Editorial April 30, 1910 Issue

MORE ABUNDANT LIFE

John B. Willis

The spring is a great preacher. It speaks for beauty and law and wondrous art. There is a freshness, a spontaneity, and a joy about its coming and its song which win for it a welcome at every hearthstone, and make its reign a time of buoyancy and of cheer. Unspiritual as is the world, it cannot brook the suggestion that all this fine modeling of bud and branch, this weaving and tinting of leaves and petals, is but a manifestation of materiality. Nothing indeed satisfies our sense here but the thought that underlying all this material seeming there is an infinite and ever-active Mind which is good and beautiful and true.

Above all else, however, the spring speaks for more abundant life, life that like a mighty tide fills to their full every bay and estuary and channel, until all the land is laved and loved by the sea. These suggestions of the larger life are the more ministering because they meet the heart's great need. Mortal experience finds life but a toy of circumstance and utterly unsatisfying. At its so-called beginning the tender feet of the little babe are ofttimes found in paths that are strewn with thorns. While yet a child he becomes a prey to impulses that drive him, like a tiny craft, before the ocean's storm. Arrived at youth he is assaulted by appetites and passions which he does not understand, and to which if he yield but for an hour he may reap for himself and all who love him a lifetime of suffering. Manhood ushers in that impelling desire for place, possession, and power which leads to bitterness, while all along the way the possibilities of accident abound, and at the last death claims the right to make an insistent close of the tragedy men have called life.

Surely those wondrous words of the Master, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," were most opportune, for nothing but a larger, more vital, more spiritual sense of life can solve the human problem and end human woe. The wonderworking of spring, the fragrant prodigalities with which it carpets the hillsides and makes bush and tree to burn with blossomings, as if aflame with the divine glory,—all this will have served us most and best only when it has lifted our thought to that unfailing and inexhaustible source of life which was made manifest by the lowly Nazarene.

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