Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 81, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1915 — IN THE SEASON OF REBIRTH [ARTICLE]

IN THE SEASON OF REBIRTH

Mankind Can See In Nature Awakening an Appeal to His Spiritual Feelings.

Between the penitential season of the religious year, which Ash Wednesday opens, and the weather of winter’s decay and of spring’s renewing, is a mysterious bond of similarity which enhances the meaning of the observance. In the order of nature it is a time of the sloughing off of the old and the quickening of the new; of the release of earth and streams from icy fetters and snow burial, and the deep, secret stirrings of new life. And these, if we' will, are but the symbols of what may stir and quicken in us under the Influence of ‘this season of self-denials, both of the great things and of the small. It is the season which reaffirms the mystery which, like death, no man understands until he has passed its portals by experience; the mystery, namely, that it is only by giving up that we acquire the greatest gifts of Ufa We know that the principle holds in the little things, vet the fear of trying it in the great things is such that comparatively few ever bring themselves to the supreme point, and they, their selves forgotten.

spend the rest of their lives striving to tell their truth to others who will not believe until they, too, have passed through at the same gate of their own free will, follows the eternal paradox—-that those who have given up thdir lives, with no thought of a reward, are given back in another form, all they have given up, and a great deal more besides, and they who supposed that they had destroyed all selfhood see as, through the eyes of another, their self living and transmitting its force and influence to the coming generations, it may be in the mighty legend of a great life, it may be in the obscure usefulness of a life of infinite consequences which the world never hears of.