DR RENTOUL AND LABOUR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 10714, 18 October 1912, Page 4

DR RENTOUL AND LABOUR.

Tho dignity and duty of labour, the new Moderator (Dr Rentoul) of the Presbyterian General Assembly of Australia represented to his congregation in Melbourne last week, is expressed throughout the New Testament. With "that foolish spokesman of Labour who, the other day, said the ideal of man was to loaf," Dr Rentoul said that the Creator never made him so, or made a world for such. What a noble activity, a thrill and throb of life's energies flowed from the figures of speech our Lord applied to life! He called us "sowers," "reapers," "harvesters," "vine dressers," and sometime "ploughmen." In the text (St. Mark xii. 10), as in His great mountain address, Ho called us "builders," the wise and the foolish. Incidentally Dr Rentoul spoke of what he regarded as the pessimism of the present time. He believed the feeling of pessimism grew upon men as they became older and wiser, unless they had refuge in God. It was due to fear of the future, and to life's disappointments. Tho experience seemed to him to be a maddening one — the disappointingness of knowledge, power, wealth, fame, passion, beauty, health, and all things. "My young brother," ho exclaimed, "you are not foolish v enough to suppose that it would add greatly to your power or your happiness if you had some more land or gold, and some more care? Do you imagine that anything like that can fill the mind and soul that God made for Himself?"