SUNDAY READING.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2622, 2 October 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

SUNDAY READING.

Kind hearts are here, yet would the tenderest one Have limits to its mercy. God has none. Yes, Man’s forgiveness may he true and sweet. Yet lie stoops to give it. More complete Is love that lays forgiveness at thy feet And pleads with thee to raise it. Only Heaven Means crowned, not vanquished, when it says forgiven. GOD IS LOVE. (Bishop. Moule.) iSuch iis the Fountain; worthy of its Stream. This Love of the Being of God came forth, unasked, unmerited, in the love of His actings. He, this God, loved the world,: so loved it that He gave His only begotten Son for the sinner’s life. “He spared not His own •Son;” “He commendetji His love to us, in that, while we w#*re yet sinners, Christ died for us;” “Herein is love, not that Ae loved, God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another;” “Wo have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is Loye.’t Yes, my brethren. Here is indeed the point of contact between the sublime truth of the Holy Trinity and the humblest, smallest, most trying claims which one poor suffering human being may lay upon another, it this other is a Christian, a child and servant of this Gou. Here descends the great ladder of light, from the throne above all heavens, to the stones of the desert road. If God is this God, if this God hath tints loved us, then we cannot own His tenderliesg to us, we cannot see this glorious depth of. lovableness in Him* self, and yet remain cool, calculating and selfish in our thoughts and wills towards our suffering brethren. We can. not count heart’s sorrow, and soul’s sin, and body’s pain “nothing to us who pass by,” if in the least degree we have known and believed the love which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have poured out on us from the fountain of their own eternally loving Deity. The truth of the Trinity comes down to the bed of pain, to the burning head, the wasted cheek, the broken limb, and bespeaks for the sufferer the kindness of those who in the glory of the Father and the Son have seen that God is Love. v

WHY THE CONGREGATION

SMILED.

Rev. J. R. Wood, pastor of Upper Holloway Baptist Church, says: “My friend Rev. Charles Browne, of Ferine Park, was horn in Northamptonshire. Like most of us, he is fond of visiting the scenes of his boyhood days. A short time ago he visited the village of Moulton, once the home of William Carey, the famous founder of modern foreign missions. Mr Browne was in a service there, and one of the deacons of the church got up, and with a long face bemoaned the fact that only one person had joined the church during the year. When Mr Browne spoke, he said, T don’t see why our friend is so sad about only one person joining the church during the past year. That person might bo a William Carey.’ He saw a smile go over the faces of the people, but did not understana it until after the service. Then he said to his hostess, ‘Why did you smile when I said that the person who joined the church might be a William Carey?’ ‘I smiled because it was only a servant girl who joined the church,’ said his hostess. Mr Browne went to the next village, and there he found liis hostess running over with joy because her two young sons had been baptised and had joined the church. On inquiry Mr Browne found that they had been led to Christ by the very servant girl who had joined the church at Moulton, and who afterwards came to serve in this family. Those two boys might be William Careys some day.”

DR DAWSON ON ENGLISH CHURCHES.

Dr W. J. Dawson, on his return to America, recounts in the Boston “Uongregationalist” some of the lessons lie learned, during his recent visit- of the changing popular temper towards evangelism in England. His observation, he says, has made it abundantly clear that the older forms of popular evangelism have been everywhere discredited and discarded; that mechanical evangelism has been found out: and that appeals to mere emotion and sentimental anecdotes, and hymns have been generally repudiated. Dr Dawson observes that “one striking thing was the manifest shifting of the base of thought from individualism to collectivism. The social aspects of the Gospel are those which arouse most interest in an English audience. Evangelism which does not go beyond the appeal to the individual to save his own soul is felt to be inherently petty and selfish.’ Dr Dawson adds: ‘The English Churches still believe in evangelism; they will make great sacrifices for it; but they will have no evangelism that is not sane and quiet, and they have learned the difficult lesson that to impart a genuine spiritual uplift to a community, so that each church and minister i s the better fitted for normal work, is a far greater, because much more permanent, result, than any blazoned forth by misleading statistics of success.’

“THE THREE GEORGES.”

As the Sunday-school connected with .St. Mary’s Baptist Church, Norwich, was dismissing one Sunday afternoon a photographer ‘snapped’ thyee veteran teachers as they left the building. The three totalled between them 159 years of teaching at the school. To this figure Sir George White, M.P., contributes 53 years, Mr George Moore 63, and Mr George Dannock 43. Sir George is a prominent public man in Norwich itself, quite apart from his Parliamentary duties, and is head of one of the largest shoe manufacturing firm s in the eastern counties.

General Sir lan Hamilton, presiding at the annual meeting of the Royal Army Temperance Association, said that when lie considered that in his thirty-seven years of active service some 10,000 quarts of dutiable liquor had gone down his throat, his conscience pricked him. The tradition of officers of the British Army was to say to their men not ‘Go on!’ but ‘Come on!’ and he had no idea of advising the men to drink ginger beer and .going home to 'cool his own parched throat with claret. To pay his footing on that platform he would take tlie pledge for a year. Ho knew he would he uncomfortable, but he had said it, and lie had got tp see it through, and his reason for doing so was that some soldier lad might be influenced by his example. The Association has now 23,692 enrolled members, an increase of 3,692 on the year.