THRESHING MACHINE--FLOWER SHOW--THE HOLLYHOCK AND ITS SUGGESTIONS--
THE LAW OF CO-OPERATIVE ACTIVITIES IN VEGETABLE, ANIMAL, MENTAL, AND
MORAL LIFE.
"In all places, then, and in all seasons,
Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings,
Teaching us, by most persuasive reasons,
How akin they are to human things."--LONGFELLOW.
My stay at Babraham was short. It was like a visit to the grave of
one of those English worthies whose lives and labors are so well
known and appreciated in America. All the external features of the
establishment were there unchanged. The large and substantial
mansion, with its hall and parlor walls hung with the mementoes of
the genius and success that had made it so celebrated; the barns and
housings for the great herds and flocks which had been dispersed
over the world; the very pens still standing in which they had been
folded in for the auctioneer's hammer; all these arrangements and
aspects remained as they were when Jonas Webb left his home to
return no more. But all those beautiful and happy families of
animal life, which he reared to such perfection, were scattered on
the wings of wind and steam to the uttermost and most opposite parts
of the earth.
The eldest son, Mr. Samuel Webb, who supervises part of the farm
occupied by his father, and also carries on one of his own in a
neighboring parish, was very cordial and courteous, and drove me to
his establishment near Chesterford. Here a steam threshing machine
was at work, doing prodigious execution on different kinds of grain.
The engine had climbed, a proprii motu, a long ascent; had made its
way partly through ploughed land to the rear of the barn, and was
rattlingly busy in a fog of dust, doing the labor of a hundred
flails. Ricks of wheat and beans, each as large as a comfortable
cottage, disappeared in quick succession through the fingers of the
chattering, iron-ribbed giant, and came out in thick and rapid
streams of yellow grain. Swine seemed to be the speciality to which
this son of Mr. Webb is giving some of that attention which his
father gave to sheep. There were between 200 and 300 in the barn-
yards and pens, of different ages and breeds, all looking in
excellent condition.
From Chesterford I went on to Cambridge, where I remained for the
most part of two days, on account of a heavy fall of rain, which
kept me within doors nearly all the time. I went out, however, for
an hour or so to see a Flower Show in the Town Hall. The varieties
and specimens made a beautiful, but not very extensive array. There
was one flower that not only attracted especial admiration, but
invited a pleasant train of thoughts to my own mind. It was one of
those old favorites to which the common people of all countries, who
speak our mother tongue, love to give an inalienable English name--
The Hollyhock. It is one of the flowers of the people, which the
pedantic Latinists have left untouched in homely Saxon, because the
people would have none of their long-winded and heartless
appellations. Having dwelt briefly upon the honor that Divine
Providence confers upon human genius and labor, in letting them
impress their finger-marks so distinctly upon the features and
functions of the earth, and upon the forms of animal life, it may be
a profitable recurrence to the same line of thought to notice what
that same genius and labor have wrought upon the structure and face
of this familiar flower. What was it at first? What is it now in
the rural gardens of New England? A shallow, bell-mouthed cup, in
most cases purely white, and hung to a tall, coarse stalk, like the
yellow jets of a mullein. That is its natural and distinctive
characteristic in all countries; at least where it is best known and
most common. What is it here, bearing the fingerprints of man's
mind and taste upon it? Its white and thin-sided cup is brim full
and running over with flowery exuberance of leaf and tint infinitely
variegated. Here it is as solid, as globe-faced, and nearly as
large as the dahlia. Place it side by side with the old, single-
leafed hollyhock, in a New England farmer's garden, and his wife
would not be able to trace any family relationship between them,
even through the spectacles with which she reads the Bible. But the
dahlia itself--what was that in its first estate, in the country in
which it was first found in its aboriginal structure and complexion?
