Religion and science; Science -- Juvenile literature
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, God.
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 God is on
our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on God'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 God 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 sturdier
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 passed away.
God 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 God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many.
Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up
successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are
oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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