SUNDAY READING

Taranaki Daily News, 27 November 1926, Page 17

SUNDAY READING

By

REV. A. H. COLLINS

“BECAUSE THEY HAD NO ROOT” “And because they had no root, they withered away.”—St. Matt. XIII, 6. Our text is part of what is generally called “The Parable of the Sower.” Perhaps a better title would be “The Parable of the Soil.'- For the subject is not the skill of the husbandman, but the sterility of the soil, a failure due not to the sower of the seed, but entirely due to the soil in which thf seed was cast. Our Lord not only spake the parable, he supplied the clue to its meaning. The parable sheds light on His own experience. His public ministry is the illustration of what the parable means, He was the sower, and His words the Reed, and “the field is the world.” Yet at the end of His ministry. His hearers rejected His message and put the messenger to death. In some cases the seed fell on ground trodden hard by hurrying feet; in other cases the seed was starved by choking thorns; in some rases the hungry birds devoured the seed, and in other cases the failure was due to a thin layer of soil on slabs nf rock, through which the roots could find no way. And we are not left to guess what this means, for Christ pro. eroded to explain what the four kinds < f soil mean. For one brief period Jesus was the popular idol of the people. Men flocked to hear Him. He was applauded. They would have taken Him by force and made Him king. Then the popular enthusiasm cooled off. the crowd dropped away and “Hozannah” was changed to ‘Crucify;” and at the end of the day His converts were but a handful. The parable epitomises Christ's experience in the days of His flesh. He whose spirit was so noble, and whose doctrine was »o pure, was doomed to comparative failure by the worldliness, the frivolity, the fickleness, the shallowness of his hearers.

Of those who heard this parable none were more concerned than the twelve Apostles. They were to sow the world with the good seed of the kingdom, and they were to share Christ’s experience of failure. If the Master was baffled and defeated so were His servants. They also ploughed the rock, and the seed lay on the hard surface; thorns choked the seed, and superficiality disappointed them; and the latter history of the church supplies further illustration of the same tragedy. VISIBLE RESULTS PAINFULLY SMALL. The visible results of Christian service are often painfully small. After two thousand years of gospel preaching, vast numbers of the human race are wnevangelised; and even in nominally Christian lands the social and public life are fran»<\Y pagan. Our laws and institutions, our political and commercial life, and even the church itself, is little more than Christian in name. If you inquire the reason, the answer is far from satisfactory. The sower is blamed. He is not diligent or practical enough; he should change his method or his tools. The seed is blamed, and we have rivers of talk about preachers and preaching. The critic seems to forget that with Christ as the preacher and the Gospel as the seed, the soil made no response. Christ said the cause of failure lay ;n the soil. He never slandered His audience. He was the most patient and pitiful of teachers, and made large allowance for men, but He said that if men made no response, and still remained non-Christian, it was not due to the will of God, or the. inadequacy of the Gospel, or the infidelity of the sower. It was due to the lack of moral seriousness in the hearers. The failure lay in the soil. No man was ever lost by' the decree of the Almighty. No man was ever lost because the Gospel is inadequate. No man was ever lost because the sower failed in his duty. The attempt to lay the blame on the Church, or the Gospel, or the preacher, is false and cruel. SHALLOWNESS. The blame rests where Jesus Christ put it, on the hearer ami chiefly on shallowness. “Because they had no root,” describes a. good deal of our modern life. Take the witness of three experts in education. Professor William James, the author of that remarkable book, “Types of Religious Experience,” says “the average man uses only about onetenth of his brain.” Dr. Elmer Gates writes: “Under usual circumstances, and education, children develop less than 1(1 per cent, of the cells of their brain area.” Dean Inge declares: “If the average intelligence of the people were equal to a thirteen-year-old child, then democracy would be safe, but the average intelligence has not reached that standard, and so democracy is not safe.” Think of the tragedy of that! Ninety per cent, of the world's brains not developed! And so the people are the prey of a few clever wen who work on the ignorance of the crowd, and you have all kinds of wild theories and mad adventures. and silly fads, just because people don't think. ROOM AT THE TOP. T'ne Postmaste.r-General, addressing a deputation, told them that not more than 13 per cent, of the employees in the lower branches of the service ever qualified fur promotion to the higher grade! Turn to any branch of industry and you will find the same thing. The top rungs of the ladder have room and to- spare. It is the bottom of the ladder that is crowded. People do not think.

