Spiritual law in natural fact

Contents

Chaptbr Page

I. His Words and his Works 9

II. Light 23

Introduction

This book is an effort to collect facts and theories more or less familiar to everybody, and to put them into a particular combination for confirmation or illustration, especially of spiritual truth. In this sense the field is somewhat new to the author. He finds peculiar delight in discovering new and wider likenesses between things spiritual and things material, and he is confirmed in the view that it is quite as correct to speak of spiritual law in the natural world as to speak of " Natural Law in the Spiritual World." Maybe we are yet to learn that the laboratory is, after all, as sacred as the altar, and that spiritual forces are as definite in their combinations and actions as those other forces which we have arbitrarily put on the other side of an imaginary line and labeled as simply physical.

To help any devout heart to this conception, and to win the favorable attention of any who may be skeptical toward God's written thoughts, is the chief reason for writing this book. Nothing like scientific order or theological sequence has been attempted in the arrangement of topics, and certainly no claim is set up for either extensive or intensive cultivation of the field which is opened. We come 4 upon our topics much as we meet the facts of nature in daily life, and much as we find various forms of religious truths mixed together in the Scriptures. Our readers are invited to take their Bibles with them and walk through the valleys and groves and fields. We look at the flowers, the fruits, the leaves, and the rocks. There we see footprints and finger-marks which we know are those of our Father, for we have become acquainted with them in his book. It is more than a fancy with us that Jesus was walking this very path we are in, when he gave those wonderful parables. Here are the vines which taught the lesson of a soul's fruitfulness when it abides in him. Here are the flowers God paints and the sparrows he feeds, just as he clothes the soul of a saint or tenderly cares for his children. We handle the flowers he made out of mud, and we see how heaven came down in sunshine and put celestial colors into them. We eat of the fruit which he compounds in mysterious laboratories to nourish the life he has created and loves. Wheat and tares grow together, out of the same soil and under the same sunlight; nor do we fail to note that though they are so near each other and so much alike, he remembers all the time which is the wheat, and he is not mocked at harvest-time.

Then we go to a sick-room and see one of his unordained ministers, but none the less his minister, giving remedies he has made to cure the ills of the flesh. We only have to remember that he is the

Great Physician. In a ward of the hospital we see a skilful surgeon, who has studied the delicate bodily structure which has been built after the divine plan, as he presses the knife along the path God has marked out with infinite precision. Because that path has been followed in the making, it can and must be followed in the mending. We stand breathless, because this man is a sort of high priest ministering in the most holy place. It is a service of sacrifice and suffering for one form of salvation. We go into a laboratory, and the devout man who is at home there assures us that he has not created nor decided anything ; he is merely finding out how God has done and still does his work. We go into a factory and find men who have called in God's forces of steam and electricity — forces which they cannot see nor understand — to do their bidding and minister to human progress. These material machines are efficient just in proportion as they are orthodox.

In all these studies we are impressed with two or three very significant facts: In the first place, all these operators produce nothing of matter or force, but simply accept what is provided for them. Everything which they take hold of is a revelation from without themselves, is inspired. In the next place, there are definite rules which they must follow to secure the good which they seek and which seems to have been made for their beneficent use. In other words, they work under unfailing and inviolable authority. The light which guides them to useful action is not light from within, but light from without. Investigation and reason have their office in comprehending the will of the Lord, but it is his light and his law that governs and guides. Last of all, it is plain that he who made nature made it for the welfare and the delight of his creatures. Wisdom and love are written large. True, one could ignorantly or wilfully violate the rules, but he does so to his own hurt. There is perfect freedom, but unquestioned responsibility.

