"But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men...wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy"
(Ezra 3:12).
I don't think these weeping folk helped very much. The mood was natural enough, perhaps, but certainly not over-manly and little likely to do anything except dishearten those around them. And a mind that is perpetually looking back, and talking scornfully of all things present as a sad decadence, that is gloomy and pessimistic, that knows the reins have broken in God's hands, and that all things are hurtling hideously down to ruin, that keeps clutching the seat nervously, ready to jump when the disaster it is always forseeing comes--well, it's a rather miserable role to fill, and surely not a little blasphemous.
But what about you who are young? Ah, well, you can be trying and exasperating too. That airy assumption of yours that all who went before you were incompetent bunglers, that you are the people and wisdom will die with you, or at least that suddenly the slow, dour thing has blossomed into full flower in your day, is less than just by far to that innumerable company of valiant souls who, with hard breathing, toil and pain and sheer dare-devil heroism, won for you with their bare hands nearly all you have inherited. Look again at your possessions, at the simplest of them; and, like David, with that water from the well at Bethlehem which valiant men had risked their lives to bring, you too will feel, in an awed and even ashamed way that these are vastly too valuable, have cost far too much, to make it seemly you should use them as if they were common nothings; will make you want rather to pour them out before God, who alone is worthy to receive them--these things how wonderful when you look at them closer, for has it not taken human blood and brains and lives to win each one of them? Don't forget that.
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Arthur John Gossip was Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University from 1939 until 1945.
Born in Glasgow, Gossip graduated MA from the University of Edinburgh and was licensed as a Free Church of Scotland minister in 1898. He was minister of a number of churches before coming to St Matthew's United Free Church in Glasgow in 1910; he served as a chaplain in Belgium and France during the First World War, and he returned to Scotland as minister of Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen.
In 1928, Gossip was appointed Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Training in the United Free Church's Divinity school in Glasgow (known as Trinity College after the reunion of the United Free and Church of Scotland in 1929, and the amalgamation of the Divinity schools at the College and the University). The University's Chair of Ethics and Practical Theology was suppressed after Gossip's retirement in 1945.