[Ill.u.s.tration: The Big Trees.]
There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover. The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color. The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite. But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thousands unfinished.
The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs, outline of the ma.s.s, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity. It discriminates.
But how does it build itself? Myriads of rootlets search the surrounding country for elements it needs for making bark, wood, leaf, flower, and seed. They often find what they want in other organizations or other chemical compounds. But with a power of a.n.a.lytical chemistry they separate what they want and appropriate it to their majestic growths. But how is material conveyed from rootlet to veinlet of leaf hundreds of feet away? The great tree is more full of channels of communication than Venice or Stockholm is of ca.n.a.ls, and it is along these watery ways of commerce that the material is conveyed.
These channels are a succession of cells that act like locks, set for the perpendicular elevation of the freight. The tiny boats run day and night in the season, and though it is dark within, and though there are a thousand piers, no freight that starts underground for a leaf is ever landed on the way for bark or woody fiber. Freight never goes astray, nor are express packages miscarried. What starts for bark, leaf, fiber, seed, is deposited as bark, leaf, fiber, seed, and nothing else.
There are hundreds of miles of ca.n.a.ls, but every boat knows where to land its unmarked freight. Curious as is this work underground, that in the upper air is more so. The tree builds most of its solid substance from the mobile and tenuous air. Trees are largely condensed air. By the magic chemistry of the sunshine and vegetable life the tree breathes through its myriad leaves and extracts carbon to be built into wood. Had we the same power to extract fuel from the air we need not dig for coal.
In doing this work the power of life in the tree has to overcome many other kinds of force. There is the power of cohesion. How it holds the particles of stone or iron together! You can hardly break its force with a great sledge. But the power of life in the tree, or even gra.s.s, must master the power of cohesion and take out of the disintegrating rock what it wants. So it must overcome the power of chemical affinity in water and air. The substances it wants are in other combinations, the power of which must be overcome.
Gravitation is a great power, but the thousand tons of this tree"s vast weight must be lifted and sustained in defiance of it. So for a thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the power of life. There is not a place where one can put his finger that there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher. So the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a thousand years. The fairy-fingered breeze plays through its myriad harp strings. It makes wide miles of air aromatic. Animal life feeds on the quintessence of life in its seeds. But most of all it is an object lesson that power triumphs over lesser power, and that the highest power has dominion over all other power.
The great power of vegetable life was shown under circ.u.mstances that seemed the least favorable in the following experiment:
In the Agricultural College at Amherst, Ma.s.s., a squash of the yellow Chili variety was put in harness in 1874 to see how much it would lift by its power of growth.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Yellow Chili Squash in Harness.]
It was not an oak or mahogany tree, but a soft, pulpy, squashy squash that one could poke his finger into, nourished through a soft, succulent vine that one could mash between finger and thumb. A good idea of the harness is given by the ill.u.s.tration. The squash was confined in an open harness of iron and wood, and the amount lifted was indicated by weights on the lever over the top. There were, including seventy nodal roots, more than eighty thousand feet of roots and rootlets. These roots increased one thousand feet in twenty-four hours. They were afforded every advantage by being grown in a hot bed.
On August 21 it lifted sixty pounds. By September 30 it lifted a ton.
On October 24 it carried over two tons. The squash grew gnarled like an oak, and its substance was almost as compact as mahogany. Its inner cavity was very small, but it perfectly elaborated its seeds, as usual.
The lever to indicate the weight had to be changed for stronger ones from time to time. More weights were sought. They scurried through the town and got an anvil and pieces of railroad iron and hung them at varying distances, as shown in the cut. By the 31st of October it was carrying a weight of five thousand pounds. Then owing to defects of the new contrivance the rind was broken through without showing what might have been done under better conditions. Every particle of the squash had to be added and find itself elbow room under this enormous pressure. But life will a.s.sert itself.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Squash in Cage.]
No wonder that the Lord, seeking some form of speech to represent his power in human souls, says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." The tremendous life of infinite strength surges up through the vine and out into all branches that are really vitally attached. No wonder that much fruit is expected, and that one who knew most of this imparted power said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."
SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS*
*Reprinted from _The Study_.
Will G.o.d indeed dwell upon the earth? asked Solomon. Will G.o.d indeed work with man on the earth? asks the pushing, working spirit of to-day.
Has man a right to expect a special lending of the infinite power to help out his human endeavors? Does G.o.d put special forces to open some doors, close others, influence some men to come to his help, hinder others, bring to bear influences benign, restrain those malign, and invigorate a man"s own powers so that his arm has the strength of ten, because his heart is pure enough for G.o.d to work in it and through it?
If this is so, in what fields, under what conditions, to what extent, and in accordance with what laws may we expect aid?
First, it is evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compa.s.s to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal force. We did not make the next highest force, cohesion.
The particles of rock and iron cohere with so great an energy that gravitation cannot overcome it. But it is not by our energy. We did not make the next highest force, chemical affinity, that masters both gravitation and cohesion. Water, the result of chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, can be rent into its const.i.tuent elements with nothing less than a stream of lightning. We did not make the next highest force, vegetative life. That masters gravitation, and lifts up the tree in spite of it; masters cohesion--the tree"s rootlets tear asunder the particles of stone; masters chemical affinity--it takes the oxygen from air and water. We did not create that force, measureless to our minds. We say it must have come out of some omnipotence greater than all of them. The conclusion of all minds is, there is a power not ourselves.