As to the amount of significance to be given to the comparisons which are made in these studies, there will be difference of opinion. To some there may seem to be almost absolute identity between the facts of nature and the facts of grace, where others will see only a likeness more or less distinct. The writer does not undertake to weigh the evidential value of each case. He has tried to use discretion all along, and leaves to each reader the privilege of suggesting values. He has refrained from straining facts or twisting theories to make them fit any view he may hold as to nature or grace. He has no sympathy with reckless spiritualizing processes. On the other hand, he is profoundly convinced that the plans of God are as nearly the same throughout all creation as the conditions allow, and that where the laws of revelation and those of science border upon each other or meet in a common field, they are in close partnership. God does not change the pattern as the weaving proceeds. It may not always be possible for us to trace the pattern all the way from the body of a fabric out into the delicate fringes, but in no case is the original abandoned. This is a material world which we see all about us, but it is our Father's house made for his spiritual children. The same great provisions run across the line we seem to have to draw between the material and the spiritual, and the promises written in the book find the conditions for their realization in this physical life and this physical world. So when our brief excursion for study ends, we come back to God's house and thank him that in wisdom he has made this world as our home during part of our immortal life.

J. C. A.

"Anything God makes is worth looking at." So wrote a man who loved both nature and revelation and who delighted to find them in harmony with each other. The hand which wrote the Bible also made this material world. Between them there can be no contradictions. When we are able to understand the Scriptures fully and when we have mastered the problems of nature, we will find them in perfect agreement wherever they occupy a common field. An intolerable and impossible situation would be for a race of intelligent, moral, spiritual creatures, created for a final home in heaven, to be compelled to live in a material world made by an entirely different creator, fashioned on a wholly different plan, and governed on some other basis. There would be confusion, contradiction, and defeat at every step of the effort to live for the highest ends. We would have perpetual and irremediable chaos, rendering futile any attempt to be happy in the present or in the future. No man can serve two masters; no life can occupy a place in two hostile realms at one and the same time.

Jesus was at home in his earthly mission. Despite the fact that human hearts refused him homage, he was at home with nature. He knew the meaning of the flowers and the fields. When homes were closed against him he went up into the mountains. Winds and waves listened to his commands; water turned to wine at his bidding; a tree withered under his cursing; blind eyes opened to look upon him; ears that heard no human voice awoke to his whisper; diseases fled at his reproof; and even the dead turned back to life at his call. The only hostility he met was the unbelief of human hearts. He walked and ruled the earth as part of his Father's wide domain, and not as a territory foreign to religion and heaven. And what is still more to our point, he found heaven mirrored in these earthly forms. Nature was a reflection or an expression of the same qualities in God that appeal to us in the Scriptures. Recondite and unknown spiritual truth was found mapped out in the plants and their growth, in animal instincts and material forces which are open to the eyes of all. This is what distinguishes the manner of his teachings from that of all other teachers. Nature was his picture-lesson, his text-book, his demonstration. He found in this primer the principles of knowledge which are more fully set forth in the advanced text-book of redemption.

HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS II

No doubt if the Master were here now he would seize upon all modern inventions and discoveries, and throw their illumination upon the pages of sacred writing and far along down the path that leads heavenward, to make easier the progress of his disciples. He did not despise or discredit nature. He never let drop a hint that any one of his disciples would ever be justified in treating lightly the fashion or meaning of this material world in which God's highest creation finds its temporary home. God made the mount before he gave the Sermon on the Mount. It is an honor and an advantage to live in these later days, because there is possibility of knowing so much more of God than was known in the past. The universe is filled with the proofs of his wisdom and power. It is criminal to reject him in the face of all this proof, and it is well-nigh as criminal to shut one's eyes against the tokens of his constant presence in the physical world. The scientist needs to hear the word of God ; the theologian needs to look upon the works of God.

&t every turn the Master came, without any seeming surprise, upon some illustration of what he wanted to say about religious truth. The thirteenth chapter of Matthew is a picture gallery, on whose walls hang seven likenesses of the kingdom of heaven. Most of the pictures are from nature. He made nature, he drew the picture, then he made the comparison. The leaven, the vineyard, the grain-field, the flowers, the birds, the winds, the flood, the darkness, the light — all of these were object-lessons in his kindergarten teachings to impart spiritual truth. We are authorized to read the glory of God as declared in the heavens and his handiwork as portrayed in the firmament. Is it not disloyal to refuse to learn these lessons he teaches?

A pioneer came from the crowded East to make a home for himself and family in the new West. The country was open to him. After careful search he found an eligible place, where elevation, water supply, accessibility, and fertility gave promise of a good home. He set about building the house, thinking of every member of the family as he laid out the rooms and provided for each. Love is not brick, tenderness is not mortar, anticipation of happiness is not like boards, but all these sacred elements helped to fashion that dwelling. When the family came, they were dull beyond excuse if they failed to see the evidence of his regard for them. This earth is not the final home of saints. A better house on higher ground will be built for them at length, but this is what our Father has done for us till the days of our training are over.

