The Penn's Grove record., 1904-01-22
A SERMON FOR SUNDAY
AN ELOQUENT DISCOURSE BY THE
REV. Or. j. BAscoM SHAW.
An Interesting Lesson Drawn From the
Text Run With Patience keep
Jesus as a Pattern Before You in the
Race of Life.

Sunday morning before the students of
Princeton University. He took his text
from Hebrews kill: Run with patience"
DR.. Shaw said:
There is a vast difference between walk
Ing with patience and running with pa
thence. Both are hard, intellectually hard,
but they are hard in very different ways,
and call for graces which are exact OPP
posites. Walking with patience re.
qulres the grace of repression or 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
lily aggravating.
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 I'M
appreciative firm, he lacks the proper in
huence, he has no friends at court, he
can command no capital. Therefore, he
must stay a clerk when he deserves the
superintendency. BE must go to business
when he would prefer a profession. Creep
ing when you are eager to be leaplng-
can you imagine a greater tax upon pa
thence than that?
Walking with patience is poverty's prob
lem. To suffer want when others no more
deserving than you are in af1uence, and be
resigned to it, it is the hardest possible
task. That is the bottom cause of all
our labor neutrality-suspicious. under lin
i~tations.
Walking with patience is misfortune's
mission. To be held back by reverses, dis
abled by sickness, retarded by eircum-
stances, felled by a great sorrow, so that
we must walk instead of run-these are
among the most difficult experiences of
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 it-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 upward2
I want the love that all things sweetly
bear,
Whate'er my Fathers hand may choose
to send.
The wrongs that come from earthly foe
or friend.
Some great soul who had evidently
taken a full course in the school Of suf-
fering and won the full diploma of res
ignation, has most aptiy and beautifully
expressed the souls need under such corr
ditions in these words:
The night is dark, but God, nv God,
Is here and in command;
And sure am /, when morning breaks,
/ shall be at the land. :
And since l know the darkness is
To Him as sunniest day,
III cast the anchor-patience-out,
And wish-but wait for day.
God help us to learn how to walk with
! patience!
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 a training peculiar
to itself? Even a fast walker is not nee
essarily a good rune The requirement
in this case is active rather than negative.
Here Is needed not the grace of repression,
as Ii the other case, but of cultivation,
of application or concentration rather than
OF resignation. In walking with patience,
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 runs, sire
amid the heavenly road"
The very pace of the unner is itself
the foe of patience. 1t calls, seemingly,
fot im~petuousity, and the more impetu-
GUS the runner, we are accustomed to think,
the better. Its certain effect is to heat the
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 a%pplauding crowd urging
him onl How can he be poisefui and
self-controlled? Indeed, patience would
seem impossible, and impotence the very
price of the prize. And yet every ath-
letic man before me knows this is the talk
of a novice. If there is anything the run
ner needs it is self-control, to be able
"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 unforeseen turn the race may take or
any condition before unreckoned with that
might appear. And does it not always
turn out that a running match is at bot
tom chiefly a 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 a
country where, whether you will or not,
you must adopt the quickest pace. "Step
lively" the car conductors inelegaht com
mand, is Enthusiastically American,
though it may usually happen In this case
to be spoken by a foreigner. All Ameri-
cans are proverbially in a hurry. Even our
kindergarten tots have caught the step,
and from childhood on it gets gradually
faster and faster, until, when a young man
reaches maturity, he is on a dead run.
Lite these days is a yeritable 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-
verlsh, s0rdld, lmpetuous-ah! this is quite
another thing. Such a difficult task is it
that, amid the clamor and tumult OF our
modern life, it is the rarest thing to 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
r~aigning our age and not his own, which
was so phlegmatic and meditative as com
pared with this, when he wrote down his
memorable lines:
"The world is too much with us; late and
soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our
powers.
Little we see in nature that is our;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid
boon!"
Aversive to solitude, and over-enamored
of society, hard driven b. materialistic
gain and greed, tearing ahead for a prize
that our nervous clutch may crush so soon
as it is once in the hand, we outrun our re-
Eigious duty, the claims of our inner nature
are left away behind, and we go dashing
madly ahead, like a runaway engine, into
spiritual, if not moral, ruin. This, young
men, is the feverish race you are soon to
enter. Whatever your Discrimination there
to, you are bound to run it. The one su-
preme question is, viii you run it with pa
thence or, as the great majority are seek
ing to do, impetuously, wildly, without self
control, and therefore unsuccessfuliy
sWhat is the secret of such PATIENCE ~
You ask of me, eagerly, earnestly, in your
upturneG iacess Let our author answe
Looking unto Jesus" is the sole remedy
he suggests. let us lay aside every
weight and the sin that doth so easily be-
set us, and let us run with patience the
race that is set before us, looking unite
Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith,
who, for the joy that was set before Him,