As plain and unpretending as the hollyhock; as thinly dressed as the
short-kirtled daisy in a Connecticut meadow. It is wonderful, and
passing wonder, how teachable and quick of perception and prehension
is Nature in the studio of Art. She, the oldest of painters, that
hung the earth, sea, and sky of the antediluvian world with
landscapes, waterscapes, and cloudscapes manifold and beautiful,
when as yet the human hand had never lifted a pencil to imitate her
skill; she, with the colors wherewith she dyed the fleecy clouds
that spread their purple drapery over the first sunset, and in which
she dipped the first rainbow hung in heaven, and the first rose that
breathed and blushed on earth; she that has embellished every day,
since the Sun first opened its eye upon the world, with a new
gallery of paintings for every square mile of land and sea, and new
dissolving views for every hour--she, with all these artistic
antecedents, tastes, and faculties, comes modestly into the
conservatory of the floriculturist, and takes lessons of him in
shaping and tinting plants and flowers which the Great Master said
were "all very good" on the sixth-day morning of the creation! This
is marvellous, showing a prerogative in human genius almost divine,
and worthy of reverent and grateful admiration. How wide-reaching
and multigerent is this prerogative! In how many spheres of action
it works simultaneously in these latter days! See how it
manipulates the brute forces of Nature! See how it saddles the
winds, and bridles and spurs the lightning! See how it harnesses
steam to the plough, the flood to the spindle, the quick cross
currents of electricity to the newsman's phaeton! Then ascend to
higher reaches of its faculty. In the hands of a Bakewell or Webb,
it gives a new and creative shaping to multitudinous generations of
animal life. Nature yields to its suggestion and leading, and co-
works, with all her best and busiest activities, to realise the
human ideal; to put muscle there, to straighten that vertebra, to
parallel more perfectly those dorsal and ventral lines, to lengthen
or shorten those bones; to flesh the leg only to such a joint, and
wool or unwool it below; to horn or unhorn the head, to blacken or
blanch the face, to put on the whole body a new dress and make it
and its remote posterity wear this new form and costume for
evermore. All this shows how kindly and how proudly Nature takes
Art into partnership with her, in these new structures of beauty and
perfection; both teaching and taught, and wooing man to work with
her, and walk with her, and talk with her within the domain of
creative energies; to make the cattle and sheep of ten thousand
hills and valleys thank the Lord, out of the grateful speech of
their large, lustrous eyes, for better forms and features, and
faculties of comfort than their early predecessors were born to.
Equally wonderful, perhaps more beautiful, is the joint work of
Nature and Art on the sweet life and glory of flowers. However many
they were, and what they were, that breathed upon the first Spring
or Summer day of time, each was a half-sealed gift of God to man, to
be opened by his hand when his mind should open to a new sense of
beauty and perfection. Flowers, each with a genealogy reaching
unbroken through the Flood back to the overhanging blossoms of Eden,
have come down to us, as it were, only in their travelling costume,
with their best dresses packed away in stamen, or petal, or private
seedcase, to be brought out at the end of fifty centuries at the
touch of human genius. Those of which Solomon sang in his time, and
which exceeded his glory in their every-day array, even "the hyssop
by the wall," never showed, on the gala-days of his Egyptian bride,
the hidden charms which he, in his wisdom, knew not how to unlock.
Flowers innumerable are now, like illuminated capitals of Nature's
alphabet, flecking, with their sheen-dots, prairie, steppe, mountain
and meadow, the earth around, which, perhaps, will only give their
best beauties to the world in a distant age. As the light of the
latest-created and remotest stars has not yet completed its downward
journey to the eye of man, so to his sight have not these sweet-
breathing constellations of the field yet made the full revelation
of their treasured hues and forms. Not one in a hundred of them all
has done this up to the present moment. When one in ten of those
that bless us with their life and being shall put on all its
reserved beauty, then, indeed, the stars above and the stars below
will stud the firmaments in which they shine with equal glory, and
blend both in one great heaven-scape for the eye and heart of man.
One by one, in its turn, the key of human genius shall unlock the
hidden wardrobe of the commonest flowers, and deck them out in the
court dress reserved, for five thousand years, to be worn in the
brighter, afternoon centuries of the world. The Mistress of the
Robes is a high dignitary in the Household of Royalty, and has her
place near to the person of the Queen. But the Floriculturist, of
educated perception and taste, is the master of a higher state robe,
and holds the key of embroidered vestments, cosmetics, tintings,
artistries, hair-jewels, head-dresses, brooches, and bracelets,
which no empress ever wore since human crowns were made; which
Nature herself could not show on all the bygone birthdays of her
being.
This is marvellous. It is an honor to man, put upon him from above,
as one of the gratuitous dignities of his being. "An undevout
astronomer is mad," said one who had opened his mind to a broad
grasp of the wonders which this upper heaven holds in its bosom.
