SERIOUS THOUGHTS.

Waikato Argus, Volume XI, Issue 1030, 24 August 1901, Page 4

SERIOUS THOUGHTS.

SEE THAT YE WALK CIRCUMSPECTLY NOT AS POOLS BUT AS WISE. Let me speak of the Apostle’s lesson, ‘ not as fools but as wise.' Think of the story in the parable of the King making the marriage feast and inviting his guests, and the guests making light of it and going their way to their farms and to their merchandise. That is just the instance of what S. Paul warns us against as folly. The light-hearted neglect of the things which are really so unutterably important. Yet it is just which we are all iu danger of falling into unless we learn to be wise. On the one hand there are eternal interests; opportunities hy which souls are moulded into good or evil ; chances of incalculable importance reaching through out lives and beyond our lives into the eternal future. On the other side there arc little momentary desires and fancies, little self-pleaamgs and vanities, and yet often we choose the latter and let the former pass unheeded. Is it not simple folly—walking not as wise but as careless, imprudent, blind fools ? No doubt if at these moments when such choices lay betore us, we could stop coolly and weigh our choice, measuring the unutterable importance of the right against the absolute trivialness of the temptation to the wrong, we should more seldom neglect our duties and more often walk as wine. But that is just what is impossible in our lives. Our choices have to be made bo suddenly and the motive which calls us the wrong way is often, though trivial, so vivid and masterful compared wirh the claims of duty and our knowledge of God’s will, that it blinds us to the impoitance of the other. So we must pray for the power of estimating things rightly, of seeing the important issues that hang on little acts, ol recognising beforehand by wisdom, instead of afterwards by remorse, the worthlessness of the monetary pleasure or trivial gain which we are tempted to clutch at and in clutching at to fritter away such vast possibilities of good, such treasures of an eternal hope. And this power, this habit of realising the great issues of our inner life, is the true power of practical Christian faith. For you must know that faith is not merely the accepting of certain doctrines and creeds as true, but, if it is to have effect on our lives, it is the practical recollection', the vivid keeping in our minds, of the truths rf the unseen world in which we arc. It is the living constant remembrance of God and of His will, and of His love for us, and of the eternal life which He gives us everyone. It is the power of realising just those things which the constant interests of happy and active life tend to throw into the background and to make ns forget at least to put into a separate part of our lives an I to keep for separate thoughts. And yet those unseen truths .are truer than all the rest, more real than the daily interests of an innocent world and in knowledge of them slanderh truly our eternal life. Rev J.T. Bramston. (F.)