Inward Grace - Ellen Glasgow

note: I'm currently two-thirds through reading a book by Ellen Glasglow titled "Vein of Iron." This down-home and simple novel depicts life in a small, rural, Virginia valley community, beginning around the year 1900. It follows the life of a young girl, Ada Fincastle, as well as the past present and future of the Fincastle family. The descriptions of peoples, places and events ring with familiarity to any reader raised in a similar valley community. 

Author Ellen Glasglow writes in a way that lets readers embrace her descriptive sentences through use of all five senses; taste, smell, vision, touch, hear. And, although the novel was published in 1935, there is an immortal "Inward Grace" emitting an undying beacon of light and truth for present and future generations.

"Children were chasing an idiot boy up the village street to the churchyard." (Novel's first line)

"The Meaning of Faith" - Paths and Moods

By Harry Emerson Fosdick

Pg.88 “There is but one thing needful – to possess God.

The sad perversions of religious faith are not a matter for foreign missions only. At home, too, we find people who seem to be rather worse than better because they are religious. Just as power in any other form may be abused, so may religious faith. Some in the name of religion become censorious and intolerant, some superstitious, some slaves to morbid fears; and ignorance, self-conceit, pride, and worldly ambition when driven and enforced by a religious motive are infinitely worse than they would have been without it. 

Toward this fact two attitudes are possible. One is to throw over religion on account of its abuses, which is as reasonable as to deny all the blessings of electricity because in ignorant hands it is a dangerous power. The other is to take religious faith more seriously than ever, to see how great a force for weal or woe it always is in human life, and to strive in ourselves and in others for a high, intelligent, and worthy understanding and use of it. For religion can mean what Amiel said of it: “There is but one thing needful – to possess God.

Religion is not a method: it is a life – a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.” 

From our study of the perversions and travesties of faith, we turn therefore in the weekly comment to consider faith’s vital meanings. So Paul, writing to the Galatians, rejoices in religion as a gloriously transforming power in life.

-        But I say, Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would. But if ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, parties, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like; of which I forewarn you even as even as I did forewarn you, that they who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control; against such there is no law. And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof.

-        – Gal.5: 16-23.