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Show IN THE SEASON OF REBIRTH Mankind Can See in Nature Awakening Awaken-ing an Appeal to His Spiritual Feelings. Between the penitential season of the religious year, which Ash Wednesday Wednes-day opens, and the weather of winter's win-ter's decay and of spring's renewing, is a mysterious bond of similarity which enhances the meaning of the observance. In the order of nature it is a time of the sloughing off of the old and the quickening of the new; of the release of earth and streams from icy fetters and snow burial, and the deep, secret stirrings of new life. And these, if we will, are but the symbols of what may stir and quicken in us under the influence of this season of self-denials, both of the great things and of the small. It is the season which reaffirms the mystery which, like death, no man understands until lie has passed its portals by experience; experi-ence; the mystery, namely, that it Is only by giving up that we acquire the greatest gifts of life. We know that the principle holds in the little things, yet the fear of trying.it in the great things is such that comparatively few ever bring themselves to the supreme print, and they, thair selves forgotten spend the rest of their lives striving to tell their truth to others who will not believe until they, too, have passed through at the same gate of their own free will. Then follows the eternal paradox that those who have given up their lives, with no thought of a reward, are given back in another lorm, all they have given up, and a great deal more besides, and they who supposed that they had destroyed all selfhood see as, through the eyes of another, their self living and transmitting transmit-ting its force and influence to the coming com-ing generations, it may be in the mighty legend of a great life, it mriv be in the obscure usefulness of a life of infinite consequences which the world never hears of. |