The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1886-05-13
Thoughts for the Thoughtful.


family in heaven and earth.
Erery moment Of delay adds Bit
terness to after struggles. The mo-
ment of feeling of hired servitude
must come. If a man will not obey
God with warm heart, he may here
after have to do it with cold one -
To be holy is the work Of long life.
Oh, be brave and wait! These are
dark days-lonely days--and our
unbelieving impotence cannot bear
to wait, but must rashly, and by inn
petuous steps OF our own, plunge af-
ter the ignis .fatuus of light. Peace
at once! Light at once! I cannot
wait my time, and I viii not!
These are s'the things which God
hath prepared for them that love
Him." Compared with these, what
are loneliness, the eloquent utterances
OF man, the conceptions of the heart
OF genius2 What are they all to the
serene stiffness of a spirit lost in love;
the full deep rapture of a soul into
which the Spirit of God is pouring
itself in mighty tide of revelation ?
81 will tell you of want I am be-
ginning to experience very distinctly"
says Robertson. ST perceive more
than ever the necessity of devotional
reading: I mean the works of eminent
ly holy persons, whose tone was not
merely uprightness of character and
high-mindedness, but communion
a strong sense of personal and ever
living communion-with God be-
Sides
God is love, and to love men till
private attachments have expanded
into philanthropy which embraces
all, at last even the evil and enemies,
with compassion-that is to love God.
God is truth. To be true, to hate
every form of falsehood, to live a
brave, true, real life-that is to love
God. God is infinite, and to love the
boundless, reaching on from grace to
grace, adding charity to faith, and
rising upward ever to see the ideal
still above us, and to die with it un-
attained, aiming insatiably to be per-
feet even as the Father is perfect
that is to love God.
| The hardest, the severest, the last
lesson which man has to learn upon
this earth, is submission to the will
of God. It is the hardest lesson, be-
cause to our blinded eyesight it often
seems a cruel will. 1t is severe les
son, because it can be only taught by
the blighting of much that has been
most dear. IL is the last lesson, be-
cause when a man has learned that,
he is fit to be transplanted from a
world of willfulness to q world in
which one Will alone is loved, and
only one is done. All that sanity
experience ever had to teach resolves
itself into this, the lesson how to say
affectionately, s'Not as win, but as
Thou wilt" Slowly and stubbornly
our hearts acquiesce in that
| In all the works of God there is q
conspicuous absence of haste and
hurry. All that He does ripens slowly.
Six slow days and nights of creative
force before man was made; two
thousand years to discipline and form
Jewish people; four thousand years
of darkness and ignorance and crime
before the fullness of the time had
come, when He could send forth His
Son: unnumbered ages of war before
the thousand years of solid peace can
come. Whatever contradicts this
Divine plan must pay the price of
haste-brief duration. ALI that is
done before the hour is come decays
fast. All precocious things ripened
before their time wither before their
time: precocious fruit, precocious
minds, forced things. ssHe that be-
ieveth shall not make haste"
The awful feelings about Life and
God are not those which characterize
our earlier years. It is quite natural
that in the first espousals of the soul
in it's freshness to God, bright and
hopeful feelings should be the pre-
: dominant or the only ones. Joy marks,
and ought to mark, early religion
Nay, by Gods merciful arrangement,
even sin is not that crushing thing in
early life which it sometimes becomes
in later years, when we mourn not SC
much a calculable number of sinful
: acts, as deep pervading sinfulness
Remorse does not corrode with its
evil power then. forgiveness is moi
only granted, but consciously and
ioyfully felt. 1t is as life natures,
that the weight OF life, the burden Of
] this uninteligible world, and the
mystery OF the hidden God, are felt
The austerity that comes after life's
experience is more healthy, because
more natural, than that which begins
, it. When it begins life It's the pour
ing of the new wine into the old veal
. wine.skins, which burst; and the