Editorial: The Cover
The front cover of this volume pictured a man deep in thought.
IT IS TIME TO THINK!
The night is settling fast upon us. it seems that the last few rays of the setting sun have spread across this old rebellious world like a silent farewell, and soon they too will be extinguished. The day of God’s grace will be gone forever.
We who live in these momentous hours in the evening of the age, are called upon to bear a tremendous responsibility.
We look out on a world reeling with excesses and sleepy with opulence on the one hand, and on the other, crushed with oppression and burdened with sorrow.
We see a Church shattered with division, separated not so much from the world as from one another, experts in tradition and babes in doctrine, loud in preaching and mumbling in ethics. Like Solomon’s sixty, expert in warring; all holding swords, but wouldn’t quite know how to handle a trowel.
It is indeed TIME to THINK … Time to make an appraisal of things, time to take stock. Time to find a quiet spot, beyond the influences of other men, and with the pale light of the evening of the day of grace upon us … THINK … clearly, objectively … what is the sum total of my life? What are the motives that drive me on? Am I labouring so earnestly just to extend the sphere of my personal influence? Or to more firmly entrench in the minds of the impressionable, my personal convictions and points of view? Has all of this activity produced any real fruit in my own life, or the lives of others? Have the multitude of my words accomplished anything, or are they “idle”… unemployed, neither doing nor earning?
Soon, so very soon it would seem, the day will be over and it is high time to think, clearly and sanely of life’s abiding values. It is time to think greater thoughts, grander thoughts of God, of Christ, of His people. It is time to lift our thinking out of the microcosmic tracks it so readily pursues. It is time to gather up our pygmy points of view and launch our thoughts out, out into these realms of contemplation where the magnitude of God’s eternal plan of the ages overwhelms us; where the majesty and regal splendour of an exalted Christ eclipses utterly the pettiness of time and its troubles.
If we are content to be little in spiritual stature and influence, then let us think little thoughts. If we aspire to be great for God, then we must have great thoughts of God and His purposes, for it is recorded … “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
J.B.N.