The Newtown bee., 1897-05-28

the religious activities. Religion is pri-
 marily matter of the heart, of the feel
 ing and doing, as we'll as of the knowing.
 If a mans business instinct Is apt to be
 warped and made unfruitful unless in his
 business the heart finds 8 place; even
 more, yes supremely more mans relig-
 ious life will never be wise until it goes down deeper than all knowing and be- comes a matter of heart and life and con- science.
 A religion which had in it's creed a word about the comforter but when the sorrow came, and the head was bowed, and the hands were dropped and the eyes were filled with tears; 1t had then no comfort for the sorrow, that religion would fail just where it ought to have succeeded. Comfort is surely not thing to put only into mans creed; it is to enter into his life. It is not thing which is to be so much believed in with the mind as it is thing to wipe the tears away from the eyes, and to lift up the knees that are bowed, and to bind up the heart that is broken.
 And in the same manner faith in God :; this is not only thing which teaches us to argue from design and contrivance, and from the necessities of the case that there must be God in heaven and on earth and convinces us of it so that we accept the truth and believe it; itis more than that; it is the heart trusting in that God, looking unto Him, and yielding it, self to him. Here is a man that says with his lips and perhaps with his mind, ''I believe in Almighty God,'' but with his heart and his life he is saying rather every day, and to every man he meets,'I 1T believe in the almighty dollar, my faith is fixed on that, and live for it." When such is the heart and life, any real faith is about as impossible as five Sundays in February. True faith in God is in that we have conceived Him with our minds, confessed Him with our lips, and laid hold of Him with our hearts. Four thousand five hundred years ago, before the days of Abraham or Moses, In the time probably before that great flood swept down the Mesopotamian valleys, leaving it's ruin to enter into the tradi- tions of all those Eastern people and into our Scripture as the flood, voice cried out from the darkness. It's prayer has just been discovered on one nf the an- cient Chaldees bricks from UT of the Chaldees. This was the word: ''Tn Heaven who is supreme? God alone is supreme. On earth who is supreme? God alone is supreme. His word is pro- claimed in Heaven and the angels bow their faces down." Yet during all these ages since then, in all times of history, men have been laboring to bring that faith powerfully into the life and heart, so that indeed on earth God shall be supreme and men with the angels bow themselves down. The man who says, oh yes believe inIdoing good but goes ahead and does bad as ev- CT he can, we know that lhe don't really believe in doing good at all, because that belief has never gotten to the deep places of his life and laid hold upon them. As yet what he really believes is rather that there is something which he can get by doing badly, and he tries to get it by do- ing wrong. When man really believes with his heart in doing good; then he does it, because he is moved thereunto by the strong desire and impulse of his life. He shall as our text says understand the good thing when wisdom entereth into his heart.
 AS LONG AS MAN ONLY RELIEVES WITH
 HIS HEAD,
 while his heart desires something differ- ent, and his hope is therefore fixed upon something different there ia no faith. We don't really believe thing until we strive hard for it. There is such 8 long step between knowing the best and wis- est course and taking it.; there IS such 8 hard journey between knowledge and wisdom. I tell you it is often more of a job to make thing travel from mans head to his heart than it would be to take it all around the world. There's many a lecturer who could go from Norway to China with his lecture more speedily and easily than he could make that lecture go from the head of some one of his hearers who fully agreed with him to the heart of that same nearer, 50 that it brought forth it's fruit there. There are rough stormy seas, and tre- high mountains, and fierce gales, and many places where you lose the trail; all in the course of that short IS inches between mans head and his heart. have lost my bearings there