It ought to be to us a matter of special gratitude that nature has these innumerable lessons about God, and especially that its lessons are so thoroughly in accord with those which revelation teaches. Our first acquaintance is with the physical world; there is first that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual. The simpler lesson prepares us for that which is more difficult. As in secular studies, the alphabet remains with us to the last page of the profoundest book, and most of the simple words of childhood are familiar to the end. Early in life nature breaks in upon us and our primary conceptions are fashioned from its forms. Our language is created to express what our senses take in of the material, and we continue through life in the midst of nature's marvelous works. The first door of our earthly house to open is the door which opens out into the physical world; later and more slowly that other door, which admits us to the spiritual world, swings back and we discover that while we are akin to the brutes our highest kinship is with God and angels. Acquaintance with the material ought not to lead us away from the spiritual. Learning the multiplication table does not make it impossible or more difficult to master the higher problems of mathematics. We learn to count with blocks, but that helps us to count the stars and trace the rhythm of their mathematical motions. There is one course of study, though different text-books. There are separate revelations of the Father's mind, but it is the same Father. Most of this earthly life is, as we might expect, closely associated with the material, but nature is a friend to grace to help us understand God.

An unlettered man, who cultivated a few lean acres for the support of himself and family, was greatly surprised when told that his little bit of farm was marked off and described in terms and lines borrowed from the heavens. The surveyor establishes corners and lays down borders for these farms and lots according to heaven's landmarks and heaven's directions. Our latitude and longitude are celestial terms. When we have need of fixed weights and measures we have recourse to the law of gravitation which runs throughout the entire universe, and we weigh our pound of food in the same scales God uses to weigh a sun and to hitch it to its place in the systems. Earthly facts are so thoroughly dependent on those of the wider world that we go at once to the original for our standards. This is true whether we are on sea or on land. A pilot pays small heed to the waves which surge against his vessel, or to the winds which fill his sails. They are shifting and uncertain. Instead, he looks millions of miles away and asks sun or star to tell him where he is and whither his course is taking him. His chart is of the heavens rather than of the waves. He travels on a great circle and keeps watch on the skies as he seeks an earthly port. The stars are his banner by night and the sun his light by day. He waits for heaven's signals when to take up his ark and when to turn this way or that. Here, as elsewhere, increasing information convinces us of the unity of the universe under one wise and harmonious control. The lower and the higher are parts of a wide-stretching kingdom, which is harmonious from center to circumference because made and controlled by one Mind, which is wise and which has all power.

In meditating upon the ways of God in the realm of grace, I have been startled by stumbling upon some fact or force or process of nature which closely resembled doctrines and experiences of grace. The passing wind which keeps sweet the breath of man or which, stirred to wrath, destroys all in its path, made me think that the love of God and his wrath may be but the different manifestations of the same force. It was only a physician's remedy for disease, but it was strangely like the incoming of sacrificial merit to cleanse a soul from the malady of sin. It was only the annual task of planting seed and growing a crop on the hillside of the old farm, but the plowboy became a laborer with God, and his humble calling became wondrously like the work of the preacher who plants seeds of the kingdom in unpromising soil, but rejoices to see it watered from heaven and made fruitful. Sometimes in these experiences I have wondered whether I had not wandered across the border-line between what we call material and what we call spiritual, and without noticing the difference had strolled into the suburbs of the heavenly. The question invariably came up, whether, after all, we had not erred in our blindness in making too sharp a distinction between what is religious and what is secular. Perhaps the scientist has been looking at the texture of the cloth while the theologian has been talking about its color. This one has analyzed the chemistry of the loaf while the other has been occupied with its taste. One has studied the mechanism of the wire while the other has been reading the message it was carrying. There is a lot of splendid theology in the multiplication table. The binomial theorem is an unanswerable proof-text.

