IT is a fair and necessary question to ask whether we have not reached the limits in our advance toward public righteousness without a corresponding advance in personal religion." From-The Function of the Church in Modern Society. By WILLIAM JEWITT TUCKER. xii CHAPTER I GOD'S LENTEN CALL TO THE SOUL LENT comes to us, year by year, as a direct call from God. A call to greater strictness of life, more earnest thought on serious subjects, more strenuous effort after holiness. And since it is really true that "the penance of religious men is sweeter than the pleasures of courtiers" the call is a welcome one. It calls us from care for things that don't matter to care for things that do. It speaks to us of struggles and victories and rewards which involve our whole nature, and the highest, best, and most real part of our being. It is a call that braces us, nerving us to efforts which even while we shrink from them we feel to be worth making. And while it demands effort it promises a more than adequate reward. The lad who said "I'm glad to-morrow is Ash Wednesday. I mean to have a good strict Lent this year. Then I shall have a happy Easter " expressed, in simple boyish words, some deep spiritual truths, and showed that he was not without religious experience of his own. And yet, as we get on in life, does not a certain doubt, a certain depression, mingle with this anticipation of Lent? We feel that we have gone through all this sort of thing before, and nothing much has come of it. We have had strict, well-kept Lents, times when religion B was a pleasure, and prayer and worship real sources of strength and power, when God and the soul and the unseen things of the spirit were more real than the visible and tangible things of the world around us, and yet what has been the result? We have always slipped back again into slackness, carelessness, worldliness. Perhaps we cannot say that nothing has been gained. But we feel that a very great deal of spiritual effort, of hope and prayer, and high endeavour, has yielded very little lasting fruit for God's glory, or the welfare of others, or our own soul's growth. We ask ourselves whether the Christian life is always to be a weary round of sinning, and repenting, and trying again, only to sin afresh and need a fresh repentance. Surely it ought to be possible to make the Christian life a really victorious progress "from strength to strength till we appear, everyone of us, before our God in Sion." If, even when all allowance has been made for occasional defeats, we cannot regard our soul's life as one of steady progress, what is the cause? Perhaps at times we are tempted to doubt the power and reality of religion altogether. The joy and happiness of past Lents, we are tempted to think, was mere emotionalism, stirred feelings which settled down again without effecting anything. We worked ourselves up, or let others work us up, into a state which could not last, and we fear lest every time we try to re-capture the emotional excitement of those days, we should find the task harder and the results less permanent. "You have tried religion" the tempter whispers," and found out for yourself that there is nothing in it. You will 1 Ps. lxxxiv 7. be a fool if you let yourself be taken in again." And in such a mood it is terribly easy to drop religion altogether, or at best to fall into a state of merely conventional religious observance. But let us, at this point, consider something which, at first sight, seems to have nothing to do with what we have been thinking about but which may be found to have a very real connection. Almost every clergyman who has been any length of time engaged in parish work, can recall cases of young people, both men and women, who have at one time been inspired with real zeal for social work, and who have declared that they wished to devote all their lives to working for the betterment of their fellowmen. But sooner or later they became discouraged. They seemed to effect so little, and their fellow workers, whom they credited with a zeal like their own, revealed, when they came to know them well, so many unattractive qualities, and the people they worked for, and whom they desired to help, proved so sluggish, and irresponsive, and ungrateful. And so they became disillusioned. How that disillusionment shews itself will depend on the nature of the individual. Some men come to disbelieve in human nature altogether. Human nature, they say, is what it is, and only a fool will try to change it; everyone must look out for himself. And so the man who started life as a perfectly sincere philanthropist ends it as a self-seeking grasper, perhaps even as a sanctimonious hypocrite who, almost unconsciously, masks his own selfishness under the old phrases about service, betterment, and the uplifting of the poor. It may well be that the reader has met such cases himself. But nobler natures, instead of growing cynical and selfish, |