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Page 32
That will depend on what he wants done. If he only wants mountains
lifted, he can put the shoulder of an earthquake under the strata of a
continent and tilt them up edgewise, or toss up a hundred miles of
strata and let them come down the other side up. If he wants mountains
carried hence and cast into the sea, he can bring rivers to carry for
thousands of years numberless tons. If he wants worlds held in
rhythmic relations to their sun, he can take gravitation. Man is of no
use; he cannot reach so far.
But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly
welcome man's aid. Has he? Yes. Obviously he wants things done he
cannot do alone. Worlds are dead. Trees do not think. Morning stars
may sing together, but they cannot love. None of them have character.
None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power
and love that flush the universe. None of them are permanent, or worth
keeping forever. They are only scaffolding. He wants something
greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels
together can make. He wants not mere matter acted upon from without,
but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of
granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier
than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting,
and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a
single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal
youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away.
God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better
that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.
Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many.
Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up
successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are
oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.
But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a
full expectation of the aid of the forces without us. Man takes to
agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin.
He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain
or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his
plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work
into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a
man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the
adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the
beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to
beautify the place of his dwelling.
There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and
hand of mastery. They all work for and with him. Does he want his
burdens carried? The river will convey the Indian on a log or the
armaments of the greatest nations. The wind fits itself into the
shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land
than all the human race together. Does he want swiftness? The
lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am
I." Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work
into man's plans.
Is not our whole question settled? If these fundamental forces, these
oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them,
so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of
years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man
to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed,
until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be
otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these
forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible
signs and exponents, are working together with man? Then, in all
probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be
thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or
things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man.
God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the
highest. He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not
help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of
eternal life.
Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's
control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over
birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we
call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of
deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes. He upholds
all things by the direct exercise of his power. "The uniformities of
nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his
method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under
the pressure of a higher law." There can be no general providence
which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care
for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not
number all the hairs. The Old Testament doctrine of a special and
minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving
teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal
individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16). The cold glacial
period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man,
making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired
before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is
past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds
and hearts has commenced.
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