The floriculturist is an astronomer, with Newton's telescope
reversed; and if its revelations do not stir up holy thoughts in his
soul, he is blind as well as mad. No glass, no geometry that Newton
ever lifted at the still star-worlds above, could do more than
_reveal_. At the farthest stretch of their faculty, they could only
bring to light the life and immortality of those orbs which the
human eye had never seen before. They could not tint nor add a ray
to one of them all. They never could bring down to the reach of
man's unaided vision a single star that Noah could not see through
the deck-lights of the ark. It was a gift and a glory that well
rewarded the science and genius of Newton and Herschel, of Adams and
Le Verrier, that they could ladder these mighty perpendicular
distances and climb the rounds to such heights and sweeps of
observation, and count, measure, and name orbs and orbits before
unknown, and chart the paths of their rotations and weigh them, as
in scales, while in motion. But this ge-astronomer, whose
observatory is his conservatory, whose telescope and fluxions are
his trowel and watering-pot, not only brings to light the hidden
life of a thousand earth-stars, but changes their forms, colors
their rays, half creates and transforms, until each differs as much
from its original structure and tinting as the planet Jupiter would
differ from its familiar countenance if Adams or Le Verrier could
make it wear the florid face of Mars. This man,--and it is to be
hoped he carries some devout and grateful thoughts to his work--sets
Nature new lessons daily in artistry, and she works out the new
ideals of his taste to their joint and equal admiration. He has got
up a new pattern for the fern. She lets him guide her hand in the
delicate operation, and she crimps, fringes, shades or shapes its
leaflets to his will, even to a thousand varieties. He moistens her
fingers with the fluids she uses on her easel, and puts them to the
rootlets of the rose, and they transpose its hues, or fringe it or
tinge it with a new glory. He goes into the fen or forest, or
climbs the jutting crags of lava-mailed mountains, and brings back
to his fold one of Nature's foundlings,--a little, pale-faced
orphan, crouching, pinched and starved, in a ragged hood of dirty
muslin; and he puts it under the fostering of those maternal
fingers, guided by his own. Soon it feels the inspiration of a new
life warming and swelling its shrivelled veins. Its paralysed
petals unfold, one by one. The rim of its cup fills, leaf by leaf,
to the brim. It becomes a thing most lovely and fair, and he
introduces it, with pride, to the court beauties of his crystal
palace.
The agriculturist is taken into this co-partnership of Nature in a
higher domain of her activities, measured by the great utilities of
human life. We have glanced at the joint-work in her animal
kingdom. In the vegetable, it is equally wonderful. Nature
contributes the raw material of these great and vital industries,
then incites and works out human suggestions. Thus she trains and
obeys the mind and hand of man, in this grand sphere of development.
Their co-working and its result are just as perceptible in a common
Irish potato as in the most gorgeous dahlia ever exhibited. Not one
farmer in a thousand has ever read the history of that root of
roots, in value to mankind; has ever conceived what a tasteless,
contracted, water-soaked thing it was in its wild and original
condition. Let them read a few chapters of the early history of New
England, and they will see what it was two hundred and fifty years
ago, when the strong-hearted men and women, whom Hooker led to the
banks of the Connecticut, sought for it in the white woods of
winter, scraping away the snow with their frosted fingers. The
largest they found just equalled the Malaga grape in size and
resembled it in complexion. They called it the _ground-nut_, for it
seemed akin to the nuts dropped by the oaks of different names. No
flower that breathes on earth has been made to produce so many
varieties of form, complexion, and name as this homely root. It
would be an interesting and instructive enterprise, to array all the
varieties of this queen of esculent vegetables which Europe and
America could exhibit, face to face with all the varieties which the
dahlia, geranium, pansy, or even the fern has produced, and then see
which has been numerically the most prolific in diversification of
forms and features. It should gratify a better motive than
curiosity to trace back the history of other roots to their
aboriginal condition. Types of the original stock may now be found,
in waste places, in the wild turnip, wild carrot, parsnip, etc.
"Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a
little," it may be truly and gratefully said, these roots,
internetted with the very life-fibres of human sustenance, have been
brought to their present perfection and value. The great
governments and peoples of the world should give admiring and
grateful thought to this fact. Here nature co-works with the most
common and inartistic of human industries, as they are generally
held, with faculties as subtle and beautiful as those which she
brings to bear upon the choicest flowers. The same is true of
grains and grasses for man and beast. They come down to us from a
kind of heathen parentage, receiving new forms and qualities from
age to age. The wheats, which make the bread of all the continents,
now exhibit varieties which no one has undertaken to enumerate.