It is unthinkable that these forces before mentioned should have originated themselves. It is equally so that they could maintain and continue themselves. There must be some continual upholding by a word of power.
It is equally plain that there is intelligence, thought, and plan behind these forces. They are not blind Samsons grinding in a prison-house, and liable at any moment to bring down in utter ruin every pillar of the universe on which they can put their hands.
If intelligent and planful, there must be personality. We may as well call it by the name by which it is universally known, G.o.d.
Now does this intelligent and powerful personality know our plans and lend his powers to the accomplishment of our purposes? It is better to put it the other way. Mr. Lincoln taught us the truer statement when one said to him, in the awful anxiety of the war, "I think G.o.d is on our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on G.o.d"s side." So our question is better thus: Does this intelligent, powerful personality accept and use our energy in the accomplishment of his plans?
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 G.o.d 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 st.u.r.dier 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 pa.s.sed away.
G.o.d 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 G.o.d"s forces are cooperating with ours? Many.
Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up successively, in s.p.a.ce 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, princ.i.p.alities or powers, things present or things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man.
G.o.d 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 pa.s.sages, literally thousands in number, proclaim G.o.d"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 G.o.dless 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.
It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man"s life is not the t.i.tle to a thousand acres. He is soon dispossessed. It is not all the bonds and money he can hold. A dead man"s hands are empty. It is not reputation that the winds blow away. But it is character that he acquires and carries with him. He has a fidelity to principle that is like Abdiel"s. He is faithful among the faithless. He has allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth cannot swerve for a moment. He counts soul so much above the body that no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against even the existence of the body.
Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained? Not altogether by individual evolution. Ancestral tendencies, parental example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out this greatest result of heaven and earth. Of some men you expect nothing but goodness and greatness. They would belie all the tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good. Some are constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds. What could be expected of the men of "76 when the air was electric with patriotism?
What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty? What could be expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves exiled for liberty to worship G.o.d? What can be expected of men who have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold?
Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations been strengthened out of G.o.d? Besides the strength of development by the resistance of evil, they have found that G.o.d made a way of escape, that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men?
But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of G.o.d for every man"s life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs, a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal aids of a present G.o.d, cooperate with his plans and works.
Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth, wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it believes in the divine co-operation to that end. It must be born of the Spirit. G.o.d sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father! It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us.
Not only is this cooperation true in regard to the beginning of this higher life, but especially so in regard to the development and perfection of that life into the stature of perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. By continuous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity of endeavor that can only be represented by groanings that cannot be worded in human speech, the perfection of saints is sought.
And in the final glorification of those saints every man will say nothing of his own efforts, but all the praise will be unto him who hath redeemed us unto G.o.d, and washed us in his blood.
To what extent, then, may we expect G.o.d will lend his forces to work out our plans? First, in so far as those forces have to do with the maturing and perfecting of our character they become his plans. No energy will be withheld. All our plans should be such. The end in character may often be attained as well by failure of our plans as by success. G.o.d has to choose the poor in this world"s things, rich in faith, to do his great work. And he has to make "the best laid schemes o" mice and men gang aft a-gley" to get the desired outcome of character. He is then working with, not against, us. He would rather have any star for his crown of glory than tons of perishable gold.
But outside of our plans and work for ourselves what cooperation may we expect in our plans and work for others?
Every preacher knows that for spiritual work in saving others the word of the Lord is true, "Without me ye can do nothing." There must be an outpouring of the Spirit or there is no Pentecost. Over against that settled conviction is the thrice-blessed command and a.s.surance of the Master, "Go preach my Gospel; and lo, I am with you alway" (blessed iteration), "unto the end of the world." That has not yet come.
But there are other enterprises men must push--mines to be dug, railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emanc.i.p.ated, farms to be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten.
To what extent may we expect divine aid?
First, all these things are his purposes and plans. But since it is necessary for our development that we do our level best, he will not do what we can. We can plant and water, but G.o.d only can give the increase. Even the fable maker says that a teamster, whose wagon was stuck in the mud, seeing Jupiter Omnipotens riding by on the chariot of the clouds, dropped on his knees and implored his help. "Get up, O lazy one!" said Jupiter; "clear away the mud, put your shoulder to the wheel, and whip up your horses." We may call on G.o.d to open the rock in the dry and thirsty land where no water is, but not to lift our teacups. It is no use to ask G.o.d for a special shower when deep plowing is all that is needed. It is no use to ask G.o.d to build churches, send missionaries, endow schools, and convert the world, till we have done our best.
But when we have done our best what may we expect? All things. They shall work together for good to those who love G.o.d enough to do their best for him in any plane of work. One could preach fifty sermons on the great works done by men, obviously too great for man"s accomplishment. Time would fail me to tell of Moses, Gideon, Paul, Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, William of Orange, Washington, John Brown, Abe Lincoln, and thousands more of whom this world was not worthy, who, undeniably by divine aid, wrought righteousness. One of the great sins of our age is that men do not see G.o.d immanent in all things. We have found so many ways of his working that we call laws, so many segments of his power, that we have forgotten him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. A sustainer is as necessary as a creator.
There are diversities of operations, but it is the same G.o.d who worketh all in all. The next great service to be done by human philosophy is to bring back G.o.d in human thought into his own world. Since these things are so, what are the conditions under which we may work the works of G.o.d by his power?
First, they must be his works, not ours as opposed to his, but ours as included in his. All our works may be wrought in G.o.d, if we do his works, follow his plans, and are aided by his strength.