The Potter and the ClayWinnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley)
Religion
The Potter and the Clay
Winnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley)
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Sermons
1. I think undoubtedly that _Nature_ was, and always will be to
most minds, the first help. It does seem more and more impossible
that the ordered universe can have been produced by chance. To use
an illustration I have often used, especially on Sunday afternoons
at the open-air meetings in the parks of East London, if a box of
letters cannot throw themselves into a play of Shakespeare because
there is clearly the mark of mind in the play, how little credible
is it that the atoms of the universe have thrown themselves into
the universe as we see it to-day! We feel inclined to add to the
trenchant questions in the Book of Job the further question: Who
wrapped the atmosphere round the earth and made life possible, and
stopped the friction? Was the beauty of the earth the surprise, or
the gift to His children of a Being with a beautiful mind? Can the
ordered course of the silent stars be produced by any amount of
juggling with chance out of the atoms of the world? In other words,
Nature drives us not only to GOD, but to a very strong GOD and a
very present GOD. If the great astronomer Herschel is right, and
every atom has the appearance of a created thing and every law of
Nature requires, as he says, the continual application of force, we
are "up against"--to use a cant phrase of the day--we are up against
the most powerful Person the world has ever known. To swing the
smallest planet on its orbit is beyond the power of the greatest
superman ever present to the brain of a megalomaniac. But to swing
twenty millions of blazing suns, and to swing them every day and
every night, and to swing them, as far as we know, for millions of
years, requires a Person of surpassing strength and most present
power, for it is clear that of this wonderful thing which is done
upon earth every day and every night "He doeth it Himself."
2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first
thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he
went on to say that the second was the moral law within. And if the
minds of you women are like my own, the path of the discovery of
GOD lies next through the _conscience_. What is it, this indistinct
knocking, this voice, which though it can be stilled can never
be silenced? If it is only a product of mingled self-interest
and heredity, as some would uphold, why does it persistently
urge us, sometimes in almost bitter tones, against our immediate
self-interest?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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