A word of caution here is not out of place. Matter is not the same as spirit ; nature is not identical with grace; there is a difference between the things seen and the things unseen; what is true of the body is not always, perhaps never exactly, true of the soul; the flesh is not the spirit. We cannot throw away the Bible and find the way to heaven by following a star or a river. There is no path in the forests or in the fields that certainly leads to everlasting life. There is no gushing spring to furnish the water of eternal life. Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness, but if that is all the food they had they are dead. There is no skill that can build the holy city out of our common bricks and cement. There is not gold enough in the Klondike to pave one block in the new Jerusalem. Natural religion has no system of salvation from moral evil, though indirectly it lends its cures and its penalties to the enforcement of ethical laws. It has no message of a father who waits at the gate with the word of pardon on his lips.

There is but one God, and he rules by law. Possibly we can see hints in nature of his benevolence

HIS WORDS AND HIS WORKS 1J

and of his fatherly care. But only in his book does he take us apart from nature, of which we are a part, and there open to us the confidences of forgiveness and peace. We must not go to the scientist and demand of him that he demonstrate to us all that we have learned of God through Jesus Christ. The most we can ask of the scientist is that he tell us whether nature puts a final and effective veto on the operations of grace; whether there are in nature any hints or likenesses or illustrations of those doctrines which are found in the Bible. Maybe he who made medicinal remedies for the physician to use in healing disease can himself go a little farther and bring Lazarus back from the dead. Feeding a multitude by the seaside is not, after all, so very different from carrying a basket of food to a starving family in your block. These are not the same as ministering specifically to sick and starving souls, and we must not confound them ; the physical is not the spiritual, the temporal is not the eternal ; but the two worlds are bordering lands, and we must deny neither the one nor the other.

I have been the more hopeful of finding a useful place for this volume because a feeling has gone out that the spiritual is not real, or that it is not worth while. It is not beyond truth to say this is emphatically a material age. It is a time of rich food, of fine houses, of costly clothing, of easy riding, of tremendous business enterprises, of

B l8 SPIRITUAL LAW IN NATURAL FACT

money-making, of colossal fortunes, of fashionable display of riches, of sight-seeing, and of wide travel. The eye, the palate, and the spirit of pride are in command. We have quit the closer and careful thinking our fathers did, and all we care to take the pains for is to see. It is easier to see than to think. It is a day of pictures and picture shows and illustrated papers and kindergarten methods for old as well as young. Even the preacher must resort largely to illustration and description in order to have a patient hearing. Add to this change of taste among us the further fact that marvelous progress in scientific discovery and invention has obscured for a time the value of spiritual matters. It may have gone so far that the ordinary student can go from the primary class to a diploma of the university, engaged every day with worldly studies and material forces, without having so much as heard from teacher or text-book that there is a spiritual realm. The secular has become dangerously secularized. Our current courses of education do not so much oppose religion as they ignore it. If there is allowed to be another sphere of life, it is treated as a something entirely removed from time and place and matter and nature and this present life.

These younger people need to be told that they are right now in their Father's land ; they are studying every day the laws he has instituted, they are handling the products of his hand. The knowledge they seek with commendable avidity is nothing more nor less than standing by and learning how God accomplishes the work of his hands. He walks before them in the path; he is beside them as they study his works; they are forced to think his thoughts after him ; in every invention he lays down the lines to be observed ; in chemistry, in astronomy, in biology, the study consists absolutely in following a text-book which God wrote as really as he wrote the law on tables of stone in the mountain. All that the scientist or inventor knows is in the book before it is learned, and the authority is without question. To call some student back from forgetfulness of it all ; to induce him to stand in silence a moment and hear the whisperings of heaven; to have him look down and see the footprints of the Maker — this is what I should like to accomplish by this message.

There is another condition which seems to me to make this line of thought especially appropriate. A school of idealists has sprung up, and though the classes of this school are widely apart in some of their theories, they are agreed in denying the reality of this physical world. Some of them, on philosophical grounds, insist that we cannot know anything about an exterior world, nothing beyond the sensations we experience. Nature has little or no appeal to them. Another class, on what may be called religious grounds, denies the reality of matter, rejects the testimony of the senses, and reduces the universe to some sort of impersonal deity. Alongside of these idealists there is the school of materialists. With them there is nothing but matter; theirs is merely a world of dirt. They deny the existence of spirit, the reality of any vital distinction between right and wrong, and, of course, their doctrine has no place for immortality of the soul.

