♦The Causal Law♦
Christ has many things to say which reveal His constant consciousness of
the Harvest Law, as it may be called. To Him also it was the deepest,
the fundamental thought; and He illustrates His teaching continually by
reference to it. The Causes already in the field--the ground as well
as the seed--determine the harvest of the sower. As surely as tares are
sown amongst the good seed, so surely shall there be a mingled harvest
of tares and good grain. The kind of harvest will be according to the
kind of seed. The tree is known by its fruit. “Men do not gather grapes
of thorns, nor figs of thistles.”
There is no evasion of the Causal Law; and in the fair universe there
is no desire to evade it. For the Causal Law is the Law of Life. “The
earth beareth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, then the
full corn in the ear”--the farmer knoweth not how--but “when the fruit
is ripe, straightway he putteth forth the sickle, because the harvest is
come.”
* * * * *
♦The First Cause♦
♦Buddha♦
How the universe came into existence, who enacted the Law, the Buddha
did not inquire, and forbade men to inquire. It was enough for them that
they found themselves a part of the endless chain of causation; duty
lay for them in the practical task of finding their place in the chain,
and of adjusting themselves within it.
♦Christ♦
The Christ, on the other hand, assumed a Builder of the universe, and
a Purpose in the Law; and He summed the graciousness and the harmony of
nature in the only human phrase which conveyed His own conception of its
wonderfulness. “My Father worketh.” “Not a sparrow falleth to the ground
without your Father.” “Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not,
neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all
his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe
the grass of the field...?”
THE UNIVERSAL
LAW IN HUMAN LIFE
“_It has been remarked by one of the most distinguished physical
philosophers of our day that no atmospheric vibration ever becomes
extinct; that the pulses of speech, when they have done their work,
and become to our ears inaudible, pass in waves away, but wander
still, hither and thither through the regions of the air, eternally.
He conceives that as the atmosphere comprises still within itself the
distinct traces of any sound impressed on any portion of it, as there
the record indestructively exists, we have only to suffer a change of
position, or receive the endowment of an acuter sense, to hear again
every idle word that we have spoken, and every sigh that we have caused.
The truth is, that already, and within the limits of our mental nature
there is a power which will effect all this. It is fully within the
scope of our natural faculties of association and memory. It may be
doubted whether any idea once in the mind is ever lost and past recall:
it may drop indeed into the gulf of forgotten things, and the waves of
successive thoughts roll over it; but there are in our nature possible
and even inevitable convulsions, which may displace the waters, heave up
the deep, and disentomb whatever may be fair or hideous there.... It is
remarkable how slight a suggestion is occasionally sufficient to bring
back vast trains of emotion. There are cases in which some particular
function of the memory acquires most exquisite sensibility, and
usually, as if God would warn us what must happen when our moral nature
is divorced from the physical, it is the memory of conscience that
maintains this preternatural watch.... And if thus the past be truly
indestructible, if thus its fragments may be regathered, if its details
of evil thought and act may be thus brought together and fused into one
big agony,--why, it may be left to fools to make a mock at sin._”
“_Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh, shall of the
flesh reap corruption._”
“_The lust when it hath conceived, beareth sin; and the sin, when it
is full-grown, bringeth forth death. Be not deceived, my beloved
brethren._”