"The worlds were framed by the word of God."--_Heb._ xi., 3.
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"Mysterious night! when our first parent knew thee
From report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus, with all the host of heaven, came,
And lo! creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! Oh who could find,
Whilst fruit and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless worlds thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If light conceal so much, wherefore not life?"
BLANCO WHITE.
[Page 231]
XI.
_THE WORLDS AND THE WORD._
Men have found the various worlds to be far richer than they originally
thought. They have opened door after door in their vast treasuries,
have ascended throne after throne of power, and ruled realms of
increasing extent. We have no doubt that unfoldings in the future
will amaze even those whose expectations have been quickened by
the revealings of the past. What if it be found that the Word is
equally inexhaustible?
After ages of thought and discovery we have come out of the darkness
and misconceptions of men. We believe in no serpent, turtle, or
elephant supporting the world; no Atlas holding up the heavens;
no crystal domes, "with cycles and epicycles scribbled o'er." What
if it be found that one book, written by ignorant men, never fell
into these mistakes of the wisest! Nay, more, what if some of the
greatest triumphs of modern science are to be found plainly stated
in a book older than the writings of Homer? If suns, planets, and
satellites, with all their possibilities of life, changes of flora
and fauna, could be all provided for, as some scientists tell us,
in the fiery star-dust of a cloud, why may not the same Author
provide a perpetually widening river of life in his Word? As we
believe He is perpetually present in his worlds, we know He has
[Page 232] promised to be perpetually present in his Word, making it
alive with spirit and life.
The wise men of the past could not avoid alluding to ideas the falsity
of which subsequent discovery has revealed; but the writers of the
Bible did avoid such erroneous allusion. Of course they referred
to some things, as sunrise and sunset, according to appearance;
but our most scientific books do the same to-day. That the Bible
could avoid teaching the opposite of scientific truth proclaims
that a higher than human wisdom was in its teaching.
That negative argument is strong, but the affirmative argument is
much stronger. The Bible declares scientific truth far in advance
of its discovery, far in advance of man's ability to understand
its plain declarations. Take a few conspicuous illustrations:
The Bible asserted from the first that the present order of things
had a beginning. After ages of investigation, after researches in
the realms of physics, arguments in metaphysics, and conclusions
by the necessities of resistless logic, science has reached the
same result.
The Bible asserted from the first that creation of matter preceded
arrangement. It was chaos--void--without form--darkness; arrangement
was a subsequent work. The world was not created in the form it
was to have; it was to be moulded, shaped, stratified, coaled,
mountained, valleyed, subsequently. All of which science utters
ages afterward.
The Bible did not hesitate to affirm that light existed before
the sun, though men did not believe it, and used it as a weapon
against inspiration. Now we praise men for having demonstrated
the oldest record.
[Page 233]
It is a recently discovered truth of science that the trata of
the earth were formed by the action of water, and the mountains
were once under the ocean. It is an idea long familiar to Bible
readers: "Thou coverest the earth with the deep as with a garment.
The waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at
the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. The mountains ascend;
the valleys descend into the place thou hast founded for them."
Here is a whole volume of geology in a paragraph. The thunder of
continental convulsions is God's voice; the mountains rise by God's
power; the waters haste away unto the place God prepared for them.
Our slowness of geological discovery is perfectly accounted for by
Peter. "For of this they are _willingly ignorant_, that by the word
of God there were heavens of old, and land framed out of water, and
by means of water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed
by water, perished." We recognize these geological subsidences,
but we read them from the testimony of the rocks more willingly
than from the testimony of the Word.
Science exults in having discovered what it is pleased to call an
order of development on earth--tender grass, herb, tree; moving
creatures that have life in the waters; bird, reptile, beast, cattle,
man. The Bible gives the same order ages before, and calls it God's
successive creations.
During ages on ages man's wisdom held the earth to be flat. Meanwhile,
God was saying, century after century, of himself, "He sitteth upon
the sphere of the earth" (Gesenius).
Men racked their feeble wits for expedients to uphold [Page 234] the
earth, and the best they could devise were serpents, elephants, and
turtles; beyond that no one had ever gone to see what supported
them. Meanwhile, God was perpetually telling men that he had hung
the earth upon nothing.
Men were ever trying to number the stars. Hipparchus counted one
thousand and twenty-two; Ptolemy one thousand and twenty-six; and
it is easy to number those visible to the naked eye. But the Bible
said, when there were no telescopes to make it known, that they
were as the sands of the sea, "innumerable." Science has appliances
of enumeration unknown to other ages, but the space-penetrating
telescopes and tastimeters reveal more worlds--eighteen millions
in a single system, and systems beyond count--till men acknowledge
that the stars are innumerable to man. It is God's prerogative "to
number all the stars; he also calleth them all by their names."
Torricelli's discovery that the air had weight was received with
incredulity. For ages the air had propelled ships, thrust itself
against the bodies of men, and overturned their works. But no man
ever dreamed that weight was necessary to give momentum. During
all the centuries it had stood in the Bible, waiting for man's
comprehension: "He gave to the air its weight" (Job xxviii. 25).
