were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases
departed from them and the evil spirits went out of them.” Indeed the
man of science knows himself to be on the track of discoveries which
will show us secrets of personality and spiritual possession which
will banish for ever the absurd incredulity of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
Who now-a-days would assert that “miracles do not happen,” when men
like Sir Oliver Lodge are laboriously discovering some few of these
laws of the Universe which give us these portents and signs? Who dares
to sneer at Parthenogenesis or repeat the slander of Celsus about the
Mother of God? Men only who have grown rusty in reposing on their past
reputations and cannot see that materialism as a philosophy is dead.
Day by day fresh evidence of the power of the spirit over matter
bursts upon us. A plea for “philosophic doubt” of Professor Huxley’s
infallibility is no longer necessary. The very distinction between
matter and spirit grows more and more difficult as science develops
analytical power. The minds of men are being prepared again to receive
that Supreme revelation which told of the wedding of the earth and
heaven, the taking of the Manhood into God.
In truth, this is the one principle which can give men guidance in the
tangled intricacy of modern life. It is necessary to salvation, _now_,
not hereafter only, to believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
For, first of all, men need to be saved from the apathy of despair.
They need some hope that there is an answer to the riddle of the
Universe. Let them once begin to feel that it _may_ be true that the
very God cares for His creatures and has made His love for them
manifest by taking to Himself the body, mind and spirit of man, and
joining for ever human nature to the Godhead, then through the
darkness comes a human voice saying--
“O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself.
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me who have died for thee.”
A man regains his self-respect when once he has escaped from the
paralyzing sense that his is only
“a life of nothings nothing worth
From that first nothing ere our birth
To that last nothing under earth.”
And there is only one starting-point for those who journey on this
quest of an answer to the enigma of life. They must resolutely abandon
the long travelled “_a priori_ road.” They must understand that the
science of to-day is not tied to any materialistic axioms, that
metaphysic cannot be ignored by the physician, and that no competent
scientist to-day would say of the Resurrection of Jesus on which
ultimately depends His claims to our adoration, “_That could not
happen_.” We know enough now of the laws of the Universe to know that
we do not know them all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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