The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1904-02-03
A SERMON FOR, SUNDAY
AN ELOQUENT DISCOURSE BY THE
REV. DR.. }. BAScoM SHAW.
An Interesting Lesson Drawn From the
Text "Run With Patience '-KeeP
Jesus as q Pattern Before You in the
Race of Life.

An Interesting Lesson Drawn From the
Text Run With Patience ''-KeeP
Jesus as Pattern Before You in the
Race of Life.
PRINCETON, N. 1.-THE Rev. DR.. John
Balcom Shaw, pastor of the West Emo
Presbyterian Church, Manhattan, preached
Sunday morning before the students OF
Princeton University: He took hls text
from Hebrews kill: Run with patience"
DR.. Shaw said: 70. :,
There is a vast difference between walk
ing with patience and running with pa.
thence. Both are hard, incaleulably hard,
but they are hard in very different ways,
and call for graces which are exact op-
posites. Walking with patience re-
quires the grace of repression OF resig.
nation. The spirit leaps ahead but the
body must needs lag behind. We want
to run, but we have to walk, and a slow
pace when one feels he might make
haste and ought to make haste is might
ily agravating: :,
Walking with patience is one Of the
young mans struggles. He wants to get
on and up, with quick speed. but cir
cumstances are holding him back. He has
a mother to support, he works for an IN
appreciative firm, he lacks the proper in
fluence, he has no friends at court, he
can command no capital. Therefore, he
must stay a clerk when he deserves the
superintendency. He must go to business
when he would prefer profession. Creep
ing when you are eager to be leaplng-
can you imagine greater tax upon pa
tience than that?
Walking with patience is poverty's prob
lem. To suffer want when Others no more
deserving than you are in afluence, and be
resigned to it, it is the hardest possible
task. That is the bottom cause of all
our labor agitation--impatience under lin.
itations. ....
Walking with patience is misfortune's
mission. To be held back by reverses, dis.
abled by sickness, retarded by circum.
stances, felled by great sorrow, so that
we must walk instead of run-these are
life, and are these not experiences that
come to all? Who of us, the most pros
porous and fortunate, those whose track
has the fewest up grades upon lt-even
the young college man with his own Pc
culiar problems to solve and struggle to
meet-who of US does not find frequent
need to cry out with face turned upward?
I want the love that all things sweetly
bear, .. =.
Whate'er my Fathers hand may .ch oose
to send
I want the love that patiently endutes
The wrongs that come from earthly toe
or friend.
Some great soul who had evidently
taken full course in the school OF; sui.
fering and won the full diploma Of res.
ignation,, has most aptly and beautifully
expressed the souls need under such co.,.
ditions in these words:
The night is dark, but God, my God,
Io IN
And sure am ], when morning breaks,
I shall be at the land. 49,.
And since I know the darkness is
To Him as sunniest day,
I'll cast the anchor-patience-out
And wish-but wait for day.
God help us to learn how to walk with
patience! .,,r.
But what about running with patience?
Does it not call for quite another school
ing of ourselves, Just as running on the
athletic field demands training peculiar
to itself? Even a fast walker is not nee.
essarily q good runner. The requirement.
in this case is active rather than negative.
Here is needed not the grace of repression,
as l., the other case, but Of cultivation,
of application or concentration rather than
the weights and the brakes both must be
applied in order to hold the spirit back and
keep it apace with the body. But to run
with patience. the weights need to be laid
aside and the brakes removed that the in.
ner may keep abreast with the outward,
that our ambitions, our hopes, cur aims,
may fly forward toward the goal, nor"
as the line of the old hymn luns, tire
amid the heavenly road"
The very pace of the runner is itself
the foe of patience. It calls, seemingly,
TO: impetuousity, and the more impetn-
GUS the runner, we are accuftomed to think,
blood and fire the nerves. Behold the
athlete with every muscle taught. every
line of his face hard set, his eye. intense
and eager, the appiauding crowd urging
him Oh! How can he be poiseful and
seif-controlled? Indeed5 patience. would
seem impossible, and impatience the very
price of the prize. And yet every ath-
letic man before rue knows this is the talk
of novice. If there is anything the run
ner needs it is self-control, to be abe
"to keep his head" as we say, to COM
mand his nerves, to hold his strength
in check at the first and let it out toward
the finish, to keep from being unnerved
by the shouts Of the crowd, to be equal to
any condition before unreckoned with that
might appear. And does it not always
turn out that running match is at bot
tom chiefly q question of self-command-
muscle, wind, nerve, mind, yes, and heart
and the winner ever found to be the one
who has run the race with the greatest
patience?
Young men, this is a running age, and q
country where, whether you will or not,
you must adopt the quickest pace. "Step
lively" the car conductors inelegaht COM
mand, is cbaracteristically American,
though it may. usually happen in this case
to be spoken by a foreigner. All Ameri-
cans are proverbialiy in hurry: Even our
and from childhood on it gets gradually
faster and faster, until, when a young man
reaches maturity, he is on dead run.
Life these days is a veritable rush for ex-
istence.
To run, then is an easy thing-it IS the
most natural thing in the world to us, we
have been bred to it; it is instinct: but to
run with patience, to keep the soul calm
when the body becomes heated and over
taxed. SO that the spiritual does not lag
behind the material life, and we grow fe-
verish, sordid, impetuous-ah! this is quite
another thing. Srch difficult task is it
modern life, it is the rarest thing tc find
men with tranquil temperaments, stead
fast, patient, reposeful. Under the strain
and pressure of the times we get irascible,
restless, nervous, narrow and shallow OF
soul. Solitude has no longer any congo
niality for US, and, as DR.. Samuel Johnson
declared years ago, when a man cannot
bear his own company, does not like to be
alone, there is something wrong" 1t
would seem as if Wordsworth were ar
raigning our age and not his own, which
was so phlegmatic and meditative as COM
pared with this, when he wrote down his