Fruits follow the same rule, and show the same joint-working of
Nature and Art as in the realm of flowers.
The wheel within wheel, the circle within circle expand and ascend
until the last circumferential line sweeps around all the world of
created being, even taking in, upon the common radius, the highest
and oldest of the angels. From the primrose peering from the hedge
to the premier seraph wearing the coronet of his sublime
companionship; from the lowest forms of vegetable existence to the
loftiest reaches of moral nature this side of the Infinite, this
everlasting law of co-working rules the ratio of progress and
development. In all the concentric spheres strung on the radius
measured by these extremes, there is the same co-acting of internal
and external forces. And mind, of man or angel, guides and governs
both. Not a flower that ever breathed on earth, not one that ever
blushed in Eden, could open all its hidden treasures of beauty
without the co-working of man's mind and taste. No animal that ever
bowed its neck to his yoke, or gave him labor, milk or wool, could
come to the full development of its latent vitalities and symmetries
without the help of his thought and skill. The same law obtains in
his own physical nature. Mind has made it what it is to-day, as
compared with the wild features and habits of its aboriginal
condition. Mind has worked for five thousand years upon its fellow-
traveller through time, to fit it more and more fully for the
companionship. It was delivered over to her charge naked, with its
attributes and faculties as latent and dormant as those of the wild
rose or dahlia. Through all the ages long, she has worked upon its
development; educating its tastes; taming its appetites; refining
its sensibilities; multiplying and softening its enjoyments; giving
to every sense a new capacity and relish of delight; cultivating the
ear for music, and ravishing it with the concord of sweet sounds;
cultivating the eye to drink in the glorious beauty of the external
world, then adding to natural sceneries ten thousand pictures of
mountain, valley, river, man, angel, and scenes in human and
heaven's history, painted by the thought-instructed hand;
cultivating the palate to the most exquisite sensibilities, and
exploring all the zones for luxuries to gratify them; cultivating
the fine finger-nerves to such perception that they can feel the
pulse of sleeping notes of music; cultivating the still finer
organism that catches the subtle odors on the wing, and sends their
separate or mingled breathings through every vein and muscle from
head to foot.
The same law holds good in the development of mind. It has now
reached such an altitude, and it shines with such lustre, that our
imagination can hardly find the way down to the morning horizon of
its life, and measure its scope and power in the dim twilight of its
first hours in time. The simple fact of its first condition would
now seem to most men as exaggerated fancies, if given in the
simplest forms of truthful statement. With all the mighty faculties
to which it has come; with its capacity to count, name, measure and
weigh stars that Adam, nor Moses, nor Solomon ever saw; with all the
forces of nature it has subdued to the service of man, it cannot
tell what simplest facts of the creation had to be ascertained by
its first, feeble and confused reasonings. No one of to-day can say
how low down in the scale of intelligence the human mind began to
exercise its untried faculties; what apposition and deduction of
thoughts it required to individualise the commonest objects that met
the eye; even to determine that the body it animated was not an
immovable part of the earth itself; to obtain fixed notions of
distance, of color, light, and heat; to learn the properties and
uses of plants, herbs, and fruits; even to see the sun sink out of
sight with the sure faith that it would rise again. It was gifted
with no instinct, to decide these questions instantly and
mechanically. They had all to pass through the varied processes of
reason. The first bird that sang in Eden, built its first nest as
perfectly as its last. But, thought by thought, the first human
mind worked out conclusions which the dullest beast or bird reached
instantly without reason. What wonderful co-working of internal and
external influences was provided to keep thought in sleepless
action; to open, one by one, the myriad petals of the mind! Nature,
with all its shifting sceneries, filled every new scope of vision
with objects that hourly set thought at play in a new line of
reflection. Then, out of man's physical being came a thousand still
small voices daily, whispering, Think! think! The first-born
necessities, few and simple, cried, "_Think_! for we want bread, we
want drink, we want shelter and raiment against the cold." The
finer senses cried continually, "Give! give thought to this, to
that." The Eye, the Ear, the Palate and every other organ that
could receive and diffuse delight, worked the mental faculties by
day and night, up to the last sunset of the antediluvian world; and
all the intellectual result of this working Noah took with him into
the ark, and gave to his sons to hand over to succeeding ages.
