WARM-WEATHER RELIGION.
It takes more grace to be an earnest and useful Christian in summer than in
any other season. The very destitute, through lack of fuel and thick
clothing, may find the winter the trying season, but those comfortably
circumstanced find summer the Thermopylæ that tests their Christian courage
and endurance.
The spring is suggestive of God and heaven and a resurrection day. That eye
must be blind that does not see God's footstep in the new grass, and hear
His voice in the call of the swallow at the eaves. In the white blossoms of
the orchards we find suggestion of those whose robes have been made white
in the blood of the Lamb. A May morning is a door opening into heaven.
So autumn mothers a great many moral and religious suggestions. The season
of corn husking, the gorgeous woods that are becoming the catafalque of the
dead year, remind the dullest of his own fading and departure.
But summer fatigues and weakens, and no man keeps his soul in as desirable
a frame unless by positive resolution and especial implorations. Pulpit and
pew often get stupid together, and ardent devotion is adjourned until
September.
But who can afford to lose two months out of each year, when the years are
so short and so few? He who stops religious growth in July and August will
require the next six months to get over it. Nay, he never recovers. At the
season when the fields are most full of leafage and life let us not be
lethargic and stupid.
Let us remember that iniquity does not cease in summer-time. She never
takes a vacation. The devil never leaves town. The child of want, living up
that dark alley, has not so much fresh air nor sees as many flowers as in
winter-time. In cold weather the frost blossoms on her window pane, and the
snow falls in wreaths in the alley. God pity the wretchedness that pants
and sweats and festers and dies on the hot pavements and in the suffocating
cellars of the town!
Let us remember that our exit from this world will more probably be in the
summer than in any other season, and we cannot afford to die at a time when
we are least alert and worshipful. At mid-summer the average of departures
is larger than in cool weather. The sun-strokes, the dysenteries, the
fevers, the choleras, have affinity for July and August. On the edge of
summer Death stands whetting his scythe for a great harvest. We are most
careful to have our doors locked, and our windows fastened, and our
"burglar alarm" set at times when thieves are most busy, and at a season of
the year when diseases are most active in their burglaries of life we need
to be ready.
Our charge, therefore, is, make no adjournment of your religion till cool
weather. Whether you stay in town, or seek the farm house, or the
sea-shore, or the mountains, be faithful in prayer, in Bible reading and in
attendance upon Christian ordinances. He who throws away two months of life
wastes that for which many a dying sinner would have been willing to give
all his possessions when he found that the harvest was past and the summer
was ended.
The thermometer to-day has stood at a high mark. The heat has been fierce.
As far as possible people have kept within doors or walked on the shady
side of the street. But we can have but a faint idea of what the people
suffer crossing a desert or in a tropical clime. The head faints, the
tongue swells and deathly sickness comes upon the whole body when long
exposed to the summer sun. I see a whole caravan pressing on through the
hot sands. "Oh," say the camel-drivers, "for water and shade!" At last they
see an elevation against the sky. They revive at the eight and push on.
That which they saw proves to be a great rock, and camels and drivers throw
themselves down under the long shadow. Isaiah, who lived and wrote in a
scorching climate, draws his figure from what he had seen and felt when he
represents God as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
Many people have found this world a desert-march. They go half consumed of
trouble all their days. But glory be to God! we are not turned out on a
desert to die. Here is the long, cool, certain, refreshing shadow of the
Lord.
A tree, when in full leafage, drops a great deal of refreshment; but in a
little while the sun strikes through, and you keep shifting your position,
until, after a while, the sun is set at such a point that you have no shade
at all. But go in the heart of some great rock, such as you see in Yosemite
or the Alps, and there is everlasting shadow. There has been thick shade
there for six thousand years, and will be for the next six thousand. So our
divine Rock, once covering us, always covers us. The same yesterday, to-day
and for ever! always good, always kind, always sympathetic! You often hold
a sunshade over your head passing along the road or a street; but after a
while your arm gets tired, and the very effort to create the shadow makes
you weary. But the rock in the mountains, with fingers of everlasting
stone, holds its own shadow. So God's sympathy needs no holding up from us.
Though we are too weak from sickness or trouble to do anything but lie
down, over us He stretches the shadow of His benediction.
It is our misfortune that we mistake God's shadow for the night. If a man
come and stand between you and the sun, his shadow falls upon you. So God
sometimes comes and stands between us and worldly successes, and His shadow
falls upon us, and we wrongly think that it is night. As a father in a
garden stoops down to kiss his child the shadow of his body falls upon it;
and so many of the dark misfortunes of our life are not God going away from
us, but our heavenly Father stooping down to give us the kiss of His
infinite and everlasting love. It is the shadow of a sheltering Rock, and
not of a devouring lion.
Instead of standing right out in the blistering noon-day sun of earthly
trial and trouble, come under the Rock. You may drive into it the longest
caravan of disasters. Room for the suffering, heated, sunstruck, dying, of
all generations, in the shadow of the great Rock:
"Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee."