THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 CHRIST AND SCIENCE
 
 The Cole Lectures for 1906 
 delivered before Vanderbilt University 
 
 Christ and Science 
 
 t_~- 
 
 Jesus Christ Regarded as 
 the Centre of Science 
 
 By 
 FRANCIS HENRY SMITH 
 
 Professor in the University <if Virginia 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH
 
 Copyright, 1906, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
 
 THE COLE LECTURES 
 
 THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- 
 nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum 
 of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by 
 his widow to ten thousand ; the design and conditions 
 of which gift are stated as follows : 
 
 " The object of this fund is to establish a foundation 
 for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib- 
 lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its 
 scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- 
 ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- 
 vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the 
 Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer 
 shall be determined by nomination of the Theological 
 Faculty and confirmation of the College of Bishops of 
 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Said lecture 
 shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the man- 
 uscript of the same shall be the property of the Univer- 
 sity, to be published or disposed of by the Board of 
 Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising there- 
 from to be added to the foundation fund, or otherwise 
 used for the benefit of the Biblical Department." 

 
 '. abrou kal SI avrou Kai efc aurov T& 
 xdvra. aurai $ So^a el$ rouy a.ta>va<s. dfnjv. 
 
 ROM. xi. 36. 
 
 Jfae tibi Sacrosanct^ mentis 
 illius vivam referunt imagine.ni, ipsumquc 
 Christum loquentem, sanantem, resurgentem, 
 dtnique totum itapresentem reddunf, ut minus 
 visurus sis si coram oculis conspidas. 
 
 ERASMUS,
 
 Contents 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT IN ITS RELA- 
 TION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE . n 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT IN ITS RELA- 
 TION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE . 55 
 
 SCIENTIFIC HINTS IN BOTH TESTA- 
 MENTS in 
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE . . 147 
 
 CHRIST THE MODEL FOR THE 
 
 TEACHER OF SCIENCE . .179 
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF . 211
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT IN ITS RE- 
 LATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT IN ITS RE- 
 LATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 
 
 TO a great multitude of men, called 
 Christians, the greatest fact in the 
 world to-day, is the existence of the 
 Christian Church. To them the greatest 
 fact in the Christian Church is the presence 
 of Christ, not merely by His precepts and 
 example, but His real, personal, though not 
 bodily presence. Brahmah, Buddha, Con- 
 fucius are dead. Christ, as His followers 
 believe, lives and is here. In our solemn 
 assemblies He is addressed as though He 
 were not far away. In the Christian's daily 
 walk, the whispered or perhaps unuttered 
 prayer indicates his belief that his Master is 
 very near to him. Nay so close may be this 
 union, that in a high sense, but a very real 
 and unmystical sense, Christ may be said to 
 live in him. 
 
 13
 
 14 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 This unique relation of our Lord to His 
 people becomes transcendently significant 
 when it is remembered that they believe Him 
 to be, what He distinctly claimed to be, the 
 greatest personage in this and all worlds. 
 Human language seems inadequate to ex- 
 press even the partial conception of Him 
 which alone we can form. He is said to be 
 the Word of God. This title appears to in- 
 clude every possible way in which God may 
 be manifested to men. " No one knoweth 
 the Father but the Son and he to whom the 
 Son will reveal Him." Christ, as His follow- 
 ers believe, is the author of every revelation 
 of the Almighty whether in the physical or 
 spiritual world or in the written word. In 
 every such disclosure we may discover the 
 handiwork and trace the lineaments of Him 
 who is " the brightness of the Father's glory 
 and the express image of His person." 
 They are all epiphanies. If the Holy Spirit 
 is the Divine breath, Christ is that breath 
 articulated and made intelligible. When 
 God speaks we hear Christ, and there is no
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 15 
 
 other way to God, either for our thought or 
 our faith except through Him. 
 
 For this primacy of our Lord, let us listen 
 to the Sacred Oracles. 
 
 " By the word of the Lord were the 
 heavens made and all the host of them by 
 the breath of His mouth." 
 
 " For by Him were all things created that 
 are in heaven and that are in earth, visible 
 and invisible ... all things were created 
 by Him and for Him " (Col. i : 16). 
 
 " By whom also God made the worlds " 
 (Heb. i : 2). 
 
 " But unto the Son He saith . . . Thou 
 Lord in the beginning hast laid the foundation 
 of the earth and the heavens are the work of 
 Thine hands " (Heb. i : 10). 
 
 " Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory 
 and honour and power, for Thou hast created 
 all things and for Thy pleasure they are and 
 were created" (Rev. 4: n). 
 
 " All things were made by Him and with- 
 out Him was not anything made that was 
 made " (John i : 3).
 
 1 6 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 These and other passages declare that 
 Christ is the maker of all worlds material and 
 spiritual, visible and invisible. " All things " 
 comprehends universal creation. 
 
 If our Lord be the maker of all worlds they 
 must bear signs of Him. Not more surely 
 will the student find Michael Angelo in his 
 Moses, or Raphael in his Transfiguration, 
 Milton in Comus or Shakespeare in Hamlet, 
 than the Christian may expect to find Christ 
 in nature. The sciences of mind and matter 
 should to him bear marks of the same author 
 and that author his Lord. If Christ's claim 
 be true, the universe seen and unseen is a 
 unit and its unity is only intelligible when 
 arranged about Him as a centre. To the 
 Christian all science is Christo-centric. To 
 refer it to any other centre or to no centre is 
 to introduce confusion. 
 
 There are obviously two ways of studying 
 the connection between the Creator and His 
 works. 
 
 One way, the time honoured way, practiced 
 from the beginning is to start from the works, 
 and by patient study of them, pass upward
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 1 7 
 
 to him. To prove the being and attributes 
 of the Almighty by the works of Nature has 
 been the delightful task of many of the 
 greatest minds of the Christian era. 
 
 This appears to be the natural and ap- 
 propriate way ; to ascend from the creation 
 to the creator : to climb the ladder, for we 
 are at the bottom, and beginning there seems 
 to be not only the humble method but the 
 reasonable method. 
 
 In my boyhood, no books were oftener 
 quoted than the Bridgewater Treatises. 
 There were eight of them, written to win 
 prizes offered by the Earl of Bridgewater for 
 the best essays proving the being and per- 
 fections of God by the works of Nature. A 
 great contemporary philosopher, Dr. Bab- 
 bage, was dissatisfied with them, and with- 
 out seeking a prize, published a ninth Bridge- 
 water Treatise to remedy the supposed 
 defects. His dissatisfaction seemed to be a 
 prelude to a widening sense of inadequacy 
 in the argument, and the Bridgewater Trea- 
 tises are rarely heard of now. This has 
 somehow been the fate of numerous other
 
 1 8 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 similar essays. Indeed the reason is not fai 
 to seek. Nature is not only a very vast and 
 difficult field, only in very small part known, 
 but it is a rapidly widening field. Much of 
 the knowledge of one age is merely a step- 
 ping stone to be used in the next age for 
 climbing higher and then to be abandoned. 
 A few great leading principles are perma- 
 nent, but the details and the filling in are 
 constantly modified and improved. Thus it 
 comes about that an interpretation of one 
 age becomes valueless in a subsequent one, 
 because the thing interpreted is found to be 
 no fact. So it has happened that some 
 serious thinkers, by no means sceptical or 
 agnostic, have questioned the possibility of 
 proving the existence of Deity from the 
 phenomena of the material world, and a few 
 free thinkers have stoutly denied it. One of 
 the ablest of these, however, Mr. George J. 
 Romanes, near the close of his life recalled 
 his scepticism on this point. Leaving out of 
 account all lesser considerations, a large view 
 of the universe disclosed to him such undeni- 
 able, irresistible evidences of plan and design,
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 19 
 
 that his truth-loving soul bowed reverently 
 before the Almighty, though seen only 
 through this one rift in the clouds. From an 
 honest doubter he became an honest believer. 
 The great Apostle Paul believed in a Natural 
 Theology. He held the wicked Romans to 
 be without excuse, because those invisible 
 things, the eternal power and Godhead of 
 the Almighty were clearly seen by the 
 things that are made. To the men of Lystra 
 he had before declared that the goodness of 
 God, as seen in Nature, bears witness of Him. 
 " For He did good and gave us rain from 
 heaven and fruitful seasons." 
 
 We all remember too how the great Eng- 
 lish prelate, Butler, used the Constitution and 
 Course of Nature as a powerful defense 
 against the foes of religion both natural and 
 revealed. Yet after all, to find the Creator 
 from His works, is like trying to find the 
 centre of a circle from its circumference : 
 nay, considering the smallness of our knowl- 
 edge of those works, from a very brief part 
 of the circumference. As a practical matter 
 the chances are all against our striking the
 
 20 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 centre by any straight line drawn from the 
 circumference. The process, exact only in 
 theory, becomes merely approximate in 
 practice. 
 
 We propose a new way. Let us begin at 
 the centre and go to the circumference. We 
 cannot miss it, if we go straight. Let us 
 start from Christ, who claims to be and 
 whom Christians believe to be the centre of 
 the created universe. I shall consider only 
 the material world, leaving to abler hands the 
 corresponding inquiry as to the spiritual 
 world. If Christ be the maker of the visible 
 universe, what kind of a universe have we a 
 right to expect it to be? Judging by His 
 character and His declarations, what sort of a 
 world has He made ? Is it the world we have ? 
 If so far as our limited faculties and our ad- 
 mittedly partial knowledge enable us to see, 
 the world around us is in great essential facts 
 about which we are certain, the same world 
 we looked for if Christ be its author and 
 centre, the correspondence cannot fail to give 
 satisfaction to the Christian, and to the hon- 
 est sceptic perhaps help towards rest.
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 21 
 
 In trying to follow out this argument, let 
 us not forget that humility becomes the in- 
 quirer, for while we know some things cer- 
 tainly about our Lord and His universe there 
 remain to us possibly infinite treasures of 
 knowledge of each, to be slowly gained as 
 the years move on. This fact should not pre- 
 vent our making use of the truth so far as we 
 have it, being confident that growing light 
 will only help us to see better the things we 
 already see well. 
 
 Beginning now at the centre, we recognize 
 that our external knowledge of Christ is de- 
 rived, not from tradition nor from secular 
 writings, but from the Bible. It is one of the 
 strangest facts in human history that a per- 
 sonage so exalted and unique, dropping words 
 such as the world might well stop its busy 
 life to hear, should have attracted no attention 
 from contemporary secular historians or 
 philosophers. Tacitus had time to enlarge 
 upon the acts of an obscure tribe of bar- 
 barians, or the doings of an infamous court 
 favourite, but no eye or ear for acts and words 
 which have altered the map of the world and
 
 22 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 changed the course of history. The Bible and 
 the Bible alone is our biography of Christ. 
 The Old Testament is a light shining forward : 
 the New Testament a light shining backward 
 both concentrated upon and revealing the 
 same person ; and neither is complete with- 
 out the other. The Lord Himself said: 
 " Search the Scriptures (that is the Old Testa- 
 ment) for they are they which testify of Me." 
 The testimony of the two Testaments as to 
 our Saviour is so full that we need no help 
 from tradition or secular sources. In a re- 
 markable passage the great Erasmus declares 
 that " these Scriptures give us a living image 
 of that Divine being and reveal Christ Him- 
 self speaking, healing, dying and rising 
 again : indeed they make Him in His entire 
 being so vividly present to us that we see Him 
 better than if He stood before us bodily." In 
 a glow of emotion this great scholar exclaims, 
 " Let us thirst for these sacred writings with 
 all our soul, let us embrace them, die in them 
 at last and be changed into them, for what we 
 study that we are." 
 To ask therefore what is the relation of
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 23 
 
 Christ to Science is to ask what is the rela- 
 tion of the Bible to Science. Its declarations 
 are His declarations. Its attitude on any 
 question is His attitude. What then does the 
 Bible teach us as to the external world ? The 
 various books of the sacred Scriptures are 
 very different in the number of their refer- 
 ences to that world. Some of these books, 
 like Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms and the dis- 
 courses of our Lord are rich in them. Others 
 like the historical books, many of the proph- 
 ecies and the Epistles, have very few. 
 
 These references to external nature are 
 partly illustrative and rhetorical, for the Bible 
 is not a text-book of science, and such al- 
 lusions are only auxiliary to its high purpose. 
 Being illustrative in large part, to be intelligi- 
 ble, they must conform to the views however 
 unscientific, which prevailed among the peo- 
 ple addressed. Else instead of bringing light 
 to the subject, they would have brought 
 darkness and would \ave been adumbra- 
 tions and not illustrations. With these rhe- 
 torical uses of Nature, our argument has 
 nothing to do.
 
 24 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 There remain two other classes of state- 
 ments with regard to the physical universe. 
 The first of these are the so-called miraculous 
 events events which are " little wonders " 
 because they involve effects unexpected and 
 apparently without a physical cause. A 
 proper study of them requires a contempla- 
 tion of both worlds, material and spiritual, and 
 a discussion of the possibility of the transit of 
 energy from one to the other. This would 
 take us far beyond the humble task we have 
 proposed to ourselves at this time. Before 
 passing from it, may we not be pardoned for 
 saying, that a miracle is not a violation of the 
 order of Nature ? What is the order of Na- 
 ture ? Is it a fixed succession of events ? So 
 it seems perhaps to the young astronomer. 
 
 In those vast abysses of space, where giant 
 suns and clusters and nebulous clouds pursue 
 their solitary majestic courses, at such huge 
 intervals as to make collisions all but impos- 
 sible, we have a spectacle nearest to a perma- 
 nent picture, of anything known to us. Fixed 
 stars, we call them. For ages they present 
 to the observer the same patterns and fig-
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 25 
 
 ures. The shepherd boy, David, would 
 know our Orion and Arcturus were he here 
 to gaze upon them. Now and then, how- 
 ever, to the minute scrutiny of the modern 
 telescope, a sudden interruption of this sta- 
 bility occurs. A new star blazes forth or one 
 long known vanishes. A mighty collision 
 has occurred. The fixed succession has been 
 violated, but the order of Nature remains un- 
 disturbed, for the same laws of motion which 
 are revealed in the uninterrupted march of 
 some, required the collision of others, and, by 
 competent intelligence, might have been fore- 
 seen for ages. Such catastrophes belong to 
 the order of nature. When we descend to 
 the earth this order becomes complicated. 
 There are great successions of phenomena, 
 like the seasons, the ocean currents, the trade 
 winds, which remain the same, and may be 
 foreseen ; along with them, however, are hun- 
 dreds of events less amenable to prediction. 
 Especially is the variation from a fixed order 
 manifested where man's interference is pos- 
 sible. Rivers are moved from old channels ; 
 Niagaras are taken from spectacular leaping
 
 26 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 and harnessed to humdrum work ; seasons 
 are modified by destruction of forests ; seas 
 are united by great canals ; and many things 
 made to happen which never happened before. 
 In all these the fixed succession of events 
 is constantly abrogated. Is the order of Na- 
 ture violated by such interruption ? On 
 the contrary, would not that order be violated 
 if such interruption did not occur, when the 
 conditions have been changed ? The intro- 
 duction of volition (touching the triggers of 
 unused stores of potential energy), must bring 
 new things to pass, and the order of the world 
 would be destroyed if the old things kept on. 
 The true order of Nature is, that every effect 
 must have a cause, and every cause must 
 have its effect. Hence if a new cause be in- 
 troduced, a new effect must arise, if the order 
 of Nature is preserved. A miraculous event 
 is then a violation of natural order only if it 
 can be proved to be causeless. The order of 
 Nature is synonymous with an unchanged 
 succession of events, only so long as no new 
 cause is introduced. If God intervenes, a 
 miracle belongs to that order.
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 2^ 
 
 There remains to us in the Bible a third 
 class of statements as to the material world 
 comparatively few in number, which are not 
 illustrations but revelations. They are posi- 
 tive declarations which reach to the reality of 
 the things we see, and which, being in the 
 Bible, must be true of any universe which 
 Christ has made. They may not be con- 
 formable to the science of the times in which 
 they were written, nor to that of many ages 
 afterwards. The boldness of these declara- 
 tions is such that if they were made in a mere 
 human uninspired document, it would argue 
 a reckless folly on the part of the writer, in- 
 conceivable in a person of ordinary judgment. 
 No human being would venture on positive 
 statements of novel character which he need 
 not make, and which, once made, might im- 
 peril the credibility of his entire treatise. But 
 if a Divine being speaks there is no room for 
 caution or timidity. The boldness which 
 would be weak in a man, is the proper tone 
 and sign of a God. 
 
 We ask your attention to some passages 
 of this kind in the Old Testament. That
 
 28 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 Testament opens grandly with a tremendous 
 statement as to the material world. Even in 
 our English version the words roll out with 
 indescribable majesty : " In the beginning, 
 God created the Heaven and the Earth." 
 The material universe is declared by the 
 Bible not to be eternal. It began in time, 
 and it owed its origin not to physical causes. 
 This origin is asserted to be superphysical. 
 The Bible declares that the chain of physical 
 causation reaching backwards farther and 
 farther, is not endless. It stops at a definite 
 moment in the past and at that end is an act 
 of God. 
 
 What a contrast is seen between these clear 
 simple words of the Bible, and the obscure, 
 non-committal and sparing references re- 
 ported to us by students of the sacred books 
 of India, as given in those venerable docu- 
 ments with regard to the primordial universe ! 
 They seem to assume that the ultimate mat- 
 ter, the Urstoff or Protyle of the philosophers 
 is eternal, and that the beginning of the world 
 was merely the formation of stars and worlds, 
 out of this everlasting material. In contrast
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 29 
 
 with these vague and dreamy views, our 
 Holy Book speaks with a simplicity and au- 
 thority befitting Divinity. 
 
 But the Bible goes farther. It recognizes 
 that matter is not the only constituent of the 
 universe. To make a world, the matter must 
 be endowed with power. Matter alone would 
 give a world motionless and dark and silent. 
 Matter with energy gives a world of move- 
 ment, shining and singing. Having just de- 
 clared the origin of matter to be superphys- 
 ical, the Holy Scripture now proceeds to 
 declare the origin of energy to be super- 
 physical. Of all the forms of energy, light is 
 the most universal and most typical. It is 
 therefore selected by the Old Testament 
 writer as the symbol of all energy. The 
 created world of matter lay without form and 
 void, and darkness covered the deep. " And 
 God said Let there be light, and there was 
 light." Energy is therefore declared by the 
 Bible not to be eternal. It too, came into the 
 world at a definite time, and its beginning 
 was not physical but superphysical. 
 
 But matter and energy will not make a
 
 30 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 complete world. They will make solar sys- 
 tems, with all their shining members in har- 
 monious circulation. It will be like a house 
 with all its furniture, but no inhabitant. The 
 Bible completes its universe by adding life to 
 matter and energy. Life too had a begin- 
 ning and that beginning was superphysical. 
 " And God said, Let the Earth bring forth 
 grass : Let the waters bring forth abun- 
 dantly the moving creature that hath life : 
 Let the Earth bring forth the living creature 
 after his kind." Finally the Lord God 
 formed man of the dust of the ground, and 
 breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. 
 Life, therefore, was no product of matter and 
 energy, but owed its origin to the super- 
 physical act of God. 
 
 Christ's universe, therefore, is composed of 
 matter, energy and life. No one of them is 
 eternal. They all originated in time, and 
 their origin is alike " supernatural." The 
 " natural " forces in Christ's universe cannot 
 create or annihilate energy, and therefore 
 cannot add to or subtract from the matter, 
 the energy, or the life that are put into it
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 31 
 
 The challenge is made. The gauntlet is cast. 
 The voice of Christ is clear. It was uttered 
 before science had an existence. Matter, 
 Energy and Life are superphysical in their 
 origin, said the Bible three thousand years 
 ago. This is a fundamental truth in the 
 world which Christ made. 
 
 Is this the universe we have ? Do matter, 
 energy and life make it up, and are the forces 
 of nature as we have them, incompetent to 
 produce either matter or energy or life ? For 
 two thousand years after Genesis was prob- 
 ably written the answer would have been No. 
 The nineteenth century has reversed this an- 
 swer, and we now say Yes. 
 
 The physical universe, speaking only of 
 that portion, possibly only a small part of it, 
 which is known to us, is a scene of amazing va- 
 riety and magnificence. Man stands between 
 two infinities, one stretching out above him 
 into worlds on worlds immeasurably numer- 
 ous, grand and distant : the other descending 
 beneath him into smaller and smaller groups 
 and constituents : a universe of atoms as in- 
 numerable and complex and orderly as the
 
 32 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 great orbs above us, but unlike them invis- 
 ible. These infinities great and small can 
 only be studied by classification. Not indi- 
 viduals, but species, genera, orders, classes, 
 are all we can at large describe or learn. 
 The material world is a wonderful picture. 
 The photographs of the starry heavens each 
 giving a small portion of the great celestial 
 vault, disclose a richness surpassing the 
 splendid profusion which even the telescope 
 helps the eye to detect in the same field, for 
 photography is keener than vision. 
 
 No microscope or camera can seize the 
 other universe. The atom and molecule, that 
 we know better than the distant stellar units, 
 are seen and doubtless will ever be seen only 
 by the eye of faith. In this vast expanse, 
 events are taking place which strongly sug- 
 gested to the early enquirers the fluctuating 
 character of the materials of the world. 
 
 The disappearance of heavenly bodies, or 
 their appearance where they were not before ; 
 the vanishing and reappearance of clouds, 
 the disappearance of fuel in burning, and of 
 water from a shallow pool, were believed by
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 33 
 
 many of the ancients to indicate destruction 
 and reproduction of matter. To them the 
 thought that a bit of matter could perish or 
 be reproduced was not only not untrue, but 
 was apparently the verdict of common sense 
 and ordinary observation. The opposite 
 opinion grew slowly into scientific conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 The close of the eighteenth and the open- 
 ing of the nineteenth century may be re- 
 garded as the era of the rise of modern 
 chemistry. Dalton and Lavoisier, with the 
 brilliant associates of the latter who helped to 
 make the Napoleonic times so remarkable, 
 led in a critical study of the disappearances 
 and appearances of matter in chemical acts 
 of decomposition and recombination. Bring- 
 ing the question involved to the test of highly 
 improved balances, chemists were able to 
 show that in all the operations they studied, 
 there was no variation which their balances 
 could detect in the sum total of the matter 
 employed. Such analyses are the common 
 work of every laboratory in the world, and 
 in the century since Lavoisier died, millions
 
 34 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 of these scrutinies have occurred, with not 
 the slightest evidence that a single atom has 
 ever been added to or taken from the aggre- 
 gate in the world by natural agencies. 
 
 What a few minds in the former ages sus- 
 pected to be true, is now accepted as estab- 
 lished truth. Chemistry has given us the 
 great doctrine called the Conservation of Mat- 
 ter, namely, that the forces of nature studied 
 by scientists, can neither create nor destroy 
 matter. In all its multiplied changes the 
 alteration is only of form and place, and not of 
 total quantity. 
 
 An objector may here interpose and say 
 " Your statement is based on the operation of 
 weighing. Is your balance perfect? Can 
 you weigh an atom ? If one were added to 
 or subtracted from the load, is there a 
 balance on earth that could detect the fact?" 
 In reply we must admit, that our balances are 
 imperfect and that there are masses so small 
 that the best balance is insensible to their 
 weight. But we can with the balance weigh a 
 mass too small to cause it to turn. The 
 balance is the most exact weighing instrument
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 35 
 
 we have, and while we have instruments more 
 sensitive, we have none so steady and con- 
 sistent as it. The balance stands in those 
 respects at the very head of all our measuring 
 apparatus. So sensitive may it be, that it is 
 reported by a former head of the Coast Survey 
 that a balance in possession of that office 
 will indicate a difference in the weight of two 
 small cubes according as they are placed in 
 the pan side by side or one upon top of the 
 other. 
 
 Repeated careful weighings of the same 
 object with a fine balance do not exactly 
 agree, but the variation is extremely small. 
 The whole number of results is found to 
 cluster closely about a mean value which 
 is far less fluctuating in a number of trials 
 than any individual weighing. The depart- 
 ures of the separate weighings from this 
 mean are on both sides of it, and there are 
 many more minute variations than large ones. 
 This mean result is accepted as the best 
 value of the weight which the whole series of 
 trials gives. Using the balance thus, chemists 
 declare that they can find no evidence that
 
 36 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 the mass of a compound is different from the 
 sum of the masses of its constituents. Now, 
 the balance has slowly become more perfect 
 since Lavoisier's time, but its increased ac- 
 curacy has not served to detect any fault in 
 the law of conservation of matter. Of course 
 it is always possible, without a perfect in- 
 strument used by a perfect being, to locate an 
 objection by naming a mass too small to be 
 detected : but it will strike the honest thinker 
 that a quantity less than any measurable 
 quantity, and dwindling as the instrument is 
 improved, would be zero with a perfect in- 
 strument and has no existence. 
 
 The great doctrine of the Conservation of 
 Matter is too often identified with the assumed 
 fixity and permanence of the so-called elemen- 
 tary bodies. Attempts to transmute the 
 metals, or decompose into simpler bodies any 
 of the received elements had always failed. 
 Clerk-Maxwell in a celebrated essay uses 
 these elements as natural finalities, and as 
 being outside of any possible evolution. 
 They do not seem to have grown to be what 
 they are. Yet other great philosophers were
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 37 
 
 not of that opinion, for Faraday confessed he 
 had worked at transmutation, and Dumas in 
 similar efforts reached some results that were 
 at least suggestive. Indeed it has constantly 
 been declared by chemists that by elements 
 they do not mean bodies absolutely irreduci- 
 ble, but only irreducible under existing condi- 
 tions and by existing means. At a previous 
 period of the earth, and even now in our Sun 
 or other stellar systems, some of these bodies 
 may be replaced by simpler constituents. 
 The world was therefore not unprepared for the 
 remarkable discovery of the past decade that 
 certain new bodies, called at first elements, 
 were in a state of active molecular change ; 
 in all probability, spontaneously passing to 
 simpler bodies, and evolving surprising 
 amounts of energy of radiation in the 
 process. 
 
 We have been led to suspect by the facts 
 of radio-activity, that a few of our metallic 
 elements are not permanent, but are passing 
 with a slowness that may require ages for the 
 completion of their history into lower, simpler 
 and more stable forms. Enthusiastic theor-
 
 38 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 ists snatching these fragments of truth are, 
 after their usual practice, already running to 
 the wildest conjectures as to the history of 
 our elementary bodies, and see clearly that 
 our silver becomes lead and our gold changes 
 to copper. 
 
 There is nothing very new or impossible in 
 the most extravagant of these dreams. 
 Chemists have for long years made us 
 familiar with multitudes of bodies whose 
 molecules are easily resolved in the laboratory, 
 and spontaneously so in nature around us, 
 into simpler ones. They give us also the 
 contrary phenomenon of constructing from 
 simple unpromising materials, most complex 
 new bodies of the strangest and most inter- 
 esting properties. The gorgeous colours of 
 the aniline series are developed from coal : 
 and the tremendous power of nitroglycerine 
 from harmless beginnings. How easy, then, 
 is it for us to admit that uranium may degen- 
 erate into radium and radium into helium, 
 and that possibly in some distant star re- 
 cently, or in some distant epoch of our sun's 
 history, helium may have been raised to
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 39 
 
 radium and radium to uranium. Has all this 
 anything really to do with the conservation of 
 matter? Does any one dream of making 
 radium out of nothing ? The conservation of 
 matter does not mean the permanence of any 
 form of it or any state of aggregation, but the 
 preservation of its total amount. The great 
 law of the conservation of matter is no more 
 attacked by the decay of uranium than by 
 the decay of a leaf. The passage of matter 
 from more intricate to more elementary forms 
 has been universally recognized. Such proc- 
 esses are only now extended possibly to 
 forms heretofore believed to be invariable. 
 
 Should all the chemical elements be finally 
 proved to have come originally from simpler 
 forms and to be only the more stable and yet 
 possibly not final forms of degradation, it 
 would, I believe, be no shock to our leading 
 chemists, who taught us years ago that the 
 "element" was only conditionally perma- 
 nent None of these transformations, actual 
 or possible, historical or prophetic, involve 
 the creation or annihilation of a single atom. 
 
 A more serious attack on the doctrine of
 
 40 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 the conservation of matter appears in the re- 
 cent speculations of certain living scientists 
 of great repute. The times we live in are re- 
 markable for the number and eagerness of 
 scientific enquirers. Their emulation and 
 restless activity put a premium on hypothesis. 
 Scientific restraint and patience are gone. 
 Our fathers, like Kepler, could wait a century 
 for an interpreter : but with us the slightest 
 new fact starts a world of speculation, and book 
 and magazine and lecture platform resound 
 with philosophic clamour till the next discov- 
 ery directs attention another way. 
 
 A recent observation of a very able man 
 has led him to push molecular theory far 
 beyond the point at which we just now left 
 it. He suggests the possibility of the analysis 
 of the elements reaching such a stage of 
 simplification that there would be but one 
 final substance, and that would not be what 
 we know as matter in the form of the 
 " elements." So far it is an old story. The 
 idea of a single ultimate material out of 
 which all things are made was not unfamiliar 
 to the ancients. In more recent times the
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 41 
 
 Jesuit father, Boscovich, used it in a beauti- 
 ful atomic theory, which as a static theory 
 has never been approached for clearness and 
 fertility. As the same material carbon gives 
 us the soft black coal, the hard crystalline 
 graphite and the yet harder and flashing 
 diamond, the contrasted properties of which 
 must be explained by collocation : just as the 
 humble cottage and the stately cathedral in 
 a city may be made of the same kind of 
 bricks, so it is a captivating hypothesis that 
 the endless variety in nature may arise from 
 the different ways in which the same con- 
 structive material is used. 
 
 But the brilliant professor goes much 
 farther. This ultimate material may not be 
 ordinary matter at all, but only electricity. 
 The electric atoms, or electrons are what we 
 know as negative electricity, the positive 
 being merely a deficiency of negative. The 
 professor has most ingeniously imagined a 
 kinetic atomic theory in which different 
 numbers and arrangements of these electrons 
 would constitute molecules of matter with 
 many of the qualities, which are associated
 
 42 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 with ordinary matter, such as radio-activity, 
 valency and periodic properties. 
 
 To some it appears that so far from matter 
 being preserved, this speculation makes it al- 
 together vanish. It does, if you identify 
 matter with the chemical elements. But the 
 electrons have mass and their combinations 
 do not cre.ate any new mass. The molecule 
 they build up has a mass equal to the sum 
 of its electrons. No one would more quickly 
 assert that the conservation of matter is as 
 true of the electron world, as it is of the 
 derived world, than the eminent author of 
 this new proposition. It is true that there 
 is one sign of mass, its inertia, which we 
 have been used to regard as invariable as the 
 mass itself, but which in the new theory must 
 be modified. The apparent inertia of an 
 electron, or ultimate electric atom, and there- 
 fore its apparent mass, depends on its speed. 
 
 With a speed approaching that of light, it 
 appears much heavier than it is. But when 
 we look closer, this is accounted for by the 
 fact that at their highest speeds the ether is 
 sensibly disturbed and its inertia is added to
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 43 
 
 that of the electron. When an Atlantic liner 
 is at its greatest speed, no small weight of 
 salt water is dragged with it and increases 
 its inertia. Yet the ship itself is no heavier. 
 Obviously this peculiar feature of the electron 
 theory is no real denial of the proposition 
 that the sum total of matter in the world is 
 not altered by the natural processes taking 
 place there. Looking ahead, it is not diffi- 
 cult to see that the next step in the analysis 
 will be to make the electron out of the ether 
 in which it moves, and which supports its 
 activities, and at last we shall have but one 
 thing in the universe. But this would again 
 not attack the conservation of matter, for the 
 ether is matter, and was always included in 
 the law. We have simply pressed the de- 
 composition to its last stage, but the tumbling 
 down of a house does not alter the weight of 
 its materials. 
 
 Our conclusion, therefore, is that the cen- 
 tury since Lavoisier died, has not contradicted 
 but has supported the great truth for which 
 he was sponsor. The scientific world to-day 
 puts the doctrine as one of the corner stones
 
 44 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 of our physical science. The world we live 
 in is characterized by this feature, that the 
 material of which it is made is not changed 
 in amount by the forces operating in it. So 
 far as they are concerned the aggregate 
 amount of matter is the same, yesterday, to- 
 day and through all time. 
 
 But the world is more than the objects in it. 
 When we have counted the stars and ex- 
 hausted the catalogue of terrestrial objects, we 
 have only noted a part and that the least part 
 of the universe. No photograph, however 
 minute and faithful can represent the world 
 except at one moment. It is not a picture or 
 panorama, but a theatre. Its constituent 
 bodies are not self-defined and independent. 
 They are perpetually changing and their 
 changes are due to and determined by their 
 neighbours. What a body is, makes a most 
 interesting study. What it can do, is a far 
 nobler and higher study. The rank of a 
 member of the material world, whether sun or 
 planet, tree or rock, is fixed by the amount of 
 power it has to influence other bodies. This 
 power energy, it was called by St. Paul
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 45 
 
 nearly two thousand years ago is, though 
 invisible, the most precious thing in the world. 
 Like all high things it is inexpressibly deli- 
 cate and fugitive. Philosophers tell us that 
 it is incessantly passing from body to body, 
 often with the speed of light, and that these 
 transfers constitute really the events of the 
 visible world. 
 
 The quantity of energy possessed by any 
 one body is, therefore, in a state of incessant 
 change. That the sum total of a thing so 
 fluctuating and variable in individuals, should 
 in the aggregate be unchangeable, would 
 have appeared, a century ago, a most ques- 
 tionable proposition, if not highly improbable. 
 But before the guillotine had slain Lavoisier, a 
 few great scientists in France, England and 
 Germany were laying the foundation for a 
 declaration on this point that would vivify 
 every department of science. Newton indeed 
 had virtually uttered it more than a century 
 before, but the statement was unintelligible to 
 his readers. It was left for the nineteenth 
 century in its first half to bring to light the 
 grand doctrine of the conservation of energy,
 
 46 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 namely, that in the countless operations of 
 Nature, and in all the transfers and transfor- 
 mations undergone by the noble fugitive they 
 called energy, there is no alteration of its 
 amount. Natural forces neither create nor 
 annihilate energy. They only pass it to and 
 fro. So far as they are concerned, its total 
 quantity in the world is invariable. We can 
 follow its changes in the simpler phenomena 
 of visible motions studied in physics, and in 
 the more hidden processes of heat and elec- 
 tricity. Here we can measure the energy 
 passing. In the more intricate facts of chem- 
 istry, and finally in the higher and yet more 
 complex field of biology, the law of Conser- 
 vation of Energy has been of incalculable 
 value in directing lines of research and it has 
 never led to error. It is universally accepted 
 as one of the foundation stones of physical 
 science. Only a true principle will always 
 lead us right. 
 
