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

VITAL VIRTUES. No. G.—SINCERITY. “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts.” —Psalm LI., 6.

(By

Rev. A. H. Collins,

New Plymouth.)

Religion and reality are one. You cannot separate them. If you attempt to divide them, you slay both. Yet there is a widespread impression abroad that a good deal of our modern religion is riddled with unreality. You have only to read the correspondence columns of the daily Press, or get into touch with working men, to learn how common the impression is that religion is not real. Some of these men will tell you bluntly that Zion's walls are pasteboard, coloured to look like marble, that Zion’s fine gold has become dim because it never was gold, but only gold paint, that Zion’s promises are illusions, and her threatenings are mimic thunder! You may judge of the set of the current when a business firm in Australia made it a rule that if one of its travellers became a church member they put a bad mark against his name, and if he became a church officer they paid him off! I do not cite the case because I think it just. I regard it as grossly unfair. I know it is unfair in multitudes of instances.

The ease in one of its aspect® is illustrated by a conversation between a Bishop and an actor of some repute. “How is it,” said the churchman, “that you. who represent fiction on the stage, often succeed in making a greater impression than we, who represent fact, in the pulpit?” The actor answered: “Perhaps it is because we represent fiction as if it were fact, whereas you represent fact as if it were fiction!” The reply is far from complete, but I do not dismiss it as simply a bit of smart repartee. Neither do I resent it as wholly unjust. I, whose vocation is preaching, would receive the implied rebuke with humbleness. Ministers are in constant peril of discharging their solemn task in a perfunctory way. The official easily smothers the man. We are not always at white heat of moral passion. We cool off too often. We are affected by the atmosphere of the pew, and cease to speak with a sense of the tremendous issues at stake. I have known more than one minister who had to lower his ideal to that of the pew or die of a broken heart.

George Whitefield was one of the most gifted, and impassioned preachers, and on one occasion he depicted the sinner as a blind man stumbling along a narrow shelf of rock with a yawning chasm near by. So realistic was his word-pic-ture that a man in the audience leaped to his feet and exclaimed: “Oh! good God, he’s gone!” The preacher lived his message. He realised that he stood for God between the living and the dead. When the Tahitians heard a missionary read for the first time the text: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” they said “Is that true?” “Quite true,” said the missionary. “Then how can you say it without weeping?” they cried, as the big teardrops sparkled on their dusky cheeks. RELIGION IS REAL. That is the wonder, and I don’t know a minister, who is worth his salt, who does not feel confusion of face when he think® of his own cold heart. For religion is real, whatever the faithless people say, as real as sin and sorrow and death; as real as the stones in the street. The Christian Gospel is a bona fide offer of salvation. It offers a real remedy for a real complaint, a real Saviour for real sinners. You will notice I have used the word “reality.” I have done so deliberately, for that is the force of the passage: “Thou desirest truth in the inward parte.” Not truth in contrast with falsehood, but reality in contrast to unreality. in other words, “Thou desirest sincerity,” straight out, unflinching, uncompromising, reality in thought and speech and deed —strict dogged and couri ageous truthfulness of soul, without reserve or exaggeration or pretence of any kind, for apart from this moral integrity there can no true manhood and no genuine religion. Unreality in any department of life is bad, but there is no direction in which the penalty is so swift and so deep as in the realm of religion. “If the 'light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” There is a hymn we sometimes sing, that we should do well to commit to memory, and often breathe as our prayer: “Help me, my God, to speak True words to Thee each day. Real let my voice be when I praise And truthful when 1 pray. Thy words too are true to me, Let mine to Thee be true, The speech of my whole heart and soul However low and few. True words of grief for sin, Of longing to be free, . Of groaning for deliverance, And likeness, Lord, to Thee.” A MESSAGE TO PEW OCCUPANTS. You will confess I have not spared the man in the pulpit. Let me speak with equal frankness to the pew. It is required of us all that we strip off all paint and veneer, that we sing real hymns, offer real prayers, cherish real beliefs, cultivate real trust in God. and exhibit real devotion to His cause. There can be no solid progress, and no effective service, unless and until we get down to bedrock reality. I do not accept all the critics say about unreality in reli-

gious circles. I do not suggest practised and conscious insincerity in the churches. That is not the vice of Englishman. There is a certain blunt and rugged honesty in men of our Saxon stock. We are not a nation of hypocrites. Pecksniff anil Chadband are rarely seen in any modern church. But I question if it were ever harder to be quite sincere than it is just now. The struggle for existence is so fierce that it is hard for a man to be a laan. The standard of honor is net perhaps as high as it once was. The age is artificial, an age of powders and paints and rouge! Moreover, old things are passing. Old faiths are in the crucible, and earnest souls are trying to readjust old faiths in new light. But ehihf amongst the influences which betray men into the religion of semblance, rather than the religion of reality. is the fatal familiarity with religious words ana phrases. We have received them from the storied past. Our fathers used them, and for our fathers these words stood for something definite and vital, but we use the words with little or no reflection. They trip over “our lips without challenge. They sound pious, but we haven’t compelled them to “give the pass word.” They are little more than verbal counters. say “I am a Protestant.” But we could-

