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Page 69
Science discovers that man is adapted for mastery in this world.
He is of the highest order of visible creatures. Neither is it
possible to imagine an order of beings generically higher to be
connected with the conditions of the material world. This whole
secret was known to the author of the oldest writing. "And God
blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply,
and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth." The idea is never lost
sight of in the sacred writings. And while every man knows he must
fail in one great contest, and yield himself to death, the later
portions of the divine Word offer him victory even here. The typical
man is commissioned to destroy even death, and make man a sharer
in the victory. [Page 243] Science babbles at this great truth of
man's position like a little child; Scripture treats it with a
breadth of perfect wisdom we are only beginning to grasp.
Science tells us that each type is prophetic of a higher one. The
whale has bones prophetic of a human hand. Has man reached perfection?
Is there no prophecy in him? Not in his body, perhaps; but how his
whole soul yearns for greater beauty. As soon as he has found food,
the savage begins to carve his paddle, and make himself gorgeous with
feathers. How man yearns for strength, subduing animal and cosmic
forces to his will! How he fights against darkness and death, and
strives for perfection and holiness! These prophecies compel us to
believe there is a world where powers like those of electricity and
luminiferous ether are ever at hand; where its waters are rivers
of life, and its trees full of perfect healing, and from which all
unholiness is forever kept. What we infer, Scripture affirms.
Science tells us there has been a survival of the fittest. Doubtless
this is so. So in the future there will be a survival of the fittest.
What is it? Wisdom, gentleness, meekness, brotherly kindness, and
charity. Over those who have these traits death hath no permanent
power. The caterpillar has no fear as he weaves his own shroud; for
there is life within fit to survive, and ere long it spreads its
gorgeous wings, and flies in the air above where once it crawled. Man
has had two states of being already. One confined, dark, peculiarly
nourished, slightly conscious; then he was born into another--wide,
differently nourished, and intensely [Page 244] conscious. He knows
he may be born again into a life wider yet, differently nourished,
and even yet more intensely conscious. Science has no hint how a
long ascending series of developments crowned by man may advance
another step, and make man isaggelos--equal to angels. But the
simplest teaching of Scripture points out a way so clear that a
child need not miss the glorious consummation.
When Uranus hastened in one part of its orbit, and then retarded,
and swung too wide, men said there must be another attracting world
beyond; and, looking there, Neptune was found. So, when individual
men are so strong that nations or armies cannot break down their
wills; so brave, that lions have no terrors; so holy, that temptation
cannot lure nor sin defile them; so grand in thought, that men
cannot follow; so pure in walk, that God walks with them--let us
infer an attracting world, high and pure and strong as heaven. The
eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a roll-call of heroes of whom this
world was not worthy. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance,
that they might obtain a better resurrection. The world to come
influenced, as it were, the orbits of their souls, and when their
bodies fell off, earth having no hold on them, they sped on to
their celestial home. The tendency of such souls necessitates such
a world.
The worlds and the Word speak but one language, teach but one set
of truths. How was it possible that the writers of the earlier
Scriptures described physical phenomena with wonderful sublimity,
and with such penetrative truth? They gazed upon the same heaven
that those men saw who ages afterward led the world in knowledge.
These latter were near-sighted, and absorbed [Page 245] in the
pictures on the first veil of matter; the former were far-sighted,
and penetrated a hundred strata of thickest material, and saw the
immaterial power behind. The one class studied the present, and made
the gravest mistakes; the other pierced the uncounted ages of the
past, and uttered the profoundest wisdom. There is but one
explanation. He that planned and made the worlds inspired the Word.
Science and religion are not two separate departments, they are
not even two phases of the same truth. Science has a broader realm
in the unseen than in the seen, in the source of power than in the
outcomes of power, in the sublime laws of spirit than in the laws
of matter; and religion sheds its beautiful light over all stages
of life, till, whether we eat or whether we drink, or whatsoever
we do, we may do all for the glory of God. Science and religion
make common confession that the great object of life is to learn
and to grow. Both will come to see the best possible means, for
the attainment of this end is a personal relation to a teacher
who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
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