There is no end to strikes of a more serious kind. There is a strik? against religion, against Christian morals. ere is a general loosenest in the soul of man. The result of all this is distress of mind, a great and widely felt anxiety.
We call it pessimism—that is, that the outlook is of the worst possible. As our Lord said' once, "Men's hearts fail them because: of fear." I suppose man is naturally a creature full of fear. Heathen religions have fear at their base, fear of the powers of Nature and unseen bogies. As Professor Gilbert Murray says in one of his recent essays, he is "sometimes disposed: to despair of modern civilization," he presumes "'most of us are."" ere is always an infallible proof that the Christian public is full of anxiety. That is, in the revival of the doctrine of the second coming of Jhrist. That tremendous event always looms prominently in the sky when the Church of Christ is like these disciples, "distressed in. rowing." How often you hear people say, "Will the world ever be Christian?" Some of them count the natural increase in births in China, then the missionary statistics "of conversions and deduce the conclusion that the Chinese never will be Christian. There is no end to the dismal conclusions we can come to, Fears haunt mankind, and always have haunted it.
Now, Jesus Christ saw His disciples in the storm, and knew that their souls were riven by fear. He must often have noticed it, for Ho has so much to say about fear—very much more than is commonly thought—but if we gather His utterances together on this matter of the fear that creates pessimistic views of the future, we shall see how very much He has to say. I do not think that we can spend our time more usefully this New Year Sunday than in gathering them together. We may find something Loschest us on our journey through First, fears are often groundless. They grow as big as Jonah's gourd in a night. We are full of them. They cloud our future; they create rumours and jealousies; they make us busy in preparing to fight them with all the powder_and shot at our command. And then, we find that there has been no danger at all, There has been rio enemy. I think it is a Persian proverb which says, "The plague killed 5,000 people; fear of the plague killed 50,000."" That is just it. The case of the disciples is one im point. They were evidently afraid. Yet there was no need for it. Their Lord was so near.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.