Flowers that Eve stuck in the hair of the infant Abel are just now
opening the last casket of their beauty to the favored children of
our time. This, in itself, is a marvellous instance of the law we
are noticing. But what is this to the processes of thought and
observation through which the mind of man has reached its present
expansion; through which it has developed all these sciences, arts,
industries and tastes, the literature and the intellectual life of
these bright days of humanity! The figure is weak, and every figure
would be weak when applied to the ratio or the result of this
progression; but, at what future age of time, or of the existence
beyond time, will the mind, that has thus wrought on earth, open its
last petal, put forth no new breathing, unfold no new beauty under
the eye of the Infinite, who breathed it, as an immortal atom of His
own essence, into the being of man?
Follow the radius up into the next concentric circle, and we see
this law working to finer and sublimer issues in man's moral nature.
We have glanced at what the mind has done for and through his
physical faculties and being; how that being has re-acted upon the
mind, and kept all its capacities at work in procuring new delight
to the eye, ear, palate, and all the senses that yearned for
enjoyment. We have noticed how the inside and outside world acted
upon his reasoning powers in the dawn of creation; how slowly they
mastered the simplest facts and phenomena of life in and around
them, how slowly they expanded, through the intervening centuries,
to their present development. The mind is the central personage in
the trinity of man's being; linking the mortal and immortal to its
life and action; vitalising the body with intelligence, until every
vein, muscle, and nerve, and function thrills and moves to the
impulse of thought; vitalising the soul with the vigorous activities
of reason, giving hands as well as wings to its hopes, faiths,
loves, and aspirations; giving a faculty of speech, action, and
influence to each, and play to all the tempers and tendencies of its
moral nature. Thus all the influences that the mind could inhale
from the material world through man's physical being, and all it
could draw out of the depths of Divine revelation, were the dew and
the light which it was its mission to bring to the fostering,
growth, and glory of the human soul. These were man's means
wherewith to shape it for its great destiny; these he was to bring
to its training and expansion; with these he was to co-work with the
Infinite Father of Spirits to fit it for His presence and
fellowship, just as he co-works with Nature in developing the latent
life and faculties of the rose. What distillations of spiritual
influence have dropped down out of heaven, through the ages, to help
onward this joint work! What histories of human experience have
come in the other direction to the same end!--fraught with the
emotions of the human heart, from the first sin and sorrow of Adam
to our own griefs, hopes, and joys; and all so many lessons for the
discipline of this high-born nature with us!
And yet how slow and almost imperceptible has been the development
of this nature! How gently and gradually the expanding influences,
human and divine, have been let in upon its latent faculties! See
with what delicate fostering the petals of love, faith, and hope
were taught to open, little by little, their hidden life and
beauty,--taking Moses' history of the process. First, one human
being on the earth, surrounded with beasts and birds that could give
him no intelligent companionship and no fellow-feeling. Then the
beautiful being created to meet these awakening yearnings of his
nature; then the first outflow and interchange of human love. The
narrative brings us to the next stage of the sentiment. Sin and
sorrow afflict, but unite, both hearts in the saddest experience of
humanity. They are driven out of the Eden of their first condition,
but their very sufferings and fears re-Eden their mutual attachments
in the very thorns of their troubles and sorrows. Then another
being, of their own flesh, heir to their changed lot, and to these
attachments, is added to their companionship. The first child's
face that heaven or earth ever saw, opened its baby eyes on them and
smiled in the light of their parental love. The history goes on.
In process of time, there is a family of families, called a
community, embracing hundreds of individuals connected by ties of
blood so attenuated that they possess no binding influence. Common
interests, affinities, and sentiments supply the place of family
relationship, and make laws of amity and equity for them as a
population. Next we have a community of communities, or a
commonwealth of these individual populations, generally called a
nation. Here is a lesson for the moral nature. Here are thousands
and tens of thousands of men who never saw each others' faces. Will
this expanded orb of humanity revolve around the same centre as the
first family circle, or the first independent community? How can
you give it cohesion and harmony? Extend the radii of family
relationship and influence to its circumference in every direction.
Throne the sovereign in a parent's chair, to execute a father's
laws. He shall treat them as children, and they each other as
brethren. Here is a grand programme for human society. Here is a
vigorous discipline for the wayward will and temper of the human
heart. How is a man to feel and act in these new conditions? How
is he to regulate his hates and loves, his passions and appetites,
to comply properly with these extended and complicated
relationships?
