THE SABBATH.

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20740, 25 February 1939, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE SABBATH.

THE LIFE OF LOVE (1 Corinthians xiii.) Though I am in tongues expert, Tongues of men and angels, too, If I lack a loving heart I’m a failure through and through. Though I love the preacher’s art, And in knowledge T abound, If I lack a loving heart I am but a clanging sound. Though I have a mighty faith, Faith that mountains could remove, I am on the downward path If I’m destitute of love. Though with all my goods I part. And my body sacrifice, If I lack a loving heart Giving alms will not suffice. Love is patient, suffers long— Suffers long, and still is kind; Love can give the faithful tongue Words that leave no sting behind. Love for envy has no room; Love abhors both pride and sham; Love makes faith and hope to bloom; Love, though wronged, remaineth calm. Love in evil finds no joy; Love to scandal calls a halt, Does not consciously annoy, Is not swift in finding fault. Love the absent will defend, Will not join with those who rail; Love is true to foe and friend: Love endures and will not fail. Prophecies in .part will fail; Tongues will cease, and silent stay Fuller knowledge will prevail; Lesser knowledge must give way. When a child, as child I thought, As a child I had my say; When a man. and better taught, Childlike things I put away. Faith, and hope, and love abide, Casting out both doubt and fear; But. it cannot be denied. Love excels; it has no peer. Choose this gift of greatest worth; Prize it other gifts above; You will have a heaven on earth, If you live “The Life of Love.” Thomas Fee. A NEW CREATION The first Epistle of St. Peter gives a singularly attractive picture of the appearance in the world of a type of character to which the title “Christian” is properly applied. The impression is given of groups of paople bound together by a common ethical ideal as well as by a common religious faith, and facing the suspicions, which at times rose to actual hostility, of their pagan neighbours. There is nothing distinctively Christian in an emphasis upon morality. Christianity did not come into a world that lacked guidance as to the importance of conduct and character. The later philosophical schools, and especially the

Stoics, had gone far to bring: ethics into the foreground and to expound the virtuous life as man’s chief concern. The meaning of Christian character wall be most readily appreciated if the actual facts of its origin and development arc borne in mind. The test of a man’s moral professions is the fruit which he bears, but the nature of the morality which he and others profess cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of its roots. Tt is when the question as to the roots of morality and of the moral life is answered from the Standpoint of Christian Faith that something 1 distinctively Christian does immediately come in sight. Not in man, but in God. was the root of the Christian’s moral life, in what God had done for man by the sending of His Son into the world. So Christians were to be people of a particular kind, because of what God had done for them, because, knowing Him in Christ, they wished to make a full personal answer to Him. In that answer they desired and strove to show themselves such as He would have them and such as He enabled them to be. Christian ethic w r as the ethic of grateful response, and Christian character the reality of that response manifested in the individual life. “’Brethren,” says St. Paul, “we are debtors.” The debt Is that which man owes to God because of the love revealed and poured out in the Incarnation and Cross of the Son and in the mission of the Holy Spirit. It is a debt which man cannot pay; and since the debt is, in its very nature, God’s free gift to man, he needs . not to pay. Vet it asks for something from man; and man’s gratitude for the gift appears as a Real and Controlling Fact in his life, when he walks in the way of love, which is God’s way. So he will be living out the truth of the words of John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist, that “we best glorify Him when we grow most like to Him.” Any attempt to disregard Christian theology, and yet to find in Christianity the supreme ethical ideal, does violence to a unity which the New’ Testament reveals as existing from tho first. But, further, in this disruption the distinctiveness of the Christian ethic and the special quality of the Christian moral life are lost. That life, like the faith which is both its presupposition and its indwelling power, is a personal relation of man with God. Of this the ethics of paganism at their grandest knew nothing. Not one of the great philosophers of Greece comes near to the realisation of that secret of the moral life which is given in the words of St. John: “We love because He first- loved us.” No one, indeed, can speai in that way unless he sees the whole mystery of life unveiled in the revelation of personality both divine and human. Not less truly does Christian ethic I transcend a morality which bases itself upon the principle of law. Christ is the End of the Law, since law can never supply the final and adequate motive of human action. It Is from Christ that the new’ way comes, the way of faith and love, the w T ay of our fathers in the Apostolic Church.