 The manifestations of energy in the uni- 
 verse furnish 'a. basis of classification of its 
 innumerable constituents of the most funda- 
 mental character. The greatest inequalities
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 47 
 
 prevail. Some bodies are so rich in this 
 splendid endowment that they are raised to 
 a lofty height in creation. For ages they 
 pour forth this treasure in lavish abundance, 
 and these constitute a kingly class. Such 
 marvellous centres of radiation are the count- 
 less suns in celestial space. They are num- 
 bered by at least a hundred million, while the 
 dark bodies, poor in energy, which receive 
 supplies from them, are many times more 
 numerous. Up to a very recent time the as- 
 tronomer alone could present to us these tre- 
 mendous localizations of energy the foci 
 whence light and heat pass incessantly to less 
 favoured bodies to be transformed there into 
 the manifold varieties of energy, making up a 
 complete planet. 
 
 Thus we have been told from our childhood 
 that the multiplied activities of our own earth, 
 in sky and sea and land, are only changes 
 rung upon the energy unceasingly poured 
 upon us from the sun, whose children all our 
 forms of life and motion are. It is a beauti- 
 ful truth, worthy of all the elaboration it has 
 received from scientists and poets. But
 
 48 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 recent discoveries have revealed to us de- 
 positories of energy of such transcendent 
 magnitude, all around us and in us, that we 
 no longer need to ascend into heaven or take 
 the wings of the morning to find them. The 
 study of radium and its associates in activity 
 reveals to us an amount of energy bound up 
 in the molecules of matter all about us that 
 makes the radiant wealth of a star seem an 
 ordinary thing. It has been computed by 
 Professor J. ] Thomson in his Yale lectures 
 that a gramme of radium which emits per 
 hour enough heat to raise one hundred 
 grammes of water one degree, would take 
 fifty thousand years to exhaust its energy. 
 This means energy enough to raise a battle- 
 ship of eighteen thousand tons more than 
 three-fourths of a mile. If such be the 
 amount of energy in a minute amount of 
 this metal it is oppressive to our imagination 
 to consider what tremendous stores of it are 
 locked up in the invisible atoms which make 
 up the world in which we live. In all these 
 molecular accumulations, no fact has yet ap- 
 peared to indicate that radio-activity is more
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 49 
 
 than transfer and transformation of energy, 
 without at all affecting its total amount. 
 
 But the nineteenth century had yet an- 
 other great contribution to make to human 
 knowledge. Matter and motion do not 
 make up the whole of the world we know. 
 Our earth at least is enriched with the pres- 
 ence of life. We can no more define life 
 than we can define matter, or motion, or 
 time, or space. Yet we know them well 
 enough never to confound them or take one 
 for another. The attempted definitions of 
 life are curious mental exercises, making 
 obscure what at least we felt was clear 
 enough before. The beginning of life in 
 the world is a problem which to mere 
 naturalists is invested with unspeakable 
 difficulty. To attribute it to germ-laden 
 meteors from a distant sphere would sound 
 more like a jest than a sober hypothesis, if 
 we could forget that a Scotchman proposed it. 
 
 The notion that in some way unliving 
 matter may rise to organized living forms 
 is as old as history. Students recall with 
 merriment Virgil's method in the Georgics
 
 50 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 of producing a swarm of bees. The search 
 for the origin of life, as a mere scientific 
 exercise, is a fascinating one. Professor 
 Bastian fifty years ago believed that he had 
 seen life appear where there had been none. 
 It is a noteworthy fact that the men who sub- 
 jected his experiment to a merciless criticism 
 and demonstrated his mistake, were two 
 leaders, known as sceptics, who might have 
 been expected to welcome the asserted fact, 
 but whose love of truth rejected a claim in 
 which their scientific skill detected and ex- 
 posed a fallacy. The chase of the ignis 
 fattius still goes on. We hear of attempts 
 at home and abroad. Without specifying 
 them here, the sober judgment of those best 
 able to estimate these interesting trials, is at 
 most the Scotch verdict " not proven." The 
 unanimous opinion of biologists to-day ap- 
 pears to be that which was enunciated by 
 the great masters of the nineteenth century 
 from Linnaeus on to Darwin, Huxley and 
 Gray, that life is not produced from unliving 
 matter. The great doctrine of the Continuity 
 of Life takes its place by the side of those
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 51 
 
 other fundamental truths the Conservation 
 of Matter and the Conservation of Energy. 
 
 If one is asked, "What are the great 
 scientific triumphs of the nineteenth century," 
 he would be apt to mention the steamboat and 
 locomotive, the common telegraph, telephone 
 and wireless telegraph, the high-power rifled 
 cannon and the ironclad, the sewing machine 
 and typewriter, the dynamo and electric 
 light. These are great things and make 
 that century a marked one. But greater 
 than all these inventions, and lying in a 
 higher plane are the three great scientific 
 generalizations the Conservation of Matter, 
 the Conservation of Energy and the Con- 
 tinuity of Life. These lift that century to 
 primacy over all its predecessors. That 
 century was the first that enabled us to 
 answer the inquiry with which we set out. 
 
 In view of what has been said, the idea 
 entertained by some, that the honest study 
 of Nature leads away from a Creator, would 
 seem to be unfounded. If an honest scientist 
 were asked to account for the beginning of 
 matter or energy or life, he would have to
 
 52 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 admit that science can give no account of it 
 The forces she studies the only ones he 
 finds in the operations of the world have 
 no power to create an atom or a monad. 
 Hence to ask science to tell how they came 
 into being, is like asking a blind man about 
 light, or a deaf man about music. For the 
 scientist to say that because science tells 
 nothing about absolute beginnings or end- 
 ings, there are none such, is as if the man 
 without eyesight should declare there is no 
 light. Sound science does not affirm the 
 eternity of matter, energy or life ; she merely 
 says when asked about the origin of either, 
 that she does not know, that she has no 
 means of telling it : that the inquirer must 
 resort to some other source of knowledge 
 than science for an answer to his question. I 
 step into a lecture room and see on the 
 blackboard a circle. It has no sign of a 
 beginning or end. If I am asked to find its 
 origin, geometry cannot help me to an 
 answer. Must I say that it is eternal ? Not 
 so, for a bystander of established character, 
 tells me that he was present when it was
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 53 
 
 drawn and can designate the point from 
 which it started. So when science cannot 
 tell us the origin of the world the testimony 
 of one who was at its beginning may satisfy 
 our questioning. 
 
 Is the world as we know it the world which 
 the Bible declares that Christ made? The 
 world of the Bible was declared to be one 
 whose matter, energy and life were all of 
 supernatural origin, and therefore one in 
 which mere natural forces could work no new 
 addition to either. After thousands of years 
 of slow patient inquiry, modern science de- 
 clares that the actual world is one character- 
 ized by these very features ; that the forces at 
 play in it can make no atom, can create no 
 energy, can start no life. In the most funda- 
 mental and universal of all principles, Christ's 
 world and this world are thus identified. 
 
 The irresistible inference is that the Bible is 
 right : Christ did made the universe. He is 
 here, not by courtesy, nor in a foreign or 
 hostile field, but in His own house. This 
 splendid array which comes from His hand 
 cannot be unfriendly to His highest work.
 
 54 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 All things were made by Him. They were 
 also made for Him. The Christian may walk 
 in every direction through this wonderful 
 creation and humbly feel that he has a right 
 to be here. He is at home, in his father's 
 house. Its light and beauty are for him. 
 They were made by his Lord, whom he may 
 see in every flower and hear in every bird- 
 song. Christ fills the universe. His wisdom 
 is enclosed in the atom and expanded in the 
 starry world. Nature is full of interest when 
 studied for itself alone, but infinitely richer 
 when the glorious, gracious Maker is discerned 
 in the works of His hands.
 
 LECTURE If 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT IN ITS RE- 
 LATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT IN ITS RE- 
 LATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 
 
 IN its literary aspects, no writing having 
 the same general subject the revela- 
 tion of the Son of God could well be in 
 greater contrast to the Old Testament than 
 the New, The Old Testament in its poetry 
 and its prose, in its biography, history, 
 prophecy and song, presenting every form of 
 literature and a perfect model in each, has 
 yet a deliriously antique flavour, and brings 
 to our imagination a lively picture of the 
 times in which it was written and the people 
 whose grander features of character are in- 
 delibly stamped upon it. 
 
 The New Testament diction is more like 
 that of our own age. It is simple, too, but its 
 simplicity comes with larger sentences. The 
 ample elastic Greek, with its musical lubric- 
 ity, doubtless the most perfect tongue ever 
 spoken by man was the vehicle of the one ; 
 57
 
 58 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 while the stately Hebrew, majestic, intense, 
 less copious, was the voice of the other 
 the one magnificent in expression, the other 
 marvellous in suggestion. So sharply con- 
 trasted are these great tongues, that our 
 English versions retain their characteristics, 
 and we, who are shut up to the latter in our 
 reading, are not altogether unable to appre- 
 ciate those qualities which the scholar doubt- 
 less sees better. Even to us, passing from 
 the Old Testament to the New is somewhat 
 like going from Stonehenge to St. Paul's 
 Cathedral. 
 
 These two divisions of the Bible are strik- 
 ingly different in their relation to the great 
 theme, which both of them have in common. 
 There is no part of religion that is neglected 
 in either, but is it not true that in the older 
 books the external side is emphasized, and in 
 the later ones the internal side ? In the one 
 the foundation and growth of the Church, her 
 lapses and their punishment, with her glorious 
 future, are painted in vivid colours? In the 
 other, the inner life of the believer, his growth 
 in spiritual power, his trials and victories, his
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 59 
 
 falls and recoveries and his glorious personal 
 destiny largely occupy the canvas. In the 
 one it is the God of the chosen people whom 
 we worship. In the other, it is the God of 
 each true Israelite whom we love. This 
 statement appears to be supported by the 
 marked difference in the two Testaments as 
 to the prominence given to the Third Per- 
 son of the adorable Trinity. The Holy 
 Spirit, the breath of the Almighty, is men- 
 tioned seventy times in the Old Testament, 
 while in the New Testament covering less 
 than one-third the space, He, the minister of 
 grace and power to the Christian believer, is 
 spoken of two hundred and thirty-two times. 
 That is, He is named eleven times as often in 
 the one as in an equal number of pages of 
 the other. This fact makes a decided change 
 in the standpoint from which man's relation 
 to his Maker is viewed. In both Testaments, 
 the spiritual and temporal are mingled. In 
 the older one the spiritual looks at us through 
 the temporal ; in the later, the spiritual usurps 
 the field of view and the temporal is often 
 only seen at a second glance.
 
 60 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 If, therefore, we are seeking for any light 
 upon Christ's physical world in the pages of 
 the New Testament, we are largely shut up 
 to the possible relations of the world of mat- 
 ter to moral qualities. Let it not be thought 
 chimerical to suppose that the material uni- 
 verse may have important bearings on ethical 
 or religious growth. The pursuit of truth in 
 Nature may be friendly or unfriendly to virtue, 
 
 But if Christ be the author of both worlds, 
 they will surely not be discordant. We 
 should expect the one to be in some realiza- 
 ble sense adapted to the other. To suppose 
 that He would make the two worlds hostile 
 one to the other, so that excellence in the 
 one would be irreconcilable with proficiency 
 in the other ; or even that He would make 
 them so independent of each other, that the 
 phenomena of the one would have no sort of 
 relation to those of the other, is a hypothesis 
 so unreasonable as to be inadmissible. 
 
 We propose to inquire whether the qualities 
 inculcated, especially in the New Testament, 
 as characterizing the true disciples of Christ 
 are such as best prepare one for, and are fos-
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 6l 
 
 tered by, study of the other world, the ma- 
 terial world, which He is declared to have 
 made. Is the perfect man of the New Testa- 
 ment, the perfect man of science ? If this is 
 true, shall we not have a strong proof that 
 the Bible is right in telling us that both came 
 from one hand? On the contrary, should 
 the traits of character fostered by scientific 
 pursuits be unchristian, we must believe that 
 the world material and the world spiritual 
 have different authors. 
 
 What then are fundamental traits of Chris- 
 tian character as drawn by the Master Him- 
 self? Let us pick out only the brighter 
 jewels from the full circle of gems. I would 
 surely name first Humility, the basis of virtue, 
 the indispensable condition of genuine ex- 
 cellence, the corner-stone of all lofty character. 
 Like other precious things, it is often coun- 
 terfeited. Mock humility is too common. 
 True humility is rarer than it should be. 
 
 It is easier to say what it is not, than what 
 it is. It is not servility,, This cowardly trait, 
 unlike humility, is often accompanied by great 
 sensitiveness to supposed slights and by an
 
 62 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 overweening self-esteem. Humility does not 
 crawl abjectly before power or rank. It does 
 not consort with cowardice or suspicion. It 
 no more crouches before the insolent, than it 
 tramples on the weak. The opposite of ser- 
 vility is tyranny : the opposite of humility is 
 pride. 
 
 It is commonly said that pride grows out 
 of an extravagant conceit of our merit or our 
 possessions : while humility is based on a 
 modest and proper self-estimate. Thus Mr. 
 Spurgeon says that " humility is to make a 
 right estimate of one's self. It is no humility 
 for a man to think less of himself than he 
 ought, though it might rather puzzle him to 
 do that." After all, are not our estimates of 
 ourselves or others always relative? We 
 must have what scientists call a unit of meas- 
 ure. The proud man takes his unit too 
 small. He looks beneath him for his measur- 
 ing rod. The humble man looks up for his. 
 We are exhorted in Scripture not to think of 
 ourselves more highly than we ought to 
 think. But it is not enjoined upon us to 
 think ourselves base, for the apostle immedi-
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 63 
 
 ately urges his brethren to "think of them- 
 selves soberly, according as God hath dealt 
 to every man the measure of faith." 
 
 But may it not be true after all, that the 
 highest type of humility consists in not think- 
 ing of oneself at all ? Have we not for this 
 the highest authority ? 
 
 " At the same time came the disciples unto 
 Jesus, saying, who is the greatest in the 
 kingdom of heaven ? And Jesus called a lit- 
 tle child unto Him and set him in the midst 
 of them and said, verily I say unto you, ex- 
 cept ye be converted and become as little 
 children ye shall not enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven." The Master does not leave us 
 in doubt as to what trait in the child He 
 meant to commend. 
 
 Poets and painters love to depict the beauty 
 of the little ones, their artlessness, and inno- 
 cence and their appealing helplessness. 
 These are all lovely features of the infantile 
 character. Through all the ages they have 
 made the child the jewel of the household, 
 the ruler before whom his elders bow as they 
 recognize in him the spring of the gentler
 
 64 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 feelings which the hard world outside ignores 
 or represses. But it was not those beautiful 
 appealing qualities which the Master wished 
 to emphasize here, much as He loved them. 
 He leaves us in no doubt, for He immediately 
 adds, " Whosoever therefore shall humble 
 himself as this little child, the same is the 
 greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven." Start- 
 ling paradox this as to the foundation of 
 moral greatness. Whoever, before our Lord, 
 thought of humility as characterizing a child ? 
 If humility means proper self-estimate this 
 involves reflection and comparison, and these 
 the child cannot exercise. They are the 
 mental operations of mature life. But if hu- 
 mility in this highest form means absence of 
 thought about oneself, the child has it per- 
 fectly. He does not take offense at what 
 would be grievous slights to older people. 
 The quip, the sneer, the cut are weapons pow- 
 erless with a child. He does not understand 
 them, because he is not thinking of himself. 
 Humility in him is associated with weakness, 
 but the association is accidental and unneces- 
 sary. Humility is not weakness. Strength
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 65 
 
 may stoop. Weakness must stoop. True 
 humility may belong to the most mature and 
 exalted character. An archangel may have 
 it as fully as an infant. How perfectly was 
 it exemplified by our Lord who emptied 
 Himself to save His people, and though He 
 was the son of God, rarely spoke of Himself 
 as such, preferring, when He mentioned that 
 august relation, to say that God was His 
 father, and thus in that glorious duality, to 
 direct attention to the other personage and 
 not to Himself. Are we not right then in 
 naming humility as the first and chiefest in 
 the round of Christian virtues? A good 
 Christian must that architect of the old Eng- 
 lish college have been, who, in arranging the 
 quadrangles made the gate of honour only to 
 be reached through the gate of virtue, while 
 both were inaccessible except through the 
 gate of humility. 
 