About half way from Adam's day to ours, there came an utterance from
Mount Sinai that anticipated and answered these questions once for
all, and for one and all. In that august revelation of the Divine
Mind, every command of the Decalogue swung open upon the pivot of a
_not_, except one; and that one referred to man's duty to man, and
the promise attached to its fulfilment was only an earthly
enjoyment. All the rest were restrictive; to curb this appetite, to
bar that passion, to hedge this impulse, to check that disposition;
in a word, to hold back the hand from open and positive
transgression. Even the first, relating to His own Godhead and
requirements, was but the first of the series of negatives, a pure
and simple prohibition of idolatry. No reward of keeping this first
great law, reaching beyond the boundary of a temporal condition, was
promised at its giving out. With the headstrong passions, lusts,
appetites, and tempers of flesh and blood bridled and bitted by
these restrictions, and with no motives to obedience beyond the
awards of a short life on earth, the human soul groped its way
through twenty centuries after the Revelation of Sinai, feeling for
the immortality which was not yet revealed to it, even "as through a
glass darkly." Here and there, but thinly scattered through the
ages, divinely illumined men caught, through the parting seams of
the veil, a transient glimpse and ray of the life to come. Here and
there, obscurely and hesitatingly, they refer to this vision of
their faith. Here and there we seem to see a hope climbing up out
of a good man's heart into the pathless mystery of a future
existence, and bringing back the fragment of a leaf which it
believes must have grown on one of the trees of life immortal.
Moses, Job, David, and Isaiah give us utterances that savor of this
belief; but they leave us in the dark in reference to its influence
upon their lives. We cannot glean from these incidental
expressions, whether it brought them any steady comfort, or sensibly
affected their happiness.
Thus, for four thousand years, the soul of man dashed its wings
against the prison-bars of time, peering into the night through the
cold, relentless gratings for some fugitive ray of the existence of
which it had such strong and sleepless presentiment. It is a
mystery. It may seem irreverent to approach it even with a
conjecture. Human reason should be humble and silent before it, and
close its questioning lips. It may not, however, transcend its
prerogative to say meekly, _perhaps_. Perhaps, then, for two-thirds
of the duration that the sun has measured off to humanity, that life
and immortality which the soul groped after were veiled from its
vision, until all its mental and spiritual faculties had been
trained and strengthened to the ability to grasp and appropriate the
great fact when it should be revealed. Perhaps it required all the
space of forty centuries to put forth feelers and fibres capable of
clinging to the revelation with the steady hold of faith. Perhaps
it was to prove, by long, decisive probation, what the unaided human
mind could do in constructing its idealisms of immortality. Perhaps
it was permitted to erect a scaffolding of conceptions on which to
receive the great revelation at the highest possible level of
thought and instinctive sentiment to which man could attain without
supernatural light and help. If this last _perhaps_ is preferable
to the others, where was this scaffolding the highest? Over
Confucius, or Socrates, or the Scandinavian seer, or Druid or Aztec
priest? Was it highest at Athens, because there the great apostle
to the Gentiles planted his feet upon it, and said, in the ears of
the Grecian sophists, "Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto
you?" At that brilliant centre of pagan civilization it might have
reached its loftiest altitude, measured by a purely intellectual
standard; but morally, this scaffolding was on the same low level of
human life and character all the world around. The immortalities
erected by Egyptian or Grecian philosophy were no purer, in moral
conception and attributes, than the mythological fantasies of the
North American Indians. In them all, human nature was to have the
old play of its passions and appetites; in some of them, a wider
sweep and sway. There was not one in the whole set of Grecian
deities half so moral and pure, in sentiment and conduct, as
Socrates; nor were Jupiter and his subordinate celestials better
than the average kings and courts of Greece. Out of the hay, wood,
and stubble of sheer fancy the human mind was left to raise these
fantastic structures. They exercised and entertained the
imagination, but brought no light nor strength to the soul; no
superior nor additional motives to shape the conduct of life. But
they did this, undoubtedly, with all their delusions; they developed
the _thought_ of immortality among the most benighted races of men.