The pet science of to-day is meteorology. The fluctuations and
variations of the weather have hitherto baffled all attempts at
unravelling them. It has seemed that there was no law in their
fickle changes. But at length perseverance and skill have triumphed,
and a single man in one place predicts the weather and winds [Page
235] for a continent. But the Bible has always insisted that the
whole department was under law; nay, it laid down that law so
clearly, that if men had been willing to learn from it they might
have reached this wisdom ages ago. The whole moral law is not more
clearly crystallized in "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself," than all the fundamentals
of the science of meteorology are crystallized in these words: "The
wind goeth toward the south (equator), and turneth about (up) unto
the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
again according to his circuits (established routes). All the rivers
run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from
whence the rivers come, thither they return again" (Eccles. i. 6,
7).
Those scientific queries which God propounded to Job were unanswerable
then; most of them are so now. "Whereon are the sockets of the
earth made to sink?" Job never knew the earth turned in sockets;
much less could he tell where they were fixed. God answered this
question elsewhere. "He stretcheth the north (one socket) over
the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." Speaking
of the day-spring, God says the earth is _turned_ to it, as clay
to the seal. The earth's axial revolution is clearly recognized.
Copernicus declared it early; God earlier.
No man yet understands the balancing of the clouds, nor the suspension
of the frozen masses of hail, any more than Job did.
Had God asked if he had perceived the _length_ of the earth, many
a man to-day could have answered yes. But the eternal ice keeps
us from perceiving the _breadth_ [Page 236] of the earth, and shows
the discriminating wisdom of the question.
The statement that the sun's going is from the end of the heaven,
and his circuit to the ends of it, has given edge to many a sneer
at its supposed assertion that the sun went round the earth. It
teaches a higher truth--that the sun itself obeys the law it enforces
on the planets, and flies in an orbit of its own, from one end of
heaven in Argo to the other in Hercules.
So eminent an astronomer and so true a Christian as General Mitchell,
who understood the voices in which the heavens declare the glory of
God, who read with delight the Word of God em bodied in worlds, and
who fed upon the written Word of God as his daily bread, declared,
"We find an aptness and propriety in all these astronomical
illustrations, which are not weakened, but amazingly strengthened,
when viewed in the clear light of our present knowledge." Herschel
says, "All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose
of confirming more strongly the truths that come from on high, and
are contained in the sacred writings." The common authorship of
the worlds and the Word becomes apparent; their common unexplorable
wealth is a necessary conclusion.
Since the opening revelations of the past show an unsearchable
wisdom in the Word, has that Word any prophecy concerning mysteries
not yet understood, and events yet in the future? There are certain
problems as yet insolvable. We have grasped many clews, and followed
them far into labyrinths of darkness, but not yet through into
light.
We ask in vain, "What is matter?" No man can [Page 237] answer. We
trace it up through the worlds, till its increasing fineness, its
growing power, and possible identity of substance, seem as if the
next step would reveal its spirit origin. What we but hesitatingly
stammer, the Word boldly asserts.
We ask, "What is force?" No man can answer. We recognize its various
grades, each subordinate to the higher--cohesion dissolvable by
heat; the affinity of oxygen and hydrogen in water overcome by
the piercing intensity of electric fire; rivers seeking the sea
by gravitation carried back by the sun; rock turned to soil, soil
to flowers; and all the forces in nature measurably subservient to
mind. Hence we partly understand what the Word has always taught
us, that all lower forces must be subject to that which is highest.
How easily can seas be divided, iron made to swim, water to burn,
and a dead body to live again, if the highest force exert itself
over forces made to be mastered. When we have followed force to
its highest place, we always find ourselves considering the forces
of mind and spirit, and say, in the words of the Scriptures, "God
is spirit."
We ask in vain what is the end of the present condition of things.
We have read the history of our globe with great difficulty--its
prophecy is still more difficult. We have asked whether the stars
form a system, and if so, whether that system is permanent. We
are not able to answer yet. We have said that the sun would in
time become as icy cold and dead as the moon, and then the earth
would wander darkling in the voids of space. But the end of the
earth, as prophesied in the Word, is different: "The heavens will
pass away with [Page 238] a rushing noise, and the elements will be
dissolved with burning heat, and the earth and the works therein
will be burned up." The latest conclusions of science point the same
way. The great zones of uncondensed matter about the sun seem to
constitute a resisting medium as far as they reach. Encke's comet,
whose orbit comes near the sun, is delayed. This gives gravitation
an overwhelming power, and hence the orbit is lessened and a
revolution accomplished more quickly. Faye's comet, which wheels
beyond the track of Mars, is not retarded. If the earth moves
through a resisting substance, its ultimate fall into the sun is
certain. Whether in that far future the sun shall have cooled off,
or will be still as hot as to-day, Peter's description would
admirably portray the result of the impact. Peters description,
however, seems rather to indicate an interference of Divine power at
an appropriate time before a running down of the system at present
in existence, and a re-endowment of matter with new capabilities.
After thousands of years, science discovered the true way to knowledge.