 Next to humility, we would place as a fun- 
 damental feature of a perfect man in Christ's 
 Spiritual Kingdom, a very closely allied qual- 
 ity, Simplicity, or, as the apostle calls it, 
 " singleness of heart." It characterizes the
 
 66 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 loftiest natures and is so obviously necessary 
 to a complete character, that it seems not to 
 need or receive large comment in the Scrip- 
 tures. Its opposite, duplicity or hypocrisy, 
 however, is scourged repeatedly throughout 
 the Bible. No form of imperfection is so ter- 
 ribly denounced by our Lord. " Woe unto 
 you, hypocrites," came often from those 
 gentle lips. His apostle declared that " the 
 double-minded man is unstable in all his 
 ways," and lifts up his voice in exhortation : 
 " Purify your heart, ye double minded." 
 Christ's forerunners had said that " the hope 
 of the hypocrite shall perish " and that " his 
 joy is but for a moment." 
 
 Near to simplicity in the garland of Chris- 
 tian excellencies, is love of truth. " Truth 
 and sincerity," quaintly said Bishop Tillot- 
 son, " have all the advantages of appearance 
 and many more." In short he means that 
 they are indispensable to reputation as well 
 as character. Christ made no account of 
 reputation, but exalted character, and put 
 truth as a primary and necessary part of it. 
 Truth was not apparently valued by the peo-
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 67 
 
 pie of His time and race. The Saviour rises 
 above the level of His generation in this as in 
 other things, as the Matterhorn above the 
 Zermatt hills. He exalts this trait by declar- 
 ing Himself to be embodied truth. From 
 that time on, to His followers, love of Him has 
 been love of truth. Only scholars can love an 
 abstraction, but all whether learned or un- 
 learned, can love a quality realized in a living 
 person. Pilate asked " what is truth ? " and 
 did not know that he had the answer before 
 him, for he had never heard the memorable 
 words " I am the truth." Millions since that 
 time have found in Christ, a reply to the 
 question which the Roman procurator evi- 
 dently thought to be unanswerable, for he 
 immediately retired after asking it. 
 
 We close, but do not exhaust our enumera- 
 tion of the salient virtues of the Christian 
 character, as drawn in the Bible, by mem- 
 tioning the quality of Faith. Our doctors 
 tell us that this, in spiritual things, is an 
 active state of the mind, distinguished from 
 mere belief, in that its object is a divine per- 
 son and not a proposition. Doubtless it is
 
 68 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 the acceptance of a divine person and his 
 claims on us, involving intellect, conscience 
 and will. We beg here to be allowed to 
 refer to the intellectual part only of this 
 complex act. In regard to this, we cannot 
 do better than take the bold graphic descrip- 
 tion of it by the author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, who calls it " The evidence of 
 things not seen," while the whole of it, 
 intellectual and ethical, is the " substance of 
 things hoped for." In this aspect then faith 
 is the power to see the invisible. The 
 paradox is only apparent. We see the 
 things called visible with the eye of the 
 body, but there is allegorically a mental eye 
 that may give us pictures of the invisible 
 more vivid, more definite than anything 
 we see by the light of the sun. " The things 
 which are seen are temporal, but the things 
 that are not seen are eternal," and the latter 
 make up the higher world. In it, without 
 faith, we grope like blind men ; with it, we 
 walk in light and see Him who is the 
 light. Faith is not contrary to reason. The 
 things it reveals are beautifully consistent
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 69 
 
 and harmonious. They are reasonable in a 
 high sense, but unaided reason would never 
 have seen them. They are not unnatural, 
 but supernatural, or perhaps better super- 
 physical. 
 
 We have thus briefly picked out from the 
 whole garland of graces forming the type of 
 a perfect man, as revealed to us in the word 
 of God, four that we regard as funda- 
 mental. Faith, Truth, Simplicity and Humil- 
 ity are the stones at the corners of the grand 
 edifice of Christian character. If one asks, 
 where is love? we say, love is the bright 
 aura that fills the building and warms and 
 glows in every part of it. We do not divorce 
 the occupant from his home. Love believes, 
 is true and simple and humble. 
 
 It is now our duty to ask, before passing 
 to the other realm of the creation, whether 
 these four primary qualities receive in other 
 religions the prominence they have in Christ's 
 scheme. There is a striking tendency in 
 some foreign circles, copied as usual in 
 certain localities in our own land, to press 
 the claims of the great Oriental religions to
 
 70 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 equality with and at times to superiority over, 
 those of the Bible. A free field should be 
 given to all honest admirers and faithful 
 students of those venerable cults. The theme 
 is too important to every human being to 
 allow prepossession to bar the way to the 
 truth. While we may not care to join a 
 " parliament of religions," we want sincerely 
 to know the best that Brahma or Buddha or 
 Confucius or Mahomet has to tell us. Have 
 humility, simplicity, truth and faith the vast 
 and overpowering prominence in the teach- 
 ings of any of these great leaders, which they 
 have in Christ's words ? Am I doing them 
 any injustice when I say they seem to have 
 little place and several of them no place for 
 humility? Is it not with them a slavish 
 quality, contemned and rejected? They ap- 
 peal to fear often. The images set up for 
 worship in their temples are rarely other than 
 awful. Is it not true that the lowliness which 
 may dwell in a brave and noble soul was a 
 revelation for which they were unprepared ? 
 These religions may have much which we 
 admire, especially in their leaders and
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 71 
 
 founders as distinguished from the great 
 masses of their followers. Brahma was 
 serene, Buddha severe, Confucius prudent, 
 Mahomet temperate and brave. But none 
 of them enthroned Love. Simplicity and 
 Truth were admitted by some of them when 
 useful. They exalt power, and praise "the 
 superior man." Christ loved the poor and 
 emphasized those unearthly traits which lift 
 the poor man to fitness for the loftiest society. 
 We believe that humility, simplicity, truth 
 and faith, in the emphasis given to them by 
 Christ, characterize the Christian ideal as 
 unique among the religions of the world. 
 
 Are these indispensable qualities in Christ's 
 Spiritual Kingdom recognized, or are they 
 ignored in the constitution of the Physical 
 World ? Are these moral traits fostered by 
 the study of material science, or are their op- 
 posites cultivated by such pursuits? Do 
 these Christian virtues prepare a man for suc- 
 cessful scientific work, or do they hinder him ? 
 
 As I have said in another place 1 let us 
 
 1 " Thoughts on the discord and harmony of Science and the 
 Bible," Treasury of Christian Thought.
 
 72 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 listen then first to the voice of Physical 
 Science as she speaks in the lives of her 
 greatest votaries and in her own teachings, 
 and learn what are the qualities of heart 
 which she requires of her children for en- 
 trance into her courts. Who is the perfect 
 man, as viewed from her position ? 
 
 I. The answer undoubtedly is that his 
 first and greatest virtue is humility. 
 
 The scene that is presented to us in the 
 material world is one which from time im- 
 memorial, by its vastness, has excited and 
 oppressed the imagination. Even the child- 
 ish views of the visible universe, to which the 
 ancients were shut up, overwhelmed the con- 
 templative with awe. " To count the stars, 
 or measure the earth," was their synonym for 
 an impossible task. The contrast between 
 the greatness of the universe, even as imper- 
 fectly known to them, and the littleness of man 
 furnished an obvious theme for the moralist 
 and the poet. If such were the fact in the in- 
 fancy of knowledge, how indescribably 
 exalted is this contrast, by the knowledge of 
 the universe which we possess.
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 73 
 
 David's starry dome, to him perhaps only 
 a little way above the clouds, has been pushed 
 farther and farther away, expanding more 
 rapidly than the flying centuries, until in 
 sober truth " its centre is everywhere and its 
 circumference nowhere." The sun, which 
 for him was doubtless no bigger than the 
 moon, and but little further from us, has in 
 men's conceptions retreated four hundred 
 times farther back, and swollen in importance 
 until it is eight hundred times as massive as 
 all the planets together. Yet this superb orb, 
 the Lord and giver of life and motion, from 
 which planets and moons derive their mass, 
 their light and their energy ; this glorious 
 shining sphere, which has been lavishing its 
 treasure of heat it may be for many millions 
 of years and has a store for as many more, is 
 but an inferior unit among the hundred mil- 
 lion suns which are doubtless within the 
 reach of our greatest telescopes. This ex- 
 pansion in our views of the universe has 
 left our earth immeasurably more insignifi- 
 cant than the speck it was once the fashion 
 to call it. It is nothing. To mention it,
 
 74 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 is grossly to exaggerate its relative impor- 
 tance. 
 
 The dimensions of time are no less vast 
 than those of space. Geologists demand 
 nothing less than hundreds of millions of 
 years. While the physicist may not be pre- 
 pared to admit these vast demands, he is 
 willing to grant a duration which we may 
 name, but can by no means grasp in thought. 
 These reflections, the commonplaces of the 
 schoolboy, so trite that they have lost their 
 power to stir us, have been used from im- 
 memorial time to chastise the pride of man. 
 " When I consider Thy heavens," sang David, 
 " what is man ! " How absurd in a creature, 
 occupying a point in space and a moment in 
 time, to strut forth in the presence of the silent 
 infinities. The vastness of the universe 
 rightly enjoins humility. 
 
 But while such is a legitimate use of this 
 reflection, it is perhaps better suited to the 
 early period of our lives and of the life of our 
 race. Maturer minds are less impressed by 
 these disclosures of the immensity of creation. 
 For after all the numerical greatness of a
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 75 
 
 measured quantity depends on the size of the 
 arbitrary unit one adopts. The fixed star, 
 whose distance, when expressed in miles, 
 stretches in unmeaning length across the 
 page, appears to be brought quite near, when 
 we take as a measuring rod the line which a 
 ray of light describes in a year. 
 
 It will occur to the thoughtful that vast 
 distances and duration should not oppress us. 
 Numerical grandeur ought not to stun a 
 rational being. It is not mere material ex- 
 tent which is best calculated to foster humility 
 in a reverent and thoughtful soul. Fortu- 
 nately it is not the things themselves with 
 which we are most concerned, but the ratios 
 of things. The things may be inscrutable, 
 impossible or imaginary, and the ratios may 
 be real and simple and quite comprehensible. 
 
 But is the physical universe exhausted 
 when we have gauged its depth, counted 
 and weighed its orbs, and measured its dura- 
 tions? By no means. Behind these facts of 
 mass, and distance, and time lies the greater 
 and better part of the universe. From the 
 contemplation of these phenomena emerge
 
 76 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 the nobler ideas of universal law, of cosmic 
 order, of majestic force. In these we dis- 
 cover the great soul of science in whose sol- 
 emn presence the greatest mind may bow as a 
 child. Before the ineffable and awful beauty 
 of truth, the shekinah of this sanctuary, the 
 mature philosopher bends with a reverence 
 which he cannot pay to the stones and beams 
 of the temple. He may stand erect in the 
 presence of the unfathomed abysses of space 
 with their countless contents of varied splen- 
 dour, but he must feel that he is a very little 
 thing, when there arises in his soul the con- 
 ception of the grand law by which this in- 
 numerable host is made a system. 
 
 The occasion and need for humility are 
 greatly enhanced when from the general con- 
 ception we descend to particulars. The con- 
 templation of nature fills us with astonish- 
 ment when we contrast the simplicity of her 
 causes with the complexity of their results. 
 Newton declares that "nature loves sim- 
 plicity and affects not the pomp of superflu- 
 ous causes." 
 
 The law of gravitation may be stated, and
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 77 
 
 comprehended by a child, but when it is re- 
 membered that each body in the universe 
 gravitates to every other body, and in its 
 movement must obey that influence, it is 
 easy to see that the displacement of any one 
 mass involves a complex which no human 
 mind can unravel. What is true of gravity 
 applies equally to other forces. Their opera- 
 tion is mingled hopelessly in the case of each 
 body ; so much so that the complete state- 
 ment of any actual physical event is impossi- 
 ble. The younger Herschel is reported to 
 have declared that if all the conditions of any 
 physical question were rigorously written out 
 the resulting differential equation would belt 
 the earth. Were absolutely rigorous con- 
 formity to facts, however minute, demanded, 
 there could be no science. 
 
 Mathematics can give us a rigorous solu- 
 tion of the problem of two particles only, 
 subjected to the law of gravitation. Add a 
 third and the solution is possible only under 
 certain conditions, and then it is merely ap- 
 proximate. Yet there is no problem in nature 
 so simple as the latter. What a lesson of
 
 78 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 humility we have here ! Place the intricacy 
 of nature and the limited power of the human 
 mind in juxtaposition and mark the disparity. 
 Should a little child attempt to grasp a 
 mountain, the effort would be less presump- 
 tuous. 
 
 How then have the triumphs of science 
 been won? The answer gives still more 
 cause for humiliation. It happens most for- 
 tunately that in the multitude of influences to 
 which each body is subjected the greater 
 part are insensibly small, and are for us 
 practically non-existent. Of those which can- 
 not be disregarded, one is usually large, and 
 the rest may be considered as mere dis- 
 turbances of it, which may be calculated 
 separately, and added together, their joint 
 effect being nearly equal to this sum. The 
 solution, it is true, is imperfect and only ap- 
 proximate, but if the result differ from the 
 truth by something less than one can meas- 
 ure, it is accepted as exact, because it is in- 
 distinguishable from the truth. 
 
 There are, however, very few physical 
 problems which can be attacked in this high
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 79 
 
 mathematical way. In the great majority of 
 cases one cannot begin at the beginning, but 
 must seek by experiment to be set very near 
 to the conclusion before the question can be 
 put into a mathematical form admitting of 
 solution. Experiments take the place of im- 
 possible integrations. In many problems of 
 the highest interest, involving the ultimate 
 constituents of bodies, we are forced to adopt 
 what Maxwell calls the statistical method and 
 reason by averages to results which become 
 more faulty as the groups become smaller. 
 
 The whole region of science in its most 
 exact form is thus a theatre of artifice and ex- 
 pedient. These are a confession of weakness. 
 The scientist approaches his question as a 
 hunter does his game. He watches and 
 creeps and seeks vantage ground, and then 
 mostly fails. Where is there room for ar- 
 rogance and pride ? The physicist must 
 stoop to conquer, and must stoop very low. 
 Surely of all the qualities demanded of the 
 votary of science, the first and chiefest is 
 humility. 
 
 II. Simplicity. By this I mean that sin-
 
 80 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 gleness of mind which in conduct leads to 
 consistency and in intellectual matters begets 
 clearness of thought. Perspicacity is indis- 
 pensable to the scientist. His experiments 
 are questions addressed to nature. If the 
 thought be confused, the question will be in- 
 volved, and it may be that several questions 
 will clumsily be asked at once. Now, nature 
 answers everything that is asked of her, but 
 if the inquiry be mixed and disordered, the 
 answer will be so too, and although true, it 
 will be unintelligible. For success in research 
 the student must have a point to make and 
 must make it. Such intellectual simplicity is 
 the natural product of simplicity of character. 
 Duplicity in morals may not always be joined 
 with confused thinking, but they are natural 
 allies. To follow two masters in morals leads 
 often to a similar oscillation between truth 
 and error in speculation. Such wavering is 
 incompatible with progress in science. Na- 
 ture is on the side of honesty, and sternly re- 
 presses the false and the fickle. She has no 
 pity for weakness, and towers above im- 
 becility like a frowning despot, while she
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 8l 
 
 yields with smiling grace to the strength 
 which is begotten of simplicity. 
 
 III. Next to the foregoing fundamental 
 requisites, and scarcely inferior to them in 
 value, is love of truth. Such a love excludes 
 prejudice and pride of opinion and party 
 spirit. Where the latter exist, they operate 
 on the intellect as shackles upon the limbs. 
 The fields of scientific research are intricate 
 and difficult while the powers of the explorer 
 are feeble and limited. His task is hopeless 
 if he begin his work handicapped or fettered. 
 The cultivation of science often requires the 
 sacrifice of ease, of taste, of fortune, of health, 
 nay of life itself, and often of what to many is 
 harder to bear than all these, the giving up 
 the cherished opinions of a lifetime. As a 
 reward for all these losses she offers only the 
 truth. Nothing but a passionate love of the 
 truth can ensure the noble choice. 
 
 The annals of science show that this loyalty 
 to truth has characterized the great discover- 
 ers of our own and other ages. 
 
 I recall the instance of Newton, who, when 
 the secret of the world was within his grasp
 
 82 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 and nothing but a trifling numerical discrep- 
 ancy intervened, paused for twenty years, 
 patiently waiting for new light, at a time 
 when other keen minds were on the same 
 track, and he might any day have seen the 
 crown snatched by another. 
 
 I may mention Baily, who, when by a long, 
 difficult and delicate research he had accumu- 
 lated records of one thousand three hundred 
 pendulum observations, and a discussion of 
 them revealed to him some unknown vitiat- 
 ing bias of a minute amount, did not hesitate 
 to burn them all, though the act cancelled a 
 year and a half of precious time. A less lofty 
 intolerance of error would have sought to 
 claim some recognition for these hard-earned 
 results. Think of Darwin who worked and 
 laboured in obscurity for thirty years to make 
 sure of his ground, when a less conscientious 
 man would have rushed into print with a 
 brilliant but immature hypothesis. 
 
 Contrast with these examples the feverish 
 haste with which struggling aspirants for 
 fame hasten before the public with embryonic 
 facts, which largely turn out to be abortions.
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 83 
 
 The freedom of the press is a great boon, but 
 we pay daily for it a great price. 
 
 The corrective for this haste is a love of 
 truth superior to love of fame. The love of 
 truth is a wholesome restraint, much needed 
 in this age of irrepressible movement and 
 bold speculation. 
 
