Sermon Preached by the Rev. A. Norman Rowland in Union Chueh, Shanghai, on September 14, 1924
"As for God His way is perfect.,..He girdeth me with strength and maketh my way perfect." 2 Sant. 22.31.
18 90, This stirring psalm which is of the mountains the old guest given twice in Scripture is full of houses of religion give you Glemental things, The spirit of sanctuary.
David the outlaw breathes in every No Escape Prom the Trail. me. Like King Lear he is at home with the tempest but faces it with We often speak of life as un the optimism of youth. He lives adventure, and so indeed it is, for and triumphs by the skill of his we have a power of free choice. hands and feet, He praises God But what we settle for ourselves is lat 3 with the thanks of a boy for creat-! nothing in comparison with what ing him "nimble and clean of limb." settled for us.
And it is our It'is to. the glory of Jehovah that! wisdom to think of life as an old hho climbs the orage and ambushes trail, a way that has been marked the foe. Me pictures the divine help ' and fixed by the experience of the fag the tough shield on his arm of pioneers. the safe track among the moun-1 was reading a book of Maurice tains.
Hewlett's, telling the fortunes of a It is this last thought I want to's" who" in the evi tical days of open up this morning that the Way. Soung womanhood took a step that of God, the way t0 God "Who is our Sans Simoly dictated: by her. sense Home," is like an old trail which it Yf'compassion, on the ground that it out only wisdom to keep. {Was her only guide. 1t brought her ani: disastrous consequences though her heart remained "innocent of the There in little use of this meta- rear transgression."
But the phor in English literature for the novelist defends her action. "What simple reason that the ways of Eng-/else could 1 do?" she says. "To me Tand have always been compara-)the only thing that seems to matter tively plain and safe. You will xe-lis one's mind. Freedom for that! mind me no doubt of the Pilgrim's! You can give up anything else.' Progress, which has just been so No, there ix something else we can-highly praised by the Professor of not give up without grave lors, and Literature at the Royal Institution. that ig the trail, worn by countless. There the Christian likened to a pathway but, the mind is to be vid of its obsession, what Bunyan had in his mind was'and to see things in their larger tone of the old Roman roads like hearings. What others have learned Watling Street which he often by experience on our behalf has traversed, "as straight as a rule can {aid an obligation on us that weighs make it." That ix very different, heavier even than the impulses of from a trail through the art, The law of the trail may tains. ihe full of difficulty, but it has to be 'A. bundyed years tater than! compared with the disastrous conse-Bunyan, in & poem almost &s well quences of leaving the trail. oven as his allegory, Thomas Gray!" There is a fine word in the pro-also likened life to a journey. phet of the Exile, who was evidently Speaking of his village folk he says,!at home on the mountain tracks. oat sequerted vote of ity!
Will make a way even in the wilder: all my mountains away Tu 48, 1949.11). How English is that landscape!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.