Article September 2, 1911 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Jonathan Edwards, William P. Du Bose, Charles W. Stevenson

[Congregationalist and Christian World.]

The secret secret of rest is a healed spirit, and spiritual rest is rooted in trust and surrender. Real rest works from the inside out. If God does not find us, we shall not find rest. The vacation which does not issue in deeper spiritual adjustments is no vacation at all. The processes by which this is obtained may be indirect; they must be none the less real. The real secret of the ministrations of the sea and the mountains, of quiet green spaces, yellow harvest-fields, and clear nights of stars, is just here. They insensibly lead our perturbed spirits into ampler and healing presences. The horizons of the sea call us from benumbing littlenesses to regions whose spaciousness is no unfit symbol of the tendernesses of the mercy of God. The patient strength of the mountains teaches us without words that there is a might against which the tumult of the tempest is in vain. Their remote and stainless summits carry weary eyes and hearts into altitudes to which the summits themselves offer only thresholds of approach. Green fields and quiet waters breathe the shepherding care of God, and the stars themselves, seen from horizon to horizon, declare not only the glory of God, but a serenity which puts to shame our earthborn born fretfulness. Surely all these are spiritual processes. We have yielded ourselves to the unchanging serenities and securities, and as we have let them bear us we have been healed. After the storm we can hear the birds once more carol their notes of praise; at the end of sorrow and tragedy hear faith reawaken and have the poet's song echoing in our hearts.

[Rev. Jonathan Edwards, Ph.D., in Christian Work and Evangelist.]

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