 But it is not only a curb, but a spur. It 
 leads to industry in pursuit and patience 
 under disappointment. These qualities are 
 indispensable to success, for not only are the 
 problems of science intricate, but she con- 
 ceals the truth. It seems to be her glory to 
 hide a matter. She makes no provision for 
 carelessness or weakness or laziness. On the 
 contrary the world appears to be so consti- 
 tuted as to lead these wrong. 
 
 If nature were to take human form, it 
 would often be that of a beautiful coquette, 
 delighting to mock her suitor, to deceive him 
 and laugh at him. " She flies to the willows, 
 but beckons to him as she vanishes." The 
 protective mimicry of which naturalists tell 
 us has its analogies throughout science, mak- 
 ing it easy to err, and hard to grasp the
 
 84 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 truth. The farther and higher the student 
 goes, the more is he impressed with this. 
 Sir J. Herschel, in a remarkable passage in 
 one of his essays, refers to this fact. Speak- 
 ing of what he denominates the two most 
 difficult and delicate of physical problems 
 the parallax of the fixed stars and the mean 
 density of the earth he declares that in their 
 solution " every element, nay even the ele- 
 mentary powers of heat, electricity, the mo- 
 lecular movements of the air, the varying 
 elasticity of fibres and a host of ill-understood 
 disturbing causes, set themselves in opposing 
 array in their most recondite and unexpected 
 forms of interference." This undoubted fact 
 in the existing constitution of nature, need 
 not trouble him who believes that the ma- 
 terial universe is meant to be a school for the 
 mind. A world without puzzles and dis- 
 guises, where indolence and carelessness 
 would be as safe and profitable as their op- 
 posites, might be a beautiful world. It would 
 be worthless as a school. In the actual world 
 of science then, love of truth is indispensable 
 co the complete man.
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 85 
 
 Truth in nature challenges our love and 
 our wonder by its richness and variety. In 
 the light of advancing knowledge, the utmost 
 power of invention and fiction appear to be 
 poor in comparison with the sober facts of 
 the world around us. Our childhood was 
 stirred by tales of giants and dragons. 
 Goethe exhausted his imagination and Retsch 
 his artistic resources to depict the scaly forms 
 with terrible claws and many a snaky fold 
 at which we used to shudder. Yet the geo- 
 logical museum discloses actual forms of tre- 
 mendous beasts, Dinosaurs, Brontosaurs 
 and the like, of such size and horrible com- 
 bination as make the work of the poet and 
 draughtsman seem poor indeed. The 
 dragons of mythology are mild survivals in 
 fiction of those actual monsters of the later 
 geological eras. The facts of the world are 
 everywhere far greater than our possible 
 fancies. The greatest masters of painting and 
 sculpture accordingly seek for models in all 
 their work. They do not imagine clouds, 
 but watch the sky. Whether it be the 
 human face, or even the folds of a mantle, a
 
 86 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Raphael will not paint them from imagina- 
 tion or even from memory, but must have the 
 living subject, or the actual drapery before 
 him as he works. Truth is not only stranger 
 than fiction, it is far richer. Nature stretches 
 on all sides in endless vistas. What we have 
 seen is but a small part of what remains to be 
 seen. End there is none, we cry. The same 
 cry will be heard ages hence, when in the ad- 
 vance of knowledge our widest learning now 
 will seem to our remote successors the merest 
 and crudest beginnings of a vaster science. 
 Truth should be loved because, like God, it is 
 infinite. 
 
 IV. Next to these three, and finally, the 
 moral quality most urgently demanded of 
 the scientist is Faith, or a capacity to believe 
 that for which there is evidence indeed, but 
 no immediate sensible evidence, and to act 
 on that belief. The cold intellectual constitu- 
 tion, that demands demonstration before as- 
 sent, is an effectual bar to scientific progress. 
 When we enter the field where action must be 
 based solely upon preponderance of probabil- 
 ity and demonstration to the limited extent
 
 that it exists at all is solely destructive, the 
 moral character of the student will have a 
 great deal to do with his intellectual move- 
 ments. We call the height of conviction 
 here " moral certainty," the only kind of cer- 
 tainty we can have as regards positive state- 
 ments, either in the domain of conduct or in 
 that of the sciences of observation or experi- 
 ment. 
 
 Scientific research has taught us that the 
 ultimate materials of the physical universe 
 are hopelessly beyond the reach of our 
 senses, however these may be aided by in- 
 struments. What is seen is made up of 
 what is unseen, and derives all its properties 
 from it. The electrons, forever invisible, may 
 be the efficient units of the visible world. In 
 the insensibly small spaces surrounding and 
 separating these material points, the forces 
 operate which determine solidity and fluidity, 
 which generate the marvels of light and heat, 
 and constitute the secrets of electricity. The 
 triumphs of modern science have been largely 
 won in this unseen world, where he who walks, 
 walks by faith and not by sight. No one can
 
 88 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 enter here who is not prepared to accept and 
 realize the invisible. His ability to thread his 
 way in this, the real though hidden, universe 
 will depend not only upon his imagination or 
 power to " visualize " the atomic figures and 
 swings (for this may mislead by its too clear 
 definition), but upon a healthy discrimination 
 between that which is essential and that which 
 is unimportant, and a hearty confidence in the 
 former. Surely then modern physics, whose 
 highest studies are thus conducted in a 
 region beyond cognizance of the senses, de- 
 mands and cultivates in its votaries the 
 faculty of realizing the invisible. 
 
 This will appear yet more clear if we look 
 a little farther into recent science. Bodies 
 and their atoms form but a part and that not 
 the most important part of the universe. The 
 latter is made up of two things : matter and 
 energy, or power associated with matter. 
 This power is inexpressibly fugitive. Bodies 
 and atoms are incessantly exchanging it with 
 one another. These transfers constitute the 
 events of the material world. All that 
 happens to bodies, their motions, changes,
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 89 
 
 effects on our senses, are the result and signs 
 of transfer of energy to and fro. A world 
 whose energies could not be thus transferred 
 from one member to another, would be ex- 
 actly like a world void of energy, dark, 
 silent, motionless, dead, Energy is there- 
 fore the great direct subject of scientific 
 study, and matter is only indirectly known 
 through energy. 
 
 The closeness of the association between 
 matter and energy is suggestively shown 
 by the fact that the laws of energy are 
 identically repeated in the laws of matter. 
 Thus there is a law of transmutation for 
 each, a law of conservation for each, and 
 a law of dissipation for each. It would 
 not be wrong to say that physical science 
 is the science of energy. Yet energy is 
 wholly invisible. If in the realm of matter 
 where a part is visible, science cannot per- 
 ceive without faith, much less can she do so 
 in the greater realm of energy, where all is 
 invisible. This faith, like all genuine faith, 
 is in harmony with reason. Science judges 
 of the things that are unseen by the things
 
 90 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 that do appear. When she emerges from 
 the world of sense into the world beyond 
 sense, her steps become more confident, and 
 she advances with an elastic freedom that 
 shows that she is in her native element. 
 The laws of the invisible world of Physics 
 are better known, its phenomena are simpler, 
 and its conclusions are more certain than 
 those which refer to the visible world. For 
 in this invisible world we more easily ignore 
 the multitude of vanishing but confusing 
 agencies which press upon us everywhere in 
 the world of sense, but which are more 
 readily ignored and therefore do not trouble 
 us in the unseen universe. 
 
 The physics of the invisible has received 
 a mighty contribution in the past decade. 
 In that time, a new department has been 
 created called radio-activity. As we have 
 before hinted men have been brought to 
 know that the invisible molecules of which 
 bodies are composed, possess an amount of 
 energy heretofore incredible. It appears 
 that some, at least, of them are descending 
 to lower and more stable forms, giving
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 91 
 
 off meanwhile incessant radiation partly 
 streams of matter projected with amazing 
 speed, and partly ill-understood emanations 
 of remarkable character, with radiant energy 
 beside it may be in the shape of waves. 
 The whole of this complex activity, together 
 with the sum total of the matter involved in 
 it, is of a scale of minuteness, which is in- 
 conceivably small in view of the power 
 manifested. No balance or chemical re- 
 agent has seized these shadows. 
 
 The investigations of the philosopher here 
 deal with what seem to be " the ghosts of de- 
 parted" masses, which cannot be handled 
 with our ordinary implements of research. 
 In this invisible region, near the very begin- 
 nings of all material objects, we need an eye 
 for the unseen faith hand in hand with 
 reason. It is not too much to say that the 
 scientific world to-day has its attention 
 largely engrossed by the study of radio- 
 activity. Men have turned from the pursuit 
 of the vast problems of the heavens, the in- 
 expressibly grand, to concentrate attention 
 on the opposite pole of creation, the in-
 
 92 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 expressibly small, and have in these last 
 years gathered what has perhaps somewhat 
 rashly been called " the new knowledge." 
 This novel field is believed to hold the key 
 to the material world, and it is of a difficulty 
 demanding powers given to but few ; but 
 their results are breathlessly awaited by the 
 onlooking crowd of teachers and students. 
 Great revelations are doubtless just ahead of 
 us great changes, if not reversals, in our 
 atomic theories, but the essential conditions 
 for making these discoveries and of under- 
 standing them when made is the faculty of 
 seeing the invisible. We are right then in 
 emphasizing as a fundamental quality re- 
 quired in a scientific man, and fostered by 
 his pursuits, that of faith in the unseen. 
 
 We see then that the perfect man accord- 
 ing to the New Testament is humble, simple, 
 true, and believing. The perfect man accord- 
 ing to science is humble, simple, true, and be- 
 lieving. The voice of Nature is the voice of 
 Christ. Are the two systems independent of 
 one another, or do they belong to one system 
 with one Head ? The Bible offers the only
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 93 
 
 explanation of the coincidence. The whole 
 scheme in heaven and earth is one. Nature 
 and grace are in some humble but real sense 
 complementary. They are two provinces of 
 one kingdom. Truth is Christ's, whether in 
 the realm of matter or of spirit. He who 
 does good work in any realm, really does 
 work for Christ. It is thus that even His 
 enemies must work for Him, so far as their 
 work is good. The old stone mason at 
 Cologne, putting blocks into the rising wall, 
 might have been an unbeliever, but he was 
 helping to raise the great Cathedral if he did 
 his task well. 
 
 The Christian view of the world sheds light 
 upon another dark point. While Science de- 
 mands of her votaries the great cardinal vir- 
 tues of Christianity, and while it cannot be 
 denied that the profoundest culture of nature 
 fosters these virtues, yet we do not discover 
 in her system any energy by which they can 
 be created where they are not, or substituted 
 for their contradictories, pride, unbelief, love 
 of error or insincerity. In Christianity this 
 very thing is done. She claims and shows a
 
 94 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 power which nature does not pretend to have. 
 If nature be an independent kingdom, here 
 is a confessed imperfection. If she be a part 
 of one kingdom with Christianity, the imper- 
 fection does not exist, for it is supplied in the 
 constitution of the realm to which she be- 
 longs. 
 
 In closing we shall reply briefly to two ob- 
 vious objections to these views : 
 
 1. " The qualities enumerated do not seem 
 to be necessary to scientific achievement, for 
 many scientists of fame are arrogant, sceptical 
 and lovers of their hypotheses more than 
 lovers of truth." 
 
 We reply, So are many professed Chris- 
 tians. If the faults of Christians do not dis- 
 prove the Christian scheme, the'similar faults 
 of scientists do not contradict the tenor of 
 science. We should judge of both schemes 
 by their best types. I aver that the pro- 
 foundest scientists are humble, and truth- 
 loving. 
 
 2. " If the above views are true, Chris- 
 tians should make the best scientists," says 
 the objector, "and this is contrary to ex-
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 95 
 
 perience." We admit the inference but 
 question the assertion of fact. Let us re- 
 member that science is concerned immediately 
 with the intellect, and that moral qualities, 
 alone, however important, will not make a 
 great scientist. 
 
 The history of science reveals to us in its 
 leading votaries, many instances of the union 
 of high Christian qualities with great merit 
 as philosophers. Every Christian land has 
 furnished such examples. Our own country 
 could supply instances from every section, il- 
 lustrating the support which religion and 
 science may mutually offer in the genesis of a 
 noble character. 
 
 I shall however select four men from " our lit- 
 tle mother isle " as the genial "autocrat " calls 
 her ; men who, by universal consent, were at 
 the very front of Physical Science and who, at 
 the same time, were devout Christians. The 
 contemplation of such characters, in which 
 Christian excellence was incarnate, is fuller 
 of stimulus to the observer than hours of 
 mere disquisition. 
 
 Four figures (to speak only of the dead)
 
 96 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 rise before us of supereminent stature among 
 English philosophers of the last century. 
 Brewster, Faraday, Stokes and Clerk-Max- 
 well, form a group of remarkable interest, of 
 widely different mental gifts, but alike in 
 moral excellence. 
 
 In the department of light, in which the 
 nineteenth century witnessed remarkable ad- 
 vances, no name, among experimentalists, is 
 more distinguished for the number, variety 
 and importance of his observations than 
 Brewster's. He had a harsh and rugged dis- 
 cipline in youth, and to the world his manner 
 often conformed to his training. His 
 doughty, trenchant way of dealing with his 
 opponents and critics may be largely at- 
 tributed to the influence of his early conflict 
 with poverty. Yet beneath the rough ex- 
 terior was a loyal loving soul. In old age, 
 as so often happens, his Christian character 
 developed in tenderness and charm. Few 
 narratives are more delightful than the one 
 which we owe to the filial piety of his 
 daughter, Mrs. Gordon. Standing by his 
 death-bed she said to him :
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 97 
 
 " You will see Charlie." 
 
 Gathering himself, he answered after a 
 pause : 
 
 " I shall see Jesus, who created all things 
 Jesus who made the world I shall see 
 Him as He is." 
 
 Under a sculptured window of " Fair Mel- 
 rose " Abbey, in a white marble tomb, sleeps 
 the mortal form of this great philosopher. 
 On the base of the tomb is this legend : 
 " The Lord is my light." 
 
 Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Lucasian Pro- 
 fessor of Mathematics in Cambridge Uni- 
 versity, renowned for his beautiful experi- 
 ments in fluorescence and in binocular vision, 
 and scarcely less so for his masterly writings 
 in Mathematical Physics, was singularly 
 gifted as a teacher for the brightest minds. 
 His fame is scarcely more surely founded 
 upon the publications he made, than upon 
 the pupils he taught who became later dis- 
 tinguished in science. Men like Kelvin, 
 Maxwell and Tait, delighted in after life to 
 acknowledge their debt to him. They 
 omitted no chance of profiting by his counsel
 
 98 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 and of claiming for him priority in discover- 
 ies, when he seemed too modest to claim it 
 for himself. This eminent man delighted to 
 acknowledge his Saviour. We may discern 
 his influence in the decided Christian char- 
 acter of his famous pupils, who owed him a 
 great debt, not only for the great intellectual 
 stimulus he gave them, but for moral uplift 
 as well. 
 
 Sir George Stokes was an active member 
 of the Victoria Institute, a society founded in 
 the interest of anti-sceptical science. For 
 years he took part in its work and his ad- 
 hesion constituted an important part of its 
 capital. He gave the Gifford lectures in 1891 
 and his subject was Natural Theology. He 
 also delivered in 1887 the Burnett lectures, 
 choosing for his topic Light, and treating it 
 as a Christian philosopher might do. He 
 died in the maturity of his powers, after a 
 long life of service. 
 
 Of Clerk-Maxwell, his celebrated pupil, 
 who died when still comparatively young, 
 but who left a name which will live forever, 
 we are at a loss whether to admire the
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 99 
 
 most his attractive personality and charming 
 traits, or his brilliant professional labours, and 
 strikingly original powers. He was a con- 
 spicuous example of the need and value of 
 incessant industry, if uncommon mental gifts 
 are to achieve lasting results. He under- 
 took to interpret Faraday to the Mathemat- 
 ical world and in the attempt created a new 
 department of Physics. He too was always 
 a reverent devout believer of the Bible, hon- 
 ouring the Lord. He closes his celebrated 
 essay on Molecules with an expression of his 
 faith in Him, " who in the beginning cre- 
 ated not only the Heaven and the Earth, but 
 the material of which Heaven and Earth con- 
 sist." 
 
 Michael Faraday was the son of a black- 
 smith. He was born in a blacksmith's house 
 and died in Hampton Court palace, where he 
 had residence at the Queen's request It is 
 harder to rise in England than in this land. 
 Only those of very superior worth can over- 
 come the barriers which distinctions of rank, 
 recognized by law and usage, have set up 
 not only in society, but, by its pervasive in-
 
 100 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 fluence, in all lines of human effort. Merit 
 must be great to overcome low birth, but if 
 great, it will overcome it in grand old Eng- 
 land. 
 
 Faraday was born in Surrey near London, 
 in 1791. His father was a stout Yorkshire 
 man, who while he plied his hammer, medi- 
 tated on the Bible and doubtless, as stroke 
 followed stroke, fancied that he was striking 
 error at every blow. His mother, from 
 whom we imagine that Faraday got his 
 genius, is little known in her quiet life. She 
 must have been a noble woman, for her great 
 son, amid his rising honours, never ceased, 
 while she lived, to show her a devoted affec- 
 tion. It is natural to love our mothers, but 
 common men often grow ashamed of them, 
 when wealth and honours are won. Faraday 
 never blushed for his humble origin, nor on 
 the other hand, did he ever vulgarly obtrude 
 it. On proper occasions he would modestly 
 own his liking for the forge and anvil, saying 
 in explanation, that his father was a black- 
 smith. He reminds us, in this, of that other 
 great Englishman, Dr. Samuel Johnson,
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE IOI 
 
 whose affectionate letters to his mother as 
 long as she lived, do him more honour than 
 the Rambler, and will be tenderly recalled 
 when Rasselas ceases to be read. 
 