It is the Baconian way of experiment, of trial, of examining the
actual, instead of imagining the ideal. It is the acceptance of the
Scriptural plan. "If a man wills to do God's will, he shall know."
Oh taste and see! In science men try hypotheses, think the best they
can, plan broadly as possible, and then see if facts sustain the
theory. They have adopted the Scriptural idea of accepting a plan,
and then working in faith, in order to acquire knowledge. Fortunately,
in the work of salvation the plan is always perfect. But, in order
to make the trial under the most favorable circumstances, there
must be faith. The faith of [Page 239] science is amazing; its
assertions of the supersensual are astounding. It affirms a thousand
things that cannot be physically demonstrated: that the flight of a
rifle-ball is parabolic; that the earth has poles; that gages are
made of particles; that there are atoms; that an electric light
gives ten times as many rays as are visible; that there are sounds
to which we are deaf, sights to which we are blind; that a thousand
objects and activities are about us, for the perception of which we
need a hundred senses instead of five. These faiths have nearly all
led to sight; they have been rewarded, and the world's wealth of
knowledge is the result. The Word has ever asserted the
supersensuous, solicited man's faith, and ever uplifted every true
faith into sight. Lowell is partly right when he sings:
"Science was Faith once; Faith were science now,
Would she but lay her bow and arrows by,
And aim her with the weapons of the time."
Faith laid her bow and arrows by before men in pursuit of worldly
knowledge discovered theirs.
What becomes of the force of the sun that is being spent to-day?
It is one of the firmest rocks of science that there can be no
absolute destruction of force. It is all conserved somehow. But
how? The sun contracts, light results, and leaps swiftly into all
encircling space. It can never be returned. Heat from stars invisible
by the largest telescope enters the tastimeter, and declares that
that force has journeyed from its source through incalculable years.
There is no encircling dome to reflect all this force back upon
its sources. Is it lost? Science, in defence of its own dogma,
should [Page 240] assign light a work as it flies in the space which
we have learned cannot be empty. There ought to be a realm where
light's inconceivable energy is utilized in building a grander
universe, where there is no night. Christ said, as he went out of
the seen into the unseen, "I go to prepare a place for you;" and
when John saw it in vision the sun had disappeared, the moon was
gone, but the light still continued.
Science finds matter to be capable of unknown refinement; water
becomes steam full of amazing capabilities: we add more heat, superheat
the steam, and it takes on new aptitudes and uncontrollable energy.
Zinc burned in acid becomes electricity, which enters iron as a kind
of soul, to fill all that body with life. All matter is capable
of transformation, if not transfiguration, till it shines by the
light of an indwelling spirit. Scripture readers know that bodies
and even garments can be transfigured, be made astrapton (Luke xxiv.
4), shining with an inner light. They also look for new heavens and
a new earth endowed with higher powers, fit for perfect beings.
When God made matter, so far as our thought permits us to know,
he simply made force stationary and unconscious. Thereafter he
moves through it with his own will. He can at any time change these
forces, making air solid, water and rock gaseous, a world a cloud,
or a fire-mist a stone. He may at some time restore all force to
consciousness again, and make every part of the universe thrill
with responsive joy. "Then shall the mountains and the hills break
forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field clap
their hands." One of these changes is to come to the earth. [Page
241] Amidst great noise the heaven shall flee, the earth be burned
up, and all their forces be changed to new forms. Perhaps it will
not then be visible to mortal eyes. Perhaps force will then be made
conscious, and the flowers thereafter return our love as much as
lower creatures do now. A river and tree of life may be consciously
alive, as well as give life. Poets that are nearest to God are
constantly hearing the sweet voices of responsive feeling in nature.
"For his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness and a smile,
And eloquence of beauty; and she glides
Into his darker musings with a mild
And gentle sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness ere he is aware."
Prophets who utter God's voice of truth say, "The wilderness and
the solitary place shall be glad for holy men, and the desert shall
rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and
rejoice, even with joy and singing."
Distinguish clearly between certainty and surmise. The certainty is
that the world will pass through catastrophic changes to a perfect
world. The grave of uniformitarianism is already covered with grass.
He that creates promises to complete. The invisible, imponderable,
inaudible ether is beyond our apprehension; it transmits impressions
186,000 miles a second; it is millions of times more capable and
energetic than air. What may be the bounds of its possibility none
can imagine, for law is not abrogated nor designs disregarded as
we ascend into higher realms. Law works out more beautiful designs
with more absolute certainty. Why [Page 242] should there not be a
finer universe than this, and disconnected from this world
altogether--a fit home for immortal souls? It is a necessity.
God filleth all in all, is everywhere omnipotent and wise. Why
should there be great vacuities, barren of power and its creative
outgoings? God has fixed the stars as proofs of his agency at some
points in space. But is it in points only? Science is proud of its
discovery that what men once thought to be empty space is more
intensely active than the coarser forms of matter can be. But in
the long times which are past Job glanced at earth, seas, clouds,
pillars of heaven, stars, day, night, all visible things, and then
added: "Lo! these are only the outlying borders of his works. What
a whisper of a word we hear of _Him!_ The thunder of his power
who can comprehend?"
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.
[Page 247]
XII.