Chapter 42

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."