 Faraday, in boyhood, naturally had the 
 narrowest opportunities. He says : " My 
 education was of the most ordinary descrip- 
 tion, consisting of little more than the rudi- 
 ments of reading, writing and arithmetic at a 
 common day school. My hours out of school 
 were passed at home and in the streets." He 
 is next an errand boy carrying newspapers 
 for a bookbinder ; then an apprentice to 
 him reading the books he was learning to 
 bind. His mental activity thus aroused, 
 showed itself in ways that were sometimes 
 ludicrous ; as when he got his head through 
 the bars of a fence, and in his struggles to 
 get free, tried to solve the problem " which 
 side am I on ? " 
 
 Sir Humphry Davy was then lecturing at 
 the Royal Institution. Faraday was lucky 
 enough to get tickets for four lectures. He 
 took notes, neatly transcribed them, and sent 
 them to the great chemist. Sir Humphry
 
 102 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 was struck with their merit, and, being a gen- 
 tleman, immediately acknowledged his letter. 
 Two months later he made Faraday his as- 
 sistant 
 
 The youth's progress was now rapid. 
 Yet it is not astonishing that the elegant, 
 famous, fashionable and highly connected 
 professor should not discern in the black- 
 smith's boy and bookbinder's apprentice, the 
 future leader of the science of England, to 
 whom he himself, should he live, would look 
 up, not down. He went with Sir Humphry 
 and Lady Davy on a visit to the Continent, 
 and sometimes acted as a valet for the great 
 man. 
 
 No wonder then, that in 1823, when at the 
 age of thirty-two, Faraday was proposed as 
 a member of the Royal Society, his patron and 
 superior opposed his election. It should be 
 said that Davy soon abandoned his doubts, ac- 
 quiesced in the election already made almost 
 unanimously, and gave the young philoso- 
 pher assurance of his esteem and friendship. 
 
 It speaks still more for Faraday that the 
 episode left no wound in his spirit. Twelve
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 103 
 
 years later he said, "Whenever I have 
 ventured to follow in the path which Sir 
 Humphry Davy has trod, I have done it 
 with respect and with the highest admira- 
 tion of his talents, and nothing gave me 
 more pleasure in my last paper than the 
 thought that . . . I was able to support 
 the views advanced twenty-eight years ago 
 and for the first time by our great philoso- 
 pher." 
 
 His connection with the Royal Institution 
 began in 1813 and ended with his life in 
 1867. It was made memorable by the 
 greatest series of scientific discoveries that 
 have marked any half century in the history 
 of our race, all due to this one man. 
 
 The practical application of his discoveries 
 makes up a large part of the mechanical 
 wonders of this age. The entire field of 
 electrical invention telegraph, telephone, 
 electric lighting, locomotion, and transmis- 
 sion of power began with his discoveries 
 seventy-five years ago. Not only so, but 
 his later researches led to a complete revolu- 
 tion in the theory of electricity. Faraday led
 
 104 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 to Maxwell, Maxwell to Hertz, and Hertz 
 to Marconi, and thus to telegraphy without 
 wires. 
 
 Faraday's failures even were sometimes 
 fruitful. One experiment of his made in his 
 seventieth year and rendered abortive simply 
 by lack of a sufficient instrument, repeated 
 by a successor (Zeeman) more fortunately 
 situated, has given to the latter worldwide 
 fame. 
 
 The English lad, who in 1800 was playing 
 marbles in the streets of London, had made 
 his chief discoveries before he was fifty-five 
 years old. From an early date, honours were 
 poured upon him from foreign lands. His 
 own government offered him a pension. 
 Though he was poor, he declined it. Mer- 
 cantile houses sought his alliance. He 
 would not listen to them. Men were mak- 
 ing fortunes by using his discoveries. He 
 did not disparage commerce and money- 
 making. But he had no time for it. He 
 had chosen another calling, and would not 
 mix the two. He not only declined wealth, 
 but he declined social rank. He might have
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 105 
 
 been a Knight or Baronet. He preferred 
 to remain poor and untitled. Noble man 1 
 When rank and wealth shall be forgotten in 
 the long ages, your diadem will shine with 
 increasing brightness. 
 
 Faraday did not spend all his time in re- 
 search. At intervals he appeared in the 
 theatre of the Royal Institution as a lecturer. 
 Perhaps he enjoyed most of all his Christmas 
 lectures to children. The simplicity and crys- 
 tal clearness of his expositions, the freshness 
 and felicity of his experiments, charmed and 
 instructed not only his juvenile hearers, but 
 the learned men in his audience. He was in 
 body small, though not feeble ; of singular 
 alertness and quickness of movement, with a 
 bright unresting eye, and of remarkable dex- 
 terity in his manipulations. 
 
 He had the mauvaise honte of many Eng- 
 lishmen of renown. Mr. Vincent, Librarian 
 of the Royal Institution, delighted to show 
 visitors how Faraday would trot into the 
 lecture theatre, where a distinguished com- 
 pany had assembled, and not seeming to 
 notice them at all, turn to his assistant and
 
 106 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 make some remark about the fire in the grate 
 and then about the subject he had to speak 
 of, facing about to his hearers while doing this 
 and thus imperceptibly gliding into his 
 lecture. 
 
 We have given a slight sketch of Faraday, 
 the philosopher. There was another side to 
 this great man. 
 
 He was a devout Christian and, for a while, 
 a preacher of the gospel. His father and 
 grandfather had been members of a small 
 sect cut off by Robert Sandeman from the 
 Presbyterian church, but retaining the car- 
 dinal doctrines of that religious body. Young 
 Faraday was strictly brought up and with his 
 parents was every Sunday at the Sandemanian 
 meeting house. Being trained up in the way 
 he should go, when he became old, he did not 
 depart from it. As he grew up in due time 
 he was admitted to the communion and after- 
 wards was elected an elder, which office carried 
 with it the duties of a preacher. Accordingly 
 on Sunday, he would often be found in the 
 pulpit. There was a striking contrast be- 
 tween the minister in the sacred desk, before
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE 107 
 
 a company of humble people, and the great 
 philosopher behind the lecture table of the 
 Royal Institution, with Prince Albert and a 
 crowd of richly dressed ladies and gentlemen 
 listening to him. He never spoke of 
 electricity in the pulpit, nor did he in words 
 mention the Bible in his lectures. This was 
 of set purpose, and in conformity with the 
 teaching of his Church. The best spirit of 
 his science in conscientious care and exactness 
 characterized his sermons, and the spirit of his 
 religion in its gentleness and winning address 
 and unselfishness, marked his lectures. Fara- 
 day seemed to feel that there was a tempta- 
 tion to a scientist in speaking of religion to 
 make science the master and not the servant 
 as it should be. 
 
 One who saw him in both spheres thus 
 contrasts his manner in the church and in the 
 lecture room. "The overflowing energy 
 and clearness of the professor," says he, 
 " were replaced in the pulpit by an earnest- 
 ness of manner best summed up in the word 
 devoutness. His object seemed to be to make 
 ( the most use of the words of Scripture and to
 
 108 THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 make as little of his own words as he could. 
 Hence a stranger was struck first by the 
 number and rapidity of his references to texts 
 in the Old and New Testaments, and secondly 
 by the devoutness of his manner. His ser- 
 mons were always extemporary but they were 
 prepared with great care. No one could 
 lecture like Faraday but many might preach 
 with more effect." 
 
 Faraday justified his exclusion of science 
 from sermons. " I shall be reproached," said 
 he, " with the weakness of refusing to apply 
 those mental operations which I think good 
 in respect of high things to the very highest. 
 I am content to bear the reproach." " I claim 
 an absolute distinction between religious and 
 ordinary belief." " Yet," he adds, " even in 
 earthly matters I believe ' that the invisible 
 things of Him from the creation of the world 
 are clearly seen, being understood by the 
 things that are made, even His eternal power 
 and godhead,' and I have never seen anything 
 incompatible between those things of man 
 which can be known by the spirit of man 
 that is in him, and those higher things con-
 
 IN ITS RELATION TO PHYSICAL SCIENCE log 
 
 cerning his future which he cannot know by 
 that spirit." Nature is no substitute for 
 God, but may be a helping image of Him. 
 
 Here I have inadequately drawn for you a 
 noble life, worthy in many points of the imi- 
 tation of any young man. The qualities that 
 shine forth in him most lustrously are his 
 humility, his simplicity, his love of truth and 
 his extraordinary power of seeing the invisi- 
 ble. These are qualities emphasized both in 
 the Bible and in Christ's record in Nature. 
 Faraday was a great scientist and a great 
 Christian far above the mass of men in both 
 characters, and a convincing witness of the 
 truth that Science in her highest form does 
 homage to our Lord.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 SCIENTIFIC HINTS IN 
 BOTH TESTAMENTS
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 SCIENTIFIC HINTS IN 
 BOTH TESTAMENTS 
 
 IN comparing the records which Christ 
 has given us in His word and His works, 
 it is wise for us to remember that it is 
 our interpretation of them which we are han- 
 dling. There are two sciences in question, 
 that of Biblical Exposition Hermeneutics 
 and that of the Physical World both human 
 sciences both incomplete both growing. 
 Of the two, Biblical interpretation is far more 
 mature and advances with far slower steps as 
 the ages roll on. Yet it is delightful to be- 
 lieve that the treasure house of sacred learn- 
 ing has many gems yet undiscovered by us, 
 and that future centuries will reveal riches in 
 God's word now unsuspected by His servants. 
 Especially will this be true of passages 
 which require for their complete comprehen- 
 sion a knowledge of external nature which is 
 "3
 
 114 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 not yet possessed and may not be ours for 
 long years to come. For contrasted with our 
 knowledge of the Bible, our acquaintance 
 with Nature, our Physical Science as we 
 term it, is lamentably immature. To the 
 greatest minds, we seem to be working still 
 in the selvage of science. The unknown 
 seems vaster to us than it did to our fathers. 
 Our painful climbing widens the horizon of 
 the unexplored and makes our growing at- 
 tainments seem relatively more and more in- 
 significant. Growth consists in discarding 
 the old while taking on the new. Science 
 advances by " trial and error," The next age 
 will use the knowledge of this one and 
 largely abandon it. Our theories serve their 
 purpose, helping us forward and then are 
 forgotten. 
 
 In this condition, apparent contradictions 
 between the Bible and science should not 
 alarm us. Such contradictions often occur 
 in other human sciences, as when geology 
 needs five hundred millions of years, and 
 physics can only grant a tenth of this. In 
 such cases we wait and work and keep
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 115 
 
 unruffled, till improved knowledge removes 
 the discrepancy. 
 
 Nor should apparent harmonies between 
 Scripture and Nature unduly elate us. The 
 reconciliations of a former generation seem 
 to us now sometimes puerile. Advancing 
 knowledge of Nature, still in its infancy we 
 must believe, while rendering obsolete some 
 old time view of the meaning, earthward, of 
 some Scripture passages, has given to many 
 others a significance and a wealth of precious 
 suggestion heretofore unsuspected. 
 
 The Bible thus becomes richer in meaning 
 as our knowledge of the world around us 
 grows. In its inner and higher life, it has to do 
 with what is independent of time and space, 
 and in that aspect it is ever young. Unaf- 
 fected as it is, in this its greatest sphere by 
 the progress of human science, it may yet in 
 many delicate expressions and illustrations, 
 have needed light thrown on the higher 
 world by the analogies and harmonies of the 
 lower world. As the Bible uses these paral- 
 lelisms between the two in metaphor, and 
 parable for the elucidation of its great theme,
 
 Il6 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 are we not justified in pursuing our inquiries 
 still further in order to find images of the 
 invisible world in the visible world about us ? 
 These considerations namely the imma- 
 ture and partial character of our knowledge 
 of the material world, and the present rapid 
 advance of that knowledge, quickly making 
 obsolete much of what was held to be tenta- 
 tively true in the recent past, should expel 
 dogmatism and make us humble and modest 
 in assertions regarding it. There is however 
 something which is settled in science. There 
 are some principles which are established, and 
 many facts in which the only change brought 
 to them by the Science of the future will be to 
 move them by emendations, growing smaller 
 and more difficult as the years go on, to a 
 closer proximity to the truth. As regards 
 the rest of Science, in the theories held pro- 
 visionally of various lines of phenomena, 
 they are the scaffolding of the building help- 
 ing to complete it and so to assure their own 
 abandonment. In these speculations, we 
 have only bad photographs of the real world 
 mental pictures of what philosophers as-
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 117 
 
 sume and believe the world to be often very 
 inadequate and distorted representations of 
 the actual world, the true picture of which is 
 in the mind of its Maker. 
 
 In view of these facts, we shall present to you 
 some thoughts regarding the relation of Sci- 
 ence to the Scriptures, without dogmatism or 
 positiveness and with submission to scientific 
 authorities in various departments. While 
 we believe the views which we shall present 
 to be just and well founded, so far as our 
 present knowledge goes, we would still hold 
 them, with a willingness to see them super- 
 seded by a truer, better knowledge which 
 coming years may have in store for us. 
 
 We have before remarked that the refer- 
 ences of the Bible to physical nature are 
 mainly of two kinds one including a few 
 direct positive assertions about it, funda- 
 mental statements which we must believe to 
 be true, if they are the word of God. Some 
 of these we have already studied. Another 
 class of these references is designed purely 
 as illustrative, and therefore of necessity used 
 the science of the times and its philosophy.
 
 Il8 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 There remain, however, in both Testa- 
 ments, after these passages are removed, 
 occasional sentences where the reference to 
 nature is often not apparent or if suggested 
 now was not understood until perhaps the 
 progress of science revealed in them a mean- 
 ing, not seized by those who first heard them, 
 nor by any reader in the long line of centuries 
 since, and only seen by us in these last days. 
 So there may be passages whose full sig- 
 nificance is hidden from us but will be ap- 
 preciated perhaps ages hence by our suc- 
 cessors, when future science has lighted up 
 what is now dark. There are such utterances 
 in the Bible which we may well believe did 
 not appear to the prophets who wrote or 
 spoke them, as they do to the humblest be- 
 liever who now reads them. May it not be, 
 that those sentences of expanding meaning, 
 came through the lips and mind of a prophet 
 from a higher Spirit in whom was all knowl- 
 edge, and who filled and guided the former? 
 It is to some of these scientific hints in the 
 Scriptures, so marked and clear to some.
 
 that they cannot be thought accidental, that 
 I wish to ask your attention. 
 
 LIGHT BEFORE THE SUN 
 The first chapter of Genesis contains a 
 statement that has always appeared most 
 strange. On the first day, God is declared 
 to have created light, while it was not until 
 the fourth day that He made the sun, moon 
 and stars. Thus the creation of light pre- 
 ceded that of luminous bodies. Immemorial 
 experience, without exception, teaches us that 
 to have light we must somewhere have a 
 self-luminous body. Our light is gone when 
 our lamp goes out, and does not reappear 
 until it is rekindled. Day begins with the 
 approach of the sun to our horizon and night 
 comes when he retires. 
 
 It may safely be said that no human com- 
 position would contain what would in the 
 line of experience be so obvious an error as 
 reversing the order of nature and putting 
 the effect light before the cause, the sun. 
 Believing this to be no human composition,
 
 120 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 commentators in all ages have sought to 
 guess the meaning of this paradoxical state- 
 ment at the very opening of the sacred writ- 
 ings. These guesses appear to be usually 
 most inadequate or fanciful. 
 
 A widely prevalent speculation of former 
 times, upon which perhaps the majority of 
 Bible readers once settled, was that the sun, 
 moon and stars were really created on the 
 first day, when light was commanded to ap- 
 pear, but that enveloping clouds hid their 
 forms, and only allowed an indefinite illumi- 
 nation to stream through them. On the 
 fourth day, the mists were cleared away and 
 the bright luminaries were first seen from the 
 earth. Among comparatively modern Exe- 
 getes, I note Lange (1869) who declares 
 " without doubt, the meaning here is not 
 merely a light-phenomenon, which goes 
 forth out of the background of Heaven and 
 breaks through the dark vapours of the earth 
 or from heavenly clouds of light (such as the 
 primary form of the creation may have ap- 
 peared to be) but an immediate lighting up 
 of the luminous element in the earth itself,
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 121 
 
 something like what the Polar light gives 
 rise to in the Northern Aurora." Somewhat 
 less Teutonic is the writer in the Pulpit Com- 
 mentary (1881), who believes that " the cre- 
 ation of light was in reality the evolution 
 from the dark robed seething masses of our 
 condensing planet of that luminous matter 
 which supplies the light." 
 
 A better conjecture in the eyes of the 
 physicist, was that of Richard Watson, who 
 living at the time of the revival in England 
 of the wave theory of light thought that the 
 creation of the first day was of the Undula- 
 tory Ether ; the preparation for light without 
 which the sun could not shine for us. Yet 
 we know now that Light is Energy, and the 
 Ether is not Energy, but merely its vehicle ; 
 and so the conjecture of that eminent the- 
 ologian fails to satisfy us. The progress of 
 science since Watson's time would give his 
 keen intellect, were he living now, a better 
 view. 
 