Our fathers had few books and they were costly: but our fathers read and mastered these few books and not merely skimmed the surface. To-day we have, books galore in cheap editions, but the craze is for short paragraphs, with thought put through a mincer, and liberally sprinkled with the spice of personalities. The solid stuff with which our fathers wrestled, and fed their minds is voted dull and scrapped. We have rivers of talk, with a spoonful of thought. We talk too much and think to little. 3 lie quack flourishes, the mob orator gulls the. crowd, the palmist and the fortune-teller reap the harvest because the people will not think. THE BANE OF MODERN RELIGION. And tins blight of shallowness is the ha no of modern religion. ■•My people doth not consider,” cried the Prophet, and it is still true. A glib tongue and a brazen countenance are preferred before a quiet and thoughtful teacher. The crowd is the main thing. Religion Is made easy for the sake of a good show

in statistical returns. It is an age of big records, and the religious world has caught the infection., and ministers are judged by figures. But spiritual results is not a matter of counting heads regardless of what is in them. The Church of Laodieea would have made a brave show in an annual return, but Christ’s estimate of Laodieea was not high. Elijah began to count, and he only counted one. where God counted seven thousand! Gehazi counted two. but the man with a divine vision saw a host. The disciples saw only one convert at ‘Samaria’s Well, and that one doubtful Jesus saw a harvest. There is a real peril in making number the criterion of success, and many are yielding to the temptation of counting. instead of weighing. It is the day of “small prophets and quick returns,” and many are racking their brains to discover novelties to attract a congregaI tion. and some of the methods lack dignity and good taste. Our need is a deeper life, a firmer grasp of spiritual ideals. Easy come, easy. go. Quick growing things are quick dying tilings, like Jonah’s gourd, which sprang up in a night and died in a day. Emotions are sooner stirred than conscience. People whose feelings lie on the surface are easily.moved. But as Samuel Rutherford says: “Some get Christ for as good as next to nothing. This makes light work.” ! have no wish to play censor or violate ihe law of charity, but I profoundly distrust the methods of popular evangelism. with its crude doctrine, its sensational appeals and its commercialism. FOREIGN TO THE SPIRIT.

This counting of converts, and signing of cards, is foreign to the spirit and method of Jesus. These frantic appeals and panic cries find no sanction in the New Testament and do not make for permanent advance in the Kingdom of God. The revival we need is a revival of serious thinking. There must be religious emotion. A flood of passionate feeling may be like the full tide, which carries the ship over the bar and out to sea, but emotion must be under curb to reason. Feeling in its right place is down in the engine-room, but it makes a poor pilot, or. to keep to the figure of our test, religion must have roots, and the roots must get down under the surface, and grip the abiding facts. Robertson of Brighton lias a very searching exposition of “The Parable of the Sower,” in which he says: “Shallow soil is like superficial character. You meet such 'persons in life. There is nothing deep about them—-all they do and all they have is on the surface. The superficial servant’s work is done, but not thoroughly. The superficial workman’s labour will riot bear looking into. The very dress of such persons betrays the slatternly, incomplete character of their minds. When religion comes in contact with persons of this stamp, it shares the fate of everything else. It is taken up in a superficial way.” With deep insight our Lord says the seed sprang up quickly, and then withered away just as quickly. In such persons words are easily found, and tears easily fall, and neither means much. But as the proverb runs. “Still Waters Run Deep.” I suppose there is not. a teaser of these lines who has never been visited by religious impressions. But the Impression has passed away like the morning cloud and the early dew; the feeling has never ripened into a definite committal of the soul to God. And the reason? I will use no harsh words, but is it .not true that shallowness has something to d<? with your indecision? A few Hinrutds’ serious thought of God every day, a few minutes’ quiet prayer, would open fresh founts of life. “We rush and nod and hurry by, And never once possess our souls before we die.” ■TO KNOW HIM IS HARD." There ie a noble passage in “War and Peace”—a picture of the tumult of Russia in the light of the Napoleonic invasion, It tells of a rich young nobleman who, like ed many of Iris kind, has lived a wild, sensual, dissolute life, careless of the rights and wrongs of his fellows. On his way to St. Peters-burg-h he falls in with sin old man simply dressed, but with the light of a. great peace in his face. The old man speaks to the Count and tells him that he heard of his misfortune, referring to a duel resulting in the death at his hands of the lover of his wife. In the course of the talk the old man speaks of God. and at the mention of the Name a smile of scorn curled on the lips of the Count, who said: “I ought to tell you thft I don't believe in God.” The old man smiled, as a mother might at the silly saying of a child: and then, 1n a gentle voice, full of pity for the strange poverty of the rich young ruler, yet rich in sympathy, the old man replied : "Yes. von do not know Him. sir. You do not know Him, that is why you are unhappy. But He is here. He is within me. He is in you, and even in these scoffing words yon have just uttered. It He its not, we should not be speaking of Him. sir. Whom dost thou deny? How came there within you the conception that there is such an incomprehensible Being?” Something in the old man. who spoke earnestly, as one who stood in the radiance of a vision, touched the Count deeply. and stirred in him a longing to see What the old man saw and know what he knew. .Abject, hopeless, haunted by an ill-spent life, his hands red with the . Mood of a fellow’ man—his eyes betrayed his longing to know God. Though he did not speak, the kindly eves of the old saint read his face and answered his unasked question: “Yes. He exists, but to know Him is hard. It is not attained by reason, but by life. The highest truth 'is like the purest dew. Can I hold in an impure vessel that pure dew anil indge of its purity? Only by inner purification can we know Him.”