Such theories are as empty of fact as they are destitute of hope. One denies the physical, the other deifies it. Between these unreasonable extremes, and over against them both, stands the right understanding of Scripture and the right interpretation of nature. Every step in scientific discovery is a further confirmation of our faith in the unity of the universe. That nature is intelligible is proof that it is the product of intelligence. The parables of Jesus proceed on the claim that all truth is sacred, whether it be truth found in nature or in revelation ; and the further claim is implied that all truths are in harmony with each other, no matter from which sphere they are learned. This is the only rational view of nature or of grace. Ultimately unity rests in an intelligent, powerful, and beneficent Creator, whom the Bible teaches us to trust as our Father.

I have thus called attention to the constant and familiar and apt use which Jesus made of nature and of inventions based upon natural law. In this he warrants us in thinking of the material world about us as part of God's kingdom. It is filled with God's thoughts; it displays the divine power; it illustrates heaven's methods. It occurs to me that there is need to add a word as to the part assigned nature in other Scriptures, especially the Old Testament. Now and then I have come upon remarks by certain modern thinkers to the effect that biblical writers represented God as dwelling afar off from earthly affairs, working arbitrarily and unnaturally whenever he chose to accomplish definite purposes. They use the word " transcendent," by which they mean that the Scriptures introduce him now and then into this lower sphere only to work a miracle or inaugurate new movements. The modern representative insists upon the immanence, or permanent dwelling of God in the world of nature, accomplishing his purposes through fixed laws and in usual manner. It is readily granted that the older writers did not talk of immanence or secondary causes or uniform laws, but they did dwell most eloquently on the majesty of God in the control of natural forces. The Scriptures are full of the thought that nature is but the product of his hand, and every occurrence comes under his control. Take as a single example Psalm 104. Light is his garment; the heavens are a curtain he stretches; the bed of the ocean is the beams of his chamber; the winds are his pathway; clouds are his chariot; at his voice the earth melted and the seas fled ; he made the path of rain-clouds and raindrops ; these fountains he opened for the thirst of man and beast; he irrigates the mountains and creates harvests in the valleys; in his looms carpets of green are woven for the fields ; he planted the trees and his birds sing in their branches ; by the moon he marks of! the hours and by the sun he carves the day out of the eternal years; even young lions take food from his hand; to man the days are measured out, until he goes at length to his final home. And then in a splendid summary the exclamation is made : " O Lord, how manifold are thy works ! in wisdom hast thou made them all ; the earth is full of thy riches."

Thanks to modern science for helping us trace more accurately the paths of his creating and control; but it is not a recent discovery that God is present all the time managing affairs of this material world which he created and in which his glory shines. This earth is not a foreign country to him. All through the Old Testament there is a close linking of the material to the spiritual world, and in repeated cases physical rewards and punishments are made part of the moral government of heaven. How true and how graphic is this from Henry Drummond : " The visible is the ladder up to the invisible ; the temporal is but the scaffolding of the eternal. And when the last immaterial souls have climbed through this material to God, the scaffolding shall be taken down, and the earth dissolved with fervent heat — not because it is base, but because its work is done."

II

Light is recognized as one of the most wonderful of all the natural forces. For a long time it was believed that every material, visible body sent out a constant stream of minute particles, and that these particles in some unexplained way reproduced the picture of an object in the eye. That theory, along with a great many scientific theories and as many theological doctrines, has reposed in a junk-pile for years. The chaff-pile beside the thresher is larger than the heap of clean grain. It is now universally accepted that light is a manner or mode of motion. It is not a something of itself, but is the movement of a peculiar form of matter. Eternal stillness would be eternal silence and eternal darkness. It may be that all motion is a hymn of praise or the discord of a shriek, only our ears are too dull to hear more than a few notes in the endless scale of sounds. The universe is quivering with movements too small for us to apprehend, except as we catch a bit of the motion in terms we call " sounds," and these movements redeem the world from silence and from death. Light itself is invisible, as invisible as the spirit within us or as the presence of Jehovah moving amid the affairs of his kingdom. Its business is to reveal.