HOUSE OF SILENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 December 1941, Page 8

HOUSE OF SILENCE

HEALING QUIET REVEALS

RESOURCES. “There was once,a man who had been overwhelmed by the wild alarms of life,” said Dr. Lynn Hough, dean of Drew University, United States, in a recent address. “It was a grim and terrible time in which he lived. He asked himself how long he could go on, hearing what he must hear and seeing what he . must see. Then he built himself a house of silence from which he could shut out the tragic sights and the terrible sounds. Here in a healing quiet he found inner resources, so that when he went forth each day it was with a light in his eye and with a strange glowing power in his heart. Something happened in his house of silence which made him ready for the worst that life could do to him. It was a house not built with hands —this beautiful house of silence. It was made of thoughts and purposes and of brooding meditations. One could go into it at once at the most unexpected times and from the most baffling places. Very quickly one could breathe its inner peace and find all the power of its strange sanctuary. There was an altar in the house of silence. And here, moving around some sharp corner beyond which lay a startled awareness of great meanings, he found the significance of words which had seemed too great for him, and of experiences which had seemed too lofty to come within his reach. He was a simple man, quite without self-consci-ous pride, and sometimes he was filled with wonder when he looked upon the glory which was shining upon the altar in his house of silence. When God ceased to be a word and became a triumphant presence, he felt as if I‘fe could never be too much for Him again . . . They found him one day, his body struck down by the grimness over which his soul had been victorious. But on his face was the security of his palace of silence. And the men who looked upon him knew that they must -go on with a struggle which could not end in defeat.”