Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 76, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1915 — TURN FROM LIGHT [ARTICLE]

TURN FROM LIGHT

Those Who Deny Christian Faith Wander Deliberately Into Darkness. Christ said, “I am the good shepherd who glveth his life for the sheep.” The church becomes a “fold," in which, like a flock at night, the people of God are protected from enemies that lie in wait to hurt and destroy. The Christian bishop Is a shepherd of souls, and his emblem of office is the shepherd’s crook. Wide as Is the span of years that separates us from the psalmist’s time, wherever that sign and token of the office of a Christian bishop is uplifted it carries us back to the solitude of the hills of primitive Judea and to the Hebrew youth who first sang, out of his inmost soul, “The Lord is my shepherd;" I shall not want" The world is passing through a period when, because some of its fancies have proved an inadequate measure of the stern realities of life, many people have come to feel, for the time being, as if all beauty were deceit, and only the darkest forebodings, as to man’s nature and destiny could be true. None of us can altogether escape the influences of our time; and, lest we may appear to ouVselves to be mere rhapsodists and sentimentalists, we are forced to translate our religious poetry, as best we can, into sober legal prose.

Power That Directs Our Paths. The literal truth within the conception of God as a shepherd, If it shall be found to contain such a heart of reality, moßt be that a power is over us, able to direct our paths toward the satisfaction of our wants and desirous to lead us to what Is peaceful and good. Since belief in a God of love and might was once firmly established in the minds of the majority of men, at least in Christian lands, one Is first of all Inclined not to undertake any defense of that belief, bat to summon those whp have, for any reason, fallen away from the faith to show just cause for their apostasy. We can hardly conceive it possible that any sane mind should wish to give up this inspiring thought, the loss of which certainly robs lift of most of its glory and darkens man’s whole earthly day. And yet, strange as such a desire must appear to us, we can hardly acquit a certain class of minds of entertaining it We will not say that, as a rule, in such cases, people love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil; but we will charge that they have allowed the passions of controversy so to cloud and’ oonfuse their judgment that they are led into the worst folly. Lose Power to Discriminate. The insanity born of a fierce personal antagonism Is foolish enough, scorpionlike, to turn its sting against its own life; and there are people so blindly enraged with churchmen and all their ways that, to their own grievous hurt, they lose all power to distinguish betwen the eternal and the perishable elements of the thought of the church.

We do not see so much of this here other lands, though even here there is a lower level- of our society so ruled by blihd and bitter hatred of ecdesiastlctsm that It Is led to deny virtually everything which the ministers of Christ’s gospel are trying to affirm. Though among those with whom we are accustomed to associate there may be none whom we could rightly so describe, this class of minds is large enough to take note of in any estimate of the general social forces of our time. And we shall meet some, even In those walks of life with which we are familiar, who, because of the intellectual difficulties In which they find themselves involved, have virtually surrendered the thought of God as their keeper; who in one mood or another, of sad regret or careless indifference, are going their way and making no considerable effort to teach that thought to their children.