UNSEEN PRESENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 February 1942, Page 4

UNSEEN PRESENCE

CONFIDENCE OF FAITH. Evil in every age has seemed to enjoy immediate advantages and to win its startling victories, writes Dr Sidney M. Berry, secretary of the English Congregational Union. That problem has always weighed on man’s mind and clouded his spirit. Faith has never been able to escape from that world of doubt and contradiction. It has had to overcome it. But the message of history is clear in this respect, that the calm and confidence of faith have come through the tensions of life and never’ away from them. It is therefore no impossibility for the men and women generation. Man’s experience tells without any doubt that in the midst of martyrdoms and agonies the mind has become triumphantly aware of forces not of this world and of the reality of an Unseen Presence and Will. The certainty of God has come to men in situations where cold reasoning would have declared it to be impossible—in a Roman amphitheatre or on an Arctic waste, or sometimes amidst the hell of battle. The sanctuaries of certainty in this world have hot been places of comfort, well-lit and heated. They have more often been in the open, windswept places, „ where the only pillow a man could find was a stone. The faith which comes to the heart in that way cannot be argued as a proposition or taught as a formula. All one can say is that it comes, and comes along any one of a thousand different roads, if those who travel them have their hearts set on the highest things. I