Realize it thoroughly; it is a methodical, not an accidental world.
If a housewife turns out a good cake, it is the result of a sound
receipt, carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned ingredients
and fire them for the appropriate time without producing the
result. It is not she who has made the cake; it is nature. She
brings related things together; sets causes at work; these causes
bring about the result. she is not a creator, but an intermediary.
She does not expect random causes to produce specific effects--random
ingredients would only produce random cakes. So it is in the making
of Christian experiences. Certain lines are followed; certain
effects are the result. These effects cannot but be the result.
But the result can never take place without the previous cause.
To expect results without antecedents is to expect cakes without
ingredients. That impossibility is precisely
The almost universal expectation.
Now what I mainly wish to do is to help you firmly to grasp this
simple principle of Cause and Effect in the spiritual world. And
instead of applying the principle generally to each of the Christian
experiences in turn, I shall examine its application to one in
some little detail. The one I shall select is Rest. And I think
any one who follows the application in this single instance will
be able to apply it for himself to the others.
Take such a sentence as this: African explorers are subject to
fevers which cause restlessness and delirium.
Note the expression, "cause restlessness." RESTLESSNESS HAS A CAUSE.
Clearly, then, any one who wished to get rid of restlessness would
proceed at once to deal with the cause. If that were not removed,
a doctor might prescribe a hundred things, and all might be taken
in turn, without producing the least effect. Things are so arranged
in the original planning of the world that certain effects must
follow certain causes, and certain causes must be abolished before
certain effects can be removed. Certain parts of Africa are
inseparably linked with the physical experience called fever; this
fever is in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called
restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experience the
radical method would be to abolish the physical experience, and
the way of abolishing the physical experience would be to abolish
Africa, or to cease to go there.
Now this hold good for all other forms of Restlessness. Every other
form and kind of Restlessness in the world had a definite cause,
and the particular kind of Restlessness can only be removed by
removing the allotted cause.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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