The Portland daily press., 1897-08-16
AT WILLIsToN CHURCH.
Rev. DIR. Butler. President of Colby uni
versity Fills the Pulpit.


versity Fills the Pulpit.
Rev Nathaniel Butler. D. D., president
of Colby university, occupied the pulpit
at Williston chapel yesterday and at the
morning service delivered an able and
scholarly sermon on the assured verities
of the faith, taking his text from the LIST
verse of the 131st Psalm-'L Lord, my
heart is not naughty, nor mine eyes lofty;
neither do I exercise myself in great
matters, or in things too high for me. !"
DR.. Butler said, in part: "David's life
and history said Carlyle, las written
for us in those Psalms of his, con-
slider to be the truest emblems ever given
of a mans moral progress and warfare
here below"
Familiarity with the psalms convinces
us that what Carlyle has said is just
more completely than any other body of
literature, the psalms utter for us every
phase of human feeling and experience.
But what makes them especially useful
to us, is the fact that the writer passing
through experiences like our own reaches
conclusions which are needful for us, but
which we might not have reached with
out such aid. Such conclusion is this
text. For in the realm of religious
thought we are ever in danger Of spend
ing too much time on the mysteries and
too Httle.on the plain and simple matters
of life and duty.
The--spirit of the text.is, however, by no
means unfriendly to the more active and
eager researches, but 1t warns US against
assuming such an attitude towards the
unknown that we neglect plain and
simple matters of privilege and duty.
The great verities of the faith upon
which we may exercise ourselves are, the
existence of God, human duty, salvation,
immortality. These verities, however,
are not assured merely by the logical
faculty or by Intellectual insight, but are
rather unprecedented by unquestioned
intuition and undoubted experience In
the samess wayne arrive at nearly all of
the great vital truths that enter into our
thinking, and thusswe are led to assume
the existence of God, thus we assume,
and by experience verify, the great facts
of human duty, and though the agnostic
assures us that "no man can know any
thing of what is beyond the grave yet
the life and the world are continually
teaching us, and the heart of every man
constantly asserts the, truth SO lately
uttered by John Fiske, that 1--WE may be
sure that the creature whose intelligence
measures the pulsation of molecule and
unravels the Esecret of the whirling
nebula is one in whose creation and per-
fecting is seen the contamination of God s
creative work-no creature of a day, but
the child of the universe, the heir of all
the ages
While we press out continually into
new and broader realms Of thought, we
may rest our feet upon the assured
verities of the Christian faith. In dealing
with them we are no mora thrown back
upon mystery than we are in the realms
of material science.
Spencerian agnosticism declares that
the inmost nature of things, the ground
of all phenomena, is unknownable, yet
1t proceeds to erect upon the unknowable
a superstructure of science which it does
not hesitate to call positive On the
other hand Alexander McLaren has re-
Gently said: The inward facts of my
own consciousness are just as much facts
and are certified to me as reliably and as
validity as are facts in other regions which
are tested by the senses or arrived at by
experience, for they are not merely mat
tiers of intellectual conviction, but they
are the outcome Of life and the broad seal
of experienced possession is stamped upon
them
Assuming ourselves of these verities, we
shall come into right relations with God,
duty, salvation and Immortality The
mysteries of life will still interest and
fascinate, but they will not disturb or
confound us. We shall interpret life in a
new light, "the light that lightens every
man that cometh into the world