Their most perplexing unrealities kept the mind restless and almost
eager for some supplementary manifestation; so that, when the Star
of Bethlehem shone out in the sky of Palestine, there were men
looking heavenward with expectant eyes at midnight. From that hour
to this, and among pagan tribes of the lowest moral perception, the
heralds of the Great Revelation have found the _thought_ of another
existence active though confused. They have found everywhere a
platform already erected, like that on which Paul stood in the midst
of Mars Hill, and on which they could stand and say to heathen
communities, "Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto you!
That future life and immortality which your darkened eyes and hungry
souls have been groping and hungering for, bring we to you, bright
as the sun, in this great gospel of Divine Love." Had the Star of
Bethlehem appeared a century earlier, it might not have met an
upturned eye. If the Saviour of Mankind had come into the world in
Solomon's day, not even a manger might have been found to cradle His
first moments of human life; no Simeon waiting in the temple to
greet the great salvation He brought to our race in His baby hands.
Here, then, commences, as it were, the central era of the soul's
training in time. Here heaven opened upon it the full sunlight and
sunwarmth of its glorious life and immortality. Here fell upon its
opening faculties the dews and rays and spiritual influences which
were to shape its being and destiny. Here commenced such co-working
to this end as can find no measure nor simile in any other sphere of
co-operative activities in the world below or above. Here the
trinity of man and the Trinity of the Godhead came into a co-action
and fellowship overpassing the highest outside wonder of the
universe. And all this co-working, fellowship, and partnership has
been repeated in the experience of every individual soul that has
been fitted for this great immortality. Here, too, this co-working
is a law, not an incident; most marvellously, mightily, and minutely
a law, as legislatively and executively as that which we have seen
acting upon the development of the flower. Had not the great
apostle, who was caught up into the third heavens and heard things
unutterable, spoken of this law in such bold words, it would seem
rash and irreverent in us to approach so near to its sublime
revelation. Not ours but his they are; and it is bold enough in us
to repeat them. He said it: that He, to whose name every knee
should bow, and every tongue confess; to whom belonged and who
should possess and rule all the kingdoms of the earth, "was made
under the law," not of Moses, not of human nature only, but under
this very law of CO-WORKING. Through this the world was to be
regenerated and filled with His life and light. Through this a new
creation was to be enfolded in the bosom of His glory, of grander
dimensions and of diviner attributes than that over which the
morning stars sang at the birth of time. Said this law to the
individual soul, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,
for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do of His own good
pleasure." To will and to do. It is His own good will and pleasure
that the soul shall be fitted and lifted up to its high destiny
through this co-working. It was His power to raise it to that
condition without man's participation or conscious acquiescence; but
it was His will and pleasure to enact this law of salvation.
Looking across the circumference of the individual soul, what says
this law? "Go ye out into all the world and preach the gospel to
every creature, and, lo, I am with you unto the end,"--not as an
invisible companion, not merely with the still, small voice of the
Comforter to cheer you in trial, weakness and privation; but with
you as a _co-worker_, with the irresistible energies of the Spirit
of Power. He might have done the whole work alone. He might have
sent forth twelve, and twelve times twelve legions of angels, and
given each a voice as loud as his who is to wake the dead, and bid
them preach His gospel in the ears of every human being. He might
have given a tongue to every breathing of the breeze, an articulate
speech to every ray of light, and sent them out with their ceaseless
voices on the great errand of His love. It was his power to do
this. He did not do it, because it was His will and pleasure to put
Himself under this law we have followed so far; to make men His co-
workers in this new creation, and co-heirs with Him in all its joy
and glory. So completely has He made this law His rule of action,
that, for eighteen hundred years, we have not a single instance in
which the life and immortality which He brought to light have been
revealed to a human soul without the direct and active participation
of a human instrumentality. So completely have His meekest servants
on earth put themselves under this law, that not one of them dares
to expect, hope, or pray that He will reveal Himself to a single
benighted heathen mind without this human co-working.
Thus, begin where you will, in the flower of the field or the hyssop
by the wall, and ascend from sphere to sphere, until there is no
more space in things and beings created to draw another
circumferential line, and you will see the action and the result of
this great law of _Co-operative Activities_. When I first looked
within the lids of that hollyhock, and was incited to read the
rudimental lessons of the new leaves that man's art had added to its
scant, original volume, I had no thought of finding so much matter
printed on its pages. I have transcribed it here in the order of
its paragraphs, hoping that some who read them may see in this life
of flowers an interest they may have partially overlooked.