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March 10, 1909. THE PRESBYTER]
NOTES IN PASSING.
By Bert.
"I do set my bow in the cloud." Gen. 9: 13. These
are God's words to Noah on coming out of the ark
after the great flood. It was God's purpose to re-assure
Noah and free his mind from apprehension of a repetition
of the disaster when he should see the sky becoming
overcast, and feel the raindrops fall. God's bow is
always in the cloud. You do not seek for the cloud nor
love the cloud; you very greatly prefer the sunshine; but
all sunshine would burn you up, all sunshine makes the
desert. So God sends the cloud, but with the cloud
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and trial, we often look upon them as proofs of
God's disfavor and rebel against them, yet right across
the very blackest cloud shines the rainbow of promise
that he will never leave us nor forsake us, that all
things work together for good to them that love God,
that with the temptation he will make a way of escape.
Besides these trials of our faith work "patience, and
patience experience, and experience hope, and hope
maketh not ashamed because the love of God is shed
abroad in our hearts." If you would do away with the
cloud you must do without the rainbow, for the rainbow
is the offspring of cloud and sunshine.
Signs are often misleading. Some places arc called
palaces which are only prisons. Many profess to be
friends who are truly enemies. A smile on-the lips does
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..v^^ nK.an jyjy m me ncari. jome smiles are
easily rubbed off. True Christian joy cannot be feigned,
it is like "the oak which looks strong because it is strong,
its roots run deep and because they run deep it is not
bravado or pretence when the great tree shows resistance
to the tempest, but sheer honest strength, magnificent
and tremendous resource. The storms of life
break in fury at times, but they expend themselves upon
the surface and the inner light shines on. I have seen
a furious storm at sea, but it never for a moment extinguished
the light in the light-house, on the contrary
the light shone the brighter because of the surrounding
darkness. Just so with that joy of the Lord which is
our strength, surface storms do not affect it.
Robert Louis Stevenson said. "To be haoov is reallv
the first step to being pious." Is it not also the last
step? What is piety after all but happiness? Is there
any happiness apart from piety? Or can piety exist
without bringing the only real, genuine enduring happiness
the human soul can know?
A man said the other day in the hearing of a friend
that he would never set his foot in a church again. This
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in ti (.cuaiii t_ny several ministers joined
in a thirty of which he did not approve. That determination
of his was a sample of the unjust way men of
the world treat religion. That man would not have
ceased drinking whiskey if he had been told that one or
two saloonmen had adulterated their wares, he would
not have ceased to buy groceries because one or two
grocerymen had been convicted of giving short weight,
or putting sand in sugar, he would not have ceased to
wear clothing because one or two clothing men had
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AN OF THE SOUTH. 5
cheated him. In each of these instances he would have
gone to another establishment. Why not go to another
church? Why apply a method of judgment toward
churches he would use nowhere else? Why?
THE HIGHWAYS AND HEDGES.
In an address in Baltimore recently Governor Glenn,
of North Carolina, made a strong plea for the vigorous
prosecution of Home Mission work in our Southland.
In the mountain region extending from Maryland to
Alabama he said there were five million who needed all
me attention the Christian churches could give them.
His description of the mountain whites, as to*education,,
morals, and religion seems to have awakened some opposition,
as not altogether just. But however it may
be, that the people are not all ignorant, immoral, and
irreligious, it is certainly true that these mountain sections,
remote, inaccessible to influence of education,
literature and religion, are fields at home which are in
sore need of all that most active Christian effort can
give.
The fact 'is that North and South, East and West,
there is no section that is wholly reached by the blessings
and uplifting forces of Church and school. Nearly
every county has neighborhoods that are unreached by
the teachinp-s of our reliorirm TVir?rr> cliimc
cities and there are slums in the counties, where ignorance
and immorality abound. The far-away mountain
valleys are not more destitute than many neglected
neighborhoods on the plains. It is a problem whether
there is greater need for evangelization in the new sections
of the West, with the rapidly gathering population
and the formation of society, than, there is in manyEastern
communities. In the older sections of the
North we read of the decline of old country churchesand
the incoming of people largely alien, and often
wholly indifferent to religion. And in parts of the
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Yet these people are at our doors, and for them we
must give account. From them strong currents of
youth.flow into our towns and cities. From them our
existing churches must be replenished. From the
strength and zeal and means of town churches there
must go out the Christian help and service, gladly rendered,
to save the feeble, nearly forsaken country
church, and to plant the church and establish its blessed
work in all the country around. It was never made
more evident than it is today that every Church must
be evangelistic, missionary, going into the highways
and hedges, that by the love of Christ it may compel
men to come in. "Is it a time for you to dwell in your
ceiled houses while Jehovah's house lieth waste?"
Did not our Lord himself sro not onlv to Terusalem
but down to Samaria and sit at the well and teach and
win the poor woman, in her ignorance and prejudice
and sin, while she forgot the water pot and the water,,
and went back to proclaim, "I have found him."
Did he not go down to Jerricho, and to the other side
of the sea of Galilee, and far up into the border of Tyre
and Sidon.
The highways and hedges are not far away from
any of us.