 Modern science tells us that light does 
 not come from the sun as its source. The 
 energy we receive from his rays did not origi-
 
 122 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 nate with the great orb. The sun and stars, 
 like our artificial lights on earth, merely give 
 us what they have received. They are only 
 transferrers and transformers of an energy 
 they did not create. The power contained in 
 the light was in the world before the sun or 
 stars began to shine. That active energy in 
 Nature is everywhere the liberated form of 
 great stores of dormant power, which we call 
 potential. This latter is locked up for in- 
 stance in fuel and food, and in every colloca- 
 tion of matter which is in strain. 
 
 When God said " Let there be light," may 
 it not be that He spoke into being that vast 
 treasure of potential energy in the universe 
 connected perhaps with universal ether, 
 which has been the capital used for its 
 transactions ever since ? Light is the high- 
 est, subtlest form of the great treasure when 
 it passes into activity, and so may be a name 
 for it all. 
 
 The subsequent creation of sun and stars 
 would only be the introduction of the mech- 
 anism by which this precious capital has been 
 localized and transformed and radiated so as
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 123 
 
 to serve the purposes of vision. If this be 
 so, this Scripture is living truth to us, filled 
 with a wisdom which was four thousand 
 years in advance of the time when it was 
 written and, this paradox like all para- 
 doxes of real knowledge, is removed by the 
 removal of our ignorance concerning its 
 subject 
 
 THE INTRODUCTION AND PROGRESS OF 
 LIFE ON THE EARTH 
 
 The first chapter of Genesis tells us, as we 
 know, not only of the origin of matter and 
 energy, but also of the beginning and de- 
 velopment of life on the earth. The inter- 
 pretation of these simple massive sentences, 
 up to a time within the memory of living 
 men, was strictly literal. The days were 
 taken to be our present days of twenty-four 
 hours. The act of creation was interpreted 
 to be a sudden exhibition of omnipotence, 
 bringing to pass the event in an instant of 
 time. This exposition however was not 
 universal. 
 
 A century and a half ago, a hundred
 
 124 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 years before the publication of Murchi- 
 son's Siluria, a great naturalist and engi- 
 neer of Sweden, who afterwards became 
 a great religious leader, Emanuel Sweden- 
 borg, held the view, we are told, that the 
 early chapters of Genesis were purely 
 allegorical and not historical, thus meeting 
 and setting aside the skeptical criticism of a 
 later time. The geological discoveries of 
 the nineteenth century were hailed in their 
 very inception and immaturity as wholly 
 inconsistent with the Biblical narrative. I 
 would call to your attention the fact that 
 several of the ablest of these scientists, like 
 Murchison abroad and Dana of our land, 
 upon a review and estimate of established 
 facts, did not feel obliged to abandon the 
 Bible. Living men can recall the glowing 
 sentences of the Scottish geologist, Hugh 
 Miller, as he depicted the vision of the past 
 history of the earth from its creation, caused 
 by divine power to pass before the mental 
 eye of the inspired writer of the first chapter 
 of Genesis, vast periods being compressed 
 into days, and the rehearsal being like a
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 125 
 
 moving picture of creation. I do not propose 
 even to mention the various interpretations 
 which have in time been offered by ingenious 
 men of learning and piety with regard to 
 these primitive records. Perhaps we are not 
 even yet advanced enough to decipher them. 
 Perhaps the advancing knowledge of the 
 earth, and the improved knowledge of the 
 Bible as well, will in some future age shed a 
 great and satisfactory light on this celebrated 
 ancient geogony. Meanwhile I wish to point 
 out a feature of it, which seems to me to 
 demonstrate its superhuman origin. 
 
 The Scriptural account of the evolution of life 
 under the inspection and power of the Deity, 
 is so strangely different from popular thought 
 even in later times and certainly in the days 
 when these documents were written, and so 
 like the teachings of present day science, 
 that it is incredible they could have been 
 written by unaided human wisdom. The 
 sacred writer declares that the first life was 
 vegetable, the next marine, next birds, then 
 terrestrial beasts, closing in the appearance 
 of man. The modern geologists affirm that
 
 126 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 the earliest stratified rocks contain no undis- 
 puted animal fossil forms, but they do have 
 undeniable evidence of the existence at the 
 time of plants, probably in very considerable 
 amount, considering the quantity of graphite, 
 iron oxides and limestone that are the signs 
 of vegetation. 
 
 Then in immediate sequence stratigraph- 
 ically, come the Palaeozoic rocks, filled with 
 evidences of marine life passing from sim- 
 ple forms up to fishes and aquatic reptiles. 
 The latter are followed by amphibious 
 forms, and these give place to terrestrial 
 reptiles presently putting on avian char- 
 acteristics, capable of flight, with membran- 
 ous wings and later on feathered tails, be- 
 coming bird reptiles and finally reptilian 
 birds, until they graduate into true birds, 
 monarchs of the air. Then the four footed 
 beasts appear, and these at last make room 
 for lordly man, the last and highest of earthly 
 forms. 
 
 Such is the sequence of life in the story 
 of the rocks. Such is the sequence of 
 life in the sacred record. Contrast with
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 127 
 
 the simplicity, the clearness, the scientific 
 parallelism of the Biblical account, that of 
 the so-called Babylonian Creation Tablets. 
 Their utterances are nebulous and vague; 
 often so obscure that one may find in them 
 what he brings to them. One of them makes 
 beasts the first creation, another of them puts 
 man at the beginning and their order is 
 both incomplete and unscientific. 
 
 Now an observant writer three thousand 
 years ago, might have imagined that plants 
 preceded animals. He might have noticed 
 that at the last analysis all animal life is sup- 
 ported by the plant, and so have assumed 
 that the vegetable kingdom appeared first, 
 but such a writer would doubtless have intro- 
 duced in immediate succession the land ani- 
 mals whose needs led him to this assumption. 
 Yet in geology long ages intervene. Again 
 what man in a former age would have 
 dreamed that birds came after reptiles and 
 from them and that they in regular succession 
 followed these marine forms? Sixty years 
 since even geologists called the reptilian 
 tracks of the Portland red sandstone, bird
 
 128 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 tracks ; " ornithichnites." Even they at that 
 time had no suspicion of the truth. 
 
 The writer of the first chapter of Genesis 
 shows a correspondence not with the science 
 of his time, but with that of three thousand 
 years later, which the accepted doctrine of 
 probabilities makes it impossible to attribute 
 to a fortunate guess. 
 
 A LIVING SACRIFICE 
 
 A very significant passage of the New 
 Testament is that wherein St. Paul exhorts 
 his Roman brethren by the mercies of God 
 to present their bodies a living sacrifice which 
 he declares is their reasonable service (Ro- 
 mans 12 : i). 
 
 A sacrifice is not complete without the 
 death of the victim. Were the latter to live, 
 there would be no sacrifice. The knife or the 
 flame must complete its work. A living sac- 
 rifice seems at first glance to be an impos- 
 sibility. To the Christians addressed, the 
 words must have conveyed a startling para- 
 dox. How life and death could be true at 
 the same time of the same being must have
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 1 29 
 
 been hard for them to see. It was easy to 
 see that life and death succeed each other in 
 endless alternation. Life follows death as 
 surely as death follows life. One thing dies 
 that another and perhaps a better may live. 
 The apostle in another epistle powerfully 
 uses the dying of the seed and germination 
 of the plant as figuring the resurrection of 
 the body. Poets and orators from time im- 
 memorial have availed themselves of this 
 fact of universal experience, which repetition 
 never seems to stale, for death, however com- 
 mon, is never trite. 
 
 The passage in hand involves a different 
 thought, that life and death may be coex- 
 istent in each individual. The science of our 
 time gives to this Scripture, we venture to 
 believe, a new force by an analogy which we 
 cannot but feel was in the mind of Him from 
 whom the phrase first came. 
 
 Our friends, the biologists, tell us that a 
 living being, animal or plant such as those 
 we know best is a unit indeed but a highly 
 complex unit, with special organs devoted to 
 special uses. All these organs, when in
 
 130 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 health, are coordinated and help to a com- 
 mon end, the welfare of the individual. The 
 organs themselves are wonderfully complex ; 
 reducible to tissues, and these in the last anal- 
 ysis to cells. The striking fact is that none 
 of these tissues are permanent. All are 
 changing more or less slowly and at any in- 
 stant their phases present all possible varieties 
 of advancement or retrogression. Many are 
 increasing, many are decreasing ; all are 
 changing. There are two great processes in 
 life the change which is a rise, and the 
 change which is a descent. It used to be a 
 popular conceit, that the human subject 
 changes so, that after seven years no atom 
 of the body remains the same. Recent au- 
 thorities assure us that with regard to the 
 larger part of our mass, a few months suffice 
 for a complete renewal. Our life then is a 
 constant movement of damage and repair ; 
 growth and decay ; life and death. We live 
 daily and we die daily, if death be cessation 
 of function. The ratio of these simultaneous 
 processes of regeneration and degeneration, 
 may, in a rough sense, be said to determine
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 131 
 
 the date in the life-period at which an indi- 
 vidual has arrived. When production ex- 
 ceeds dissolution, he is advancing towards 
 maturity, to be reached when they become 
 equal, and to be followed by the coming of 
 old age, when decay predominates. 
 
 Our conception of this complexity of 
 changes, called living, is vastly enlarged, 
 when we are told that the condition of living 
 is one of unstable equilibrium, kept from over- 
 throw by the incessant interference of the 
 guiding principle of life, just as a moving 
 bicycle is maintained erect by constant mi- 
 nute arrests of incipient falls by the rider above. 
 The whole fabric tumbles when life is with- 
 drawn. While it is present, its victorious 
 office involves a struggle in which a multi- 
 tude of other living points, called microbes, 
 are arrayed as enemies or friends. These 
 innumerable changes no more affect identity, 
 than substitutes replacing the soldiers falling 
 in battle affect the identity of the regiment. 
 Death is as inseparable from life in nature, as 
 one end of a line or one face of a leaf from 
 the other.
 
 132 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 The apostle's metaphor shines out to us 
 now with new force and meaning. It is, as 
 if he said, " Your earthly life is a living sac- 
 rifice ; you are dying daily, that you may 
 live. Let it be so with these same bodies, as 
 to your spiritual life." Some things must be 
 abandoned that other higher things may keep 
 on rising. Such is the history of every noble 
 life. It sacrifices love of pleasure, love of 
 ease, of honour and applause, that upon them 
 may rise love of man and God. 
 
 Death then does not seem to have been re- 
 garded by the saints as an evil. To the 
 Christian it finally is only, as a great preacher 
 terms it, a passing through a veil, a very thin 
 veil, into an adjoining room. To the apostle 
 it seemed in a high sense to be the insepara- 
 ble condition of life, and therefore with us al- 
 ways : so that perhaps what one calls death, 
 others may call life, just as sunset to us is 
 sunrise to another continent. 
 
 THE LAWS OF ENERGY IN CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 Among the undesigned, and therefore pe- 
 culiarly impressive, hints of fundamental
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 133 
 
 physical law which we occasionally meet with 
 in the Bible, none have appeared to me to be 
 more remarkable, than a sentence of St. 
 Paul's in his letter to the Philippians (Phil. 
 n, 12). It is translated thus in the "Twen- 
 tieth Century New Testament" : 
 
 " Therefore, my dear friends, as you have 
 always been obedient in the past, so now 
 work out your own salvation with reverence 
 and awe and that not only when I am with 
 you but all the more now that I am away. 
 Remember that it is God who, in His tender- 
 ness is at work now that I am away." 
 
 This version is much closer to the meaning 
 of the original Greek than that of King James, 
 or even that of the revisers of 1884. Yet sev- 
 eral delicate points are almost of necessity 
 lost in the translation, especially in that part 
 of the sentences which I wish to bring for- 
 ward. 
 
 rrjv lauTwv ff(UTT]p{av XarepydZeffSe, 6eo~ yap iartv 
 6 ivtpYibv iv u;jLlv Kai TO Oiteiv aal TO Ivspyetv uxsp 
 rfjs eudaft j'a?. 
 
 To the physicist, this is one of the most 
 remarkable passages in literature, sacred or
 
 134 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 profane. The author was not thinking of 
 physics, for it as yet had no existence ; and 
 yet these two sentences contain by direct 
 expression and by implication the four funda- 
 mental laws of energy ; the very vitals of 
 modern physics. Nay, sixteen hundred years 
 and more before Thomas Young, who uses 
 the now accepted name for this wonderful 
 power, the word energy occurs twice in this 
 short passage of St. Paul's and, in its root, 
 a third time. If we might paraphrase the 
 apostle's utterance in the scientific language 
 of our own day, it would run somewhat thus, 
 
 " Pass your energy on, as your safety re- 
 quires ; for the energy by which you will and 
 work, is from God." 
 
 He tells His spiritual children, that in the 
 Christian life, they are merely the transferrers 
 and transformers of energy, and not its crea- 
 tors and originators. God's energy is trans- 
 ferred to them, and then it is transferred from 
 them, in Christian work, to the world about 
 them. It was given to them in the one form 
 of grace and transmuted by them into a 
 thousand forms of well-doing. In all this
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 135 
 
 they had not added any, having only given 
 what they received. The law of conserva- 
 tion as well as that of transfer and transfor- 
 mation is recognized. But more than this, 
 the apostle clearly teaches that "willing" is 
 necessary to " doing " and that divine energy 
 is required for each. "Willing" unlocks 
 the potential energy of grace, and makes 
 it active or kinetic, in " doing." Thus the 
 strange and sublime parallelism of the moral 
 and physical worlds is beautifully brought 
 out. Hidden from the reader in the previous 
 centuries, it shines forth to us like a facet 
 of a long known jewel only now disclosed. 
 How wonderful that the most precious truths 
 of recent science should be found concealed 
 in a sentence of twenty words written more 
 than eighteen hundred years ago. If you 
 tell me that St. Paul could not have had 
 such anticipation of present day science con- 
 sciously in his mind when he said these 
 words, I am forced to believe that a greater 
 than he was speaking through him. It was 
 Paul plus Christ, and as the finite vanishes 
 in presence of the infinite, I hear no one but
 
 136 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 Christ. None but the Maker of the world 
 could know it so well. Doubtless multitudes 
 of other sentences in the Scriptures will also 
 phosphoresce with new light when the radia- 
 tions of future science are turned upon them. 
 Let us consider this pregnant statement 
 of Scripture a few moments longer, in order 
 to appreciate its wholesome lessons. The 
 growing plant receives from the sun daily 
 supplies of energy. Of the copious floods 
 of heat and light which envelop our planet, 
 a part is appropriated by living vegetation. 
 These supplies of invisible power are mate- 
 rialized in the visible facts of growth. In all 
 this the plant is merely a receiver. For its 
 health, something more is needed. It must 
 transform and give out this energy in leaf 
 and flower and fruit. It must give it out in 
 producing a multitude of seeds, and thus 
 carry on the life of the species. There are 
 two ways of killing a plant. One is to shut 
 it off from the sun, and thus deprive it of 
 light, heat, and moisture. It grows pale and 
 feeble, and perishes. An equally effective 
 way is to let it enjoy the sunshine, but to
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 137 
 
 keep it from giving out its energy. Pluck 
 off its leaves and blossoms. Let it not bear 
 fruit, and it soon ceases to be able to bear 
 fruit. 
 
 So the bird that is prevented from flying, 
 singing and nesting, dies as surely as the 
 bird that is starved. 
 
 The star that is active is the shining star. 
 Invisible stars are dead and cold. The Sea 
 of Galilee and the Dead Sea are fed by the 
 same waters. The Jordan pours its bright 
 flood into each. Yet Gennesareth Lake is 
 sparkling and clean because it gives as well 
 as receives. While the Asphaltite Lake is 
 bitter and foul, because it receives and never 
 gives. 
 
 All nature is replete with instances of the 
 truth of St. Paul's words. The melody of 
 a musical sound, coming through the air, 
 strikes with its unseen waves a thousand 
 things. Only a few of them perhaps can 
 vibrate in sympathy, and they at once ab- 
 sorb the passing energy, but only to give it 
 out straightway in music themselves. The 
 " working in " is immediately associated with
 
 138 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 " working out." Thus one source of music 
 may awaken a multitude of kindred singers, 
 and make the whole air resonant with its 
 melody. 
 
 So the glorious sun sends out incessant 
 floods of energy in forms we know and it 
 may be in other forms not now suspected. 
 These streams flow out, enveloping in their 
 progress planet, comet, and meteor-swarm 
 all of which take in, in different degrees, the 
 passing treasure. They pay it back in the 
 colours of nature, the blue sky, the green 
 sea, the shining disc and in those invisible 
 forms that mitigate the rigour of space and 
 make the planet habitable, or lock it up in 
 coal beds to have it liberated in some future 
 age, when the fuel glows cheerfully in the 
 grate. 
 
