children, demands our response to the Holy Spirit and our persevering
cooperation with Him to make His influence effectual for ourselves and
for the "communion of saints" and the corporate religion into which the
Spirit also baptizes us. In a recent sermon a bishop of the Episcopal
Church says, "This is the creed of the Church--the Divine Father and
Forgiveness: the Divine Son and Redemption: the Divine Spirit and
Abundant Life. Therefore the Church still insists upon the creation of
moral rectitude and spiritual character as the end and purpose of
religion, aye, as the basic problem underlying all questions relating to
human life--social, industrial, civic, and political. The Church still
preaches the gospel of the Grace of God, the obligation and blessing of
worship, the meaning and virtue of the Christian Sacraments." Also "My
brethren, we shall not be content to criticize and find fault with our
own age and time, but rather we shall pray for the power to see within
its questionings, unrest and discontent--aye, its recklessness and
apparent failures--the strivings of the Spirit of God. But each man has
to voice for himself the conviction of the reality of the spiritual
order and the spiritual life. Therefore, let us believe in and practice
the worship of God, 'praying always' as St. Paul says, 'with all prayer
and supplication in the Spirit,' or as St. Jude says, 'building up
yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.'"
Let us accept this suggestion and try to find in the unrest of our own
time evidences of "the strivings of the Spirit of God," waiting our
perception and response. The soldier of the Great War, having faced
death and imprisonment and suffering in many forms says, "compared with
the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow." The first evidence
of good in our own day is the almost universal discontent with evils and
the desire to find a better way. The humility which recognizes that so
widespread a condition cannot be the fault of any one nation or group
but is rather the responsibility of each one of us, is cause for hope.
Some of us believe that war can breed only war, hatred only hatred; that
governments cannot make peace, but can only cause cessation of open
hostilities, and that the real peace, the Great Peace, must await the
action of the Spirit. This Spirit, of love and forgiveness, breeds love
and forgiveness, indeed is far more potent than the spirit of hate.
Because of this very strength and potency its evidences are not so
immediately apparent, but they are deeper-rooted. Perhaps in this
material sphere we human beings must see, and to a certain extent
experience, hate, before we can really know love, and consciously and
freely choose it. When that choice is made, when we, knowing all that
hate and evil and malice can accomplish, yet deliberately choose to love
our enemies, we have slain the Adversary and made hate and evil
powerless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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