hardly pass an elementary examination in Protestant history and principle. We say “I am a Free churchman,” but know next to nothing of Free Church history. We say “I am a Christian,” but how slender is the knowledge of the great aristocratic word! There is a fashion in thought, and we follow the fashion. DEFECTIVE SENSE OF SIN. Some years ago Dr. Maclaren, addressing the Baptist Union of Great Britain, gave it as hie mature opinion that ninety per cent, of the unsatisfactory religious life was due to a defective sense of sin. He said people ; speak lightly and loosely about sin. They call it pleasant names, or at least names that are not very unpleasant. “A lie” sounds disgraceful, so we don’t call it a lie, but a “fib” or “a terminological inexactitude!” Trade practices that are fraudulent are not described as thefts, but “smart.” Lust is christened “love,” and a bastard is “a love child!” Meanness is called “thrift’’ or “prudence,” and pride is “proper self-respect,” whilst bigotry is being “faithful.” But you do not alter the character of a deed by giving it a new name. You may call a foul drain a scent bottle, but that does not change the smell! You may label a bottle of arsenic “cough mixture,” but that does not make it one whit less deadly. Calling sin by another name does not change its nature, or its fruit, though it blunts the sense of guilt and shame, and it reduces the significance of the Cross. The starting point of religious reality is to cease juggling with words about sin and cease to hide facts under a golden mist of language. ALL HAVE SINNED. The plain truth is “All have sinned.” Under royal robes and fustian jackets, under the scholar’s hooded gown, and the savage’s naked skin, there lies a sinful heart, a heart that needs cleansing and renewal by the grace of God. But when rhe Holy Book speaks of sin it does not confine the term to open and disgraceful deeds; it includes acts and habits we treat with easy tolerance and sometimes pass off with a shrug and a smile. I am impressed with our Lord’s attitude to the publicans and sinners. He consorted with such. There was a compassion an 4hopefulness about His bearing towards them. It was the Pharisee and scribe he scorched with hot words. He said the publican and the harlot had a better chance than the Scribe and the Pharisee. What he- could not endure was greed, pride, cfcjloufiness. oppression, religiosity, in a word, Unreality. He said little about soundness of opinion and much about soundness in love. A man may be slain with an ugly butcher's knife or a polished stiletto with jewels on the hilt! If we would keep hold on reality in religion, we must keep hold on the fact of sin, and we must understand that sin means not only drink and debauchery and vulgar lying. It means avarice, pride, illtemper, fickleness and touchiness, those elegant sins that we don’t treat as sins at all. A Glasgow surgeon was called to see a sick man. At a glance he saw the man was dving, and so he said to him: “Friend, the best service I can do-you is to ask, have you made your peace with God?” The sick man raised his wasted arm, and, looking at the surgeon with awe-filled eyes, said: “Doctor, is it- as bad. as that?” THE MERCY OF GOD. Now, I want say, it is always as bad as that: To the brightest and gayest heart in this church, I say you need the mercy of God, you need to make frank acknowledgment of personal guilt. So with repentance. This plea for reality occurs in a psalm, where the chief feature is penitence of soul. David lies as low before God as a man can get. Verse after verse is .punctuated with a sob. He,makes no excuse for his conduct, the guilt, the shame, the ruin are his alone. But what a flimsy thing a good deal of what is called repentance is! Crowds of fashionable folk, with drooping eyelids and graceful pose, will stand up to-day and call themselves “miserable sinners,” without the twitch of a singe facial muscle. It means no more than the conventional “Sorry,” said to someone .on the street. But

“’Tis not enough to say, we’re sorry and repent, And still go on from day to day just as we always went.

Repentance that is real means confession, contrition and abandonment of the 6 in confessed. Samuel Rutherford says- “ Some men get Christ for as good as next to nothing. This makes light work.” Yes, it does, indeed. The same is true of the word “Conversion.” Crowds of people who say they have been converted are not one wit different from the unconverted. I seldom meet a person who disavows belief in God. But what’s the use of saying “1 believe in God.” and not treat God with reverence or common respect? I know people who would be ■shocked at any doubt cast on the inspiration of Holy Scripture, but they don’t read a page* of the Bibte from one month to the next. Well, what is the use of lip homage to the word’ of God? These are plain words, I know, a ®d it they are not pleasant to hear, neither are they pleasant to'speak. But the one wav to' revitalise religion m the land is a return to reality. Nothing saps and undermines influence like insincerity, nothing so surely and swiftly darkens the soul. On the other hand, nothing will so effectually bring prosperity to Zion as the touch of the actuaUin religious professions and experience. ‘Tet the words of my mouth and the mediations . f my heart be acceptable in Thy sight. O Lord, mv strength and my Redeemei.