 Our views of the universal fact of " work- 
 ing in " and " working out " being inevitably 
 associated in nature as in morals, have been 
 immeasurably extended in recent years. A 
 new department of physics, as noticed on a 
 preceding page, has been created in the dis- 
 covery of molecular radiation and transfer-
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 139 
 
 mation, or what is now called radioactivity. 
 It has brought to our knowledge, as before 
 mentioned, the previously unsuspected fact 
 that the very ultimate elements of matter, the 
 molecules of some, and perhaps of all orders 
 are themselves the repositories of tremendous 
 amounts of energy, which some of them are 
 incessantly giving out, and yet have such a 
 store that they may take many thousands of 
 years before they are completely exhausted. 
 But we also know that this energy was 
 received from some previous store. It must 
 have been " worked in," though the process 
 of building up the molecule may have been a 
 speedier one than that of " working out," just 
 as it may take but a few moments to wind 
 up a clock, which will take a year to run 
 down. 
 
 We have before indicated that the sug- 
 gestions of this remarkable scripture do not 
 end here. In the endless transformations of 
 energy in nature, much is put into the 
 " locked-up " or dormant form called poten- 
 tial such as they tell us exists in our coal beds, 
 our mountain lakes, in all fuel and food, in
 
 140 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 gunpowder and dynamite, and perhaps many 
 unsuspected forms in which the things next 
 to us may be rich all these stores awaiting 
 some directing touch at the right place to be 
 released and expend themselves in a thousand 
 modes of useful activity. In many cases the 
 magic touch involves an act of volition on the 
 part of the living being. The act of the will, 
 like the engine driver's grasp on his lever, 
 looses the giant and sets going the train. 
 The willing starts the doing. It is the 
 essential prerequisite in action, both in the 
 kingdom of Nature and of Grace. Paul de- 
 clares that the divine energy supplies power 
 for the willing as well as the doing All is 
 God's, and then all is the Christian's. The 
 working is the transfer of the energy. Work 
 it out, for God works it in you, and He does 
 it of His own good will. 
 
 This tremendous passage of St. Paul's 
 seems as full of science as it is of religion. 
 Does any one say again that it is incredible 
 that the writer could have had in conscious 
 apprehension the world of physical truth we 
 have seen that it holds? To us the improba-
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 141 
 
 bility that the real author of the wonderful 
 sentence should not have meant what it 
 means to us is on mathematical grounds so 
 great that it cannot be entertained by a 
 rational being. The difficulty does not exist 
 to the Christian. It was St. Paul's sentence 
 just as fully as though he were uninspired, 
 and it was God's sentence as fully as though 
 St. Paul were only His mouthpiece. If I 
 may be allowed to give a very inadequate 
 simile, the piano, on which Beethoven played, 
 we may imagine to be endowed with life, 
 consciousness, intelligence and will and to 
 become automatic. Let its will be altogether 
 one with Beethoven's so that what the great 
 composer wishes to do is just what the in- 
 strument wills to do. The music will then 
 be the piano's and at the same time the 
 master's. It may well be that the in- 
 telligent piano would not realize all that 
 the great performer puts into the tran- 
 scendent harmony. Thus the words of 
 Luke and John and Paul are the words 
 of Christ, and the words of His inspired 
 servants as well.
 
 142 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 HARMONY OF THE TWO WORLDS 
 Did time allow, we might find other scien- 
 tific hints in the Bible which strongly and 
 powerfully remind us of truth in the material 
 world old spiritual truths suggesting new 
 physical truths. The two worlds of nature 
 and grace seem to be strangely parallel to one 
 another. The analogies between them have 
 arrested the attention of the thoughtful in all 
 ages. The greatest teachers have found 
 boundless resources of illustration and in- 
 struction in these parallelisms. Our Divine 
 Master used them freely and often. Phi- 
 losophers have accounted for them in various 
 ways. Leibnitz declared there were only 
 three ways of doing so. Said he, if two 
 clocks were found to run together so that 
 each one always indicated exactly the same 
 time as its companion, it might be, firstly, 
 because there is a mechanical connection be- 
 tween the two, compelling them to run to- 
 gether ; or, secondly, some invisible agent by 
 continual touches, now forward and now back- 
 ward, may make one clock keep exactly with 
 the other ; or, thirdly, from a preestablished
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 143 
 
 harmony, the two instruments were so con- 
 trived and adjusted by a sufficient intelligence 
 that they, though physically unconnected, yet 
 starting together, would always be together. 
 The third explanation was the one adopted 
 by this great philosopher. 
 
 The great Scandinavian scientist and re- 
 former, Swedenborg, who was not the infe- 
 rior of Leibnitz in scientific matters, was the 
 author of a view which reminds us of the lat- 
 ter' s first hypothesis, save that the connection 
 between the two worlds in his view, while not 
 mechanical, was equally effective and con- 
 trolling. Swedenborg's doctrine of corre- 
 spondences is founded on a great array of un- 
 deniable facts in human observation and ex- 
 perience. The great Northern leader no 
 doubt pushed it to lengths to which many of 
 us find it difficult to follow him. He appears 
 to teach that a causal relation exists between 
 the two worlds so that the changes in the vis- 
 ible sphere accompany those in the invisible, 
 as instantly and closely as the image in a mir- 
 ror copies an object and its movement. 
 
 In our times a young Scottish naturalist
 
 144 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 and religious teacher, Professor Drummond, 
 has given a solution of the problem which is 
 quite startling. He declares that the paral- 
 lelism in the two worlds is due to the fact 
 that the laws of nature extend beyond the 
 boundaries of the natural world and cover the 
 spiritual world as well. Their working is in 
 his view not analogical but identical. The 
 position which the gifted Scotsman supported 
 with a glowing rhetoric that captivated the 
 world, is very hard for some students to ac- 
 cept. It would be easy to admit if one were 
 a materialist or an idealist, for then the sub- 
 stance of both worlds would be the same. 
 But to others, the difficulty at the confines of 
 the two spheres, where the law would operate 
 on matter on the one hand and spirit on the 
 other is very great. 
 
 After all, the student of the Bible is not shut 
 up to any of these theories. Leibnitz's three 
 possible cases do not exhaust the question as 
 he seemed to think. Neither world is a clock 
 or mechanical system but a sequence of 
 phenomena in which the Almighty Author 
 is ever immanent. The Absentee God exists
 
 IN BOTH TESTAMENTS 145 
 
 not in the thought of the Christian. The two 
 worlds are the simultaneous revelations of one 
 and the same omniscient, omnipresent Being , 
 Their harmony is therefore inevitable. 
 
 I live in the shadow of the mountain on 
 which Thomas Jefferson had his home. We 
 could once see there many features of his do- 
 mestic life in his peculiar views as to con- 
 venience, privacy and hospitality, shown in 
 the disposition of the apartments and the fur- 
 niture which rilled them. This private record 
 told of his method, his neatness, his original- 
 ity, his industry. But there was another rec- 
 ord ; his public acts, and his wide correspond- 
 ence and state papers. They reveal the 
 same Jefferson whom his neighbours knew 
 already from his home life. 
 
 It seems to me that the harmony of the 
 natural and spiritual worlds is like the har- 
 mony made by the right and left hands of 
 some great pianist. The parts are on differ- 
 ent portions of the keyboard, but they march 
 together. The one is independent of the 
 other and might exist alone, yet each is in- 
 complete without the other. The higher
 
 146 SCIENTIFIC HINTS 
 
 strains of the right hand are in exact concord 
 with the lower ones played with the left. One 
 does not cause the other as Swedenborg 
 thought, nor are they mechanically united so 
 as to be necessarily coexistent, nor, in fine, 
 are they the result of a preestablished har- 
 mony from eternity as Leibnitz imagined. 
 Their unity and harmony are not in and of 
 themselves, but in the one artist who makes 
 them both:* He makes every concord and we 
 stop short of the truth if we pause at the 
 music or the instrument and dp not pass 
 to Him. 
 
 Is it not true then that Christ's worlds are 
 each incomplete without the other? The 
 world of matter needs the illumination of the 
 higher world for its satisfactory study, while 
 the loftier world is not completely understood 
 without the help of the lower one, and in both 
 we fail of their deepest meaning if we do not 
 push on to Christ, the author of both.
 
 LECTURE IV 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE
 
 LECTURE IV 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 AMONG the great teachers of the world, 
 Christ is remarkable for His habitual 
 use of illustrations drawn from the 
 external world, especially the scenes and ob- 
 jects of the region He moved in. The plants 
 and animals, the landscape and skies of Gali- 
 lee were a treasury He constantly drew from. 
 Listen to one discourse. These familiar sen- 
 tences are always beautiful. 
 
 "Ye are the salt of the earth," "Ye are 
 the light of the world," "Let your light 
 shine," " Your Father maketh His sun to rise 
 . . . and sendeth His rain," " Lay not up 
 treasures on earth, where moth and rust cor- 
 rupt," "The light of the body is the eye," 
 " Behold the fowls of the air," " Consider the 
 lilies of the field," "A good tree cannot bring 
 forth evil fruit," " A wise man built his house 
 
 upon a rock and the rain descended and the 
 149
 
 150 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 floods came, and the winds blew and beat 
 upon that house and it fell not." And so al- 
 ways, whether speaking to the throng or to 
 one hearer, the multitude by the seaside or to 
 Nicodemus at night, or the Samaritan woman 
 at the well, the Master found the wind, and 
 the water, the sea and the sky, full of spirit- 
 ual meaning. To Nicodemus He said, "The 
 wind bloweth where it listeth." To the 
 woman of Sychar, " Whoso drinketh of this 
 water shall thirst again." 
 
 Contrast Him in this love of Nature with 
 other teachers before Him. Put a page of 
 the sermon on the mount by the side of a 
 leaf from Confucius or a dialogue of Plato. 
 There is the same difference as there is be- 
 tween a herbarium and a garden. The 
 earthly teacher is lofty, dry and contemptu- 
 ous of the rabble. The divine teacher is 
 simple, loving, and observant of every-day 
 life. The highest ability is that which sees 
 the wealth existing in common things. 
 
 These allusions to Nature give us an in- 
 sight into a beautiful feature of the character 
 of the Saviour. He must have been a close
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 151 
 
 observer of the external world. The boy of 
 Nazareth had a keen eye for the changing 
 seasons, the starry heavens, the glowing sun- 
 sets. He loved the rocks and hills about 
 Nazareth, and doubtless knew every nook, 
 every hidden dell with its murmuring brook. 
 From the neighbouring height He had often 
 looked over the great rich plain, with its 
 waving corn-fields and bright river threading 
 between. He saw Carmel like a crouching 
 lion grandly framing in the picture on the 
 south and west, and Tabor and Gilboa 
 towards the east, while snow-crowned Her- 
 mon guarded the north. Great events had 
 taken place in that scene, of which Joseph 
 and Mary often told Him. 
 
 The smiling plain below Him had been 
 watered with blood. It was the battle- 
 ground of nations and the thoroughfare of 
 the armies of Assyria and Egypt. There on 
 Tabor, Barak had smitten Sisera, and near 
 Gilead, Gideon had overwhelmed the 
 Midianites. On Gilboa, Saul and Jonathan 
 had perished. On the heights of Carmel 
 just before Him Elijah had triumphed over
 
 152 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 the prophets of Baal, and near Megiddo, 
 good King Josiah had fallen by the hand of 
 the Egyptian Necho. It may be that divine 
 prescience momentarily illuminated the lad's 
 mind and He saw the hosts of the Crusaders 
 and the onset of Saladin at the Horns of 
 Hattin, and later on the veterans of Napoleon 
 crushing the Mamelukes. 
 
 We have been used to think of Palestine 
 as an uninviting region, treeless, bare and 
 hot. Very different is the fact as narrated 
 by one who travelled there last spring. 1 He 
 exclaims : 
 
 " Oh, the flowers of Galilee ! The half was 
 not told me of their profusion and beauty. 
 No wonder our Saviour bade His hearers 
 'consider the lilies/ He must have loved 
 flowers, and it is pleasant to think how much 
 His beauty-loving soul, debarred from so 
 much that we enjoy in art, must have de- 
 lighted in the wealth of colour and the glory 
 of form in which God has clothed the grass 
 of the field in Galilee. I thought, years ago 
 in the Engadine, that I should never again 
 
 1 Christian Work and Evangelist.
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 153 
 
 so revel in flowers. All the fields and moun- 
 tainsides are so covered with them as to look 
 like a Persian carpet But the Engadine 
 flowers, though of every colour of the rain- 
 bow, and so profuse that you can hardly 
 drop a pin and not touch one, are yet all of 
 one sort. In Galilee there is an incredible 
 variety not only of colours, but of species and 
 families of plants. The clovers alone would 
 suffice to make the country beautiful, so 
 varied are they in size and form and texture 
 and mode of blossoming, to say nothing of 
 colour, and the clovers are only one of more 
 than fifty sorts of flowers that we saw be- 
 tween Nazareth and Tiberias. There would 
 be acres of a single sort of purple salvias, or 
 deep blue lupins, or cream-coloured cistus, 
 golden gorse, or any one of twenty other 
 kinds, and between the splendid 'purple 
 patches ' would be any number of other sorts. 
 Of course it is spring, and the flower season ; 
 but I am told that after the dry and thirsty 
 land has forgotten all the rains, both ' early ' 
 and 'later,' and the flowers that are not so 
 beautiful have passed away, then the thistles
 
 154 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 will come out in all their glory and quite 
 make good the lack of other flowers. One 
 need not live long in Syria to feel sure that 
 the curse if it was one of ' thorns and this- 
 tles ' was spoken of this country. All winter 
 long I have been delighted with the pictur- 
 esque shapes and exquisite markings of a 
 great variety of white or dark green vernal 
 leaves growing close to the soil, and on ask- 
 ing what they were, have always been told : 
 'Oh, that's a sort of thistle.' Now these 
 plants are thrusting up long flower stalks, 
 some of them as tall as mulleins, and making 
 ready to blossom. I counted seventeen va- 
 rieties the other day on a walk of a quarter 
 of a mile, and I am told that the blossoms of 
 some of them are superbly beautiful and that 
 they illumine all the land after everything 
 else is parched and dried. One of the count- 
 less things worth seeing in the library of the 
 Syrian Protestant College at Beirut is the 
 herbarium of the thistles of Syria. I am 
 afraid to say how many varieties." 
 
 Christ was a mountain boy and a moun- 
 tain boy never ceases to love the hills. So
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 155 
 
 in after life, Christ always sought the moun- 
 tains, when He wished to rest or pray, or speak 
 to His disciples alone. Other teachers pre- 
 ferred the forum or the porch. He is the 
 teacher of the mountain, which by its eleva- 
 tion, its stability, its bright light and open 
 air, was the fit symbol of His doctrine. The 
 forum and the porch are gone. The moun- 
 tain remains, and the sermon on the mount 
 bids fair to outlast the mountain itself. Dis- 
 courses on these solitary heights, far away 
 from all that could interrupt by sound or 
 sight, must have seemed like voices from 
 heaven. 
 
 And when again He retired thither to pray 
 alone, He had a closet fit for the Son of God. 
 The canopy above was lighted by the silent 
 stars ; the earth beneath was out of sight and 
 hearing. Both place and time seemed made 
 for communion with the Creator of all. 
 Eternity and heaven seemed natural subjects 
 there. Cato said that he was never less alone 
 than when alone. Christ was not lonely on 
 the mountain. His Father and the holy 
 angels were with Him.
 
 156 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 Happy is the man who loves the deep 
 forest or the mountainside. If he is of 
 meditative cast, he feels no lack of society 
 there all that is artificial in life, all vulgar 
 display of fashion or wealth, the petty calls of 
 business or pleasure, these are gone, and 
 great thoughts of a higher world and de- 
 parted friends and love and hope enter and 
 fill the soul. A traveller tells us of his 
 feelings, when once by chance he was left 
 for half a day on the snow near the base of 
 Monte Rosa. Around him in every direction 
 stretched for miles the smooth white surface 
 of the upper glacier, rimmed at a distance 
 with great snowy peaks, the Breithorn, the 
 Matterhorn, the Weisshorn, the Mischabel 
 and behind him the twin summits of Monte 
 Rosa. In all that expanse was no sign of 
 living thing beside himself. Man and his 
 works were as if they had never been. Soli- 
 tude indescribable but silence, peace, rest, 
 had universal sway. 
 
 The Master, by His constant employment 
 of natural objects and events, in metaphor, 
 simile and parable, gives to all teachers a
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 157 
 
 useful model. The highest success belongs 
 to those who can enliven their instruction 
 with apt analogies from the world about us. 
 The higher world seems to cast its shadows 
 on the lower. Every movement in the one 
 has its parallel in the other. Nothing is more 
 inspiring than the fertility of nature as a 
 source of illustration. The mine has been 
 used for many centuries but the ore is plenty 
 yet. He who would be master of assemblies 
 must be able to draw at will from this inex- 
 haustible supply. He must love and study 
 nature. This is the beauty of the mother's 
 teaching. Our childhood's lessons and songs 
 are full of metaphor, and when we grow old, 
 we still rejoice to learn by parable. ^Esop's 
 fables have been from of old the teacher of 
 all ages, child and sage. In childhood we 
 delight to sing of the " little drops of water " 
 and "the little grains of sand," while in 
 mature life we are stirred by the grand word 
 painting of Shakespeare as he sings of " the 
 cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces 
 and solemn temples," and their transitory 
 character. Many of the most celebrated
 
 158 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 passages of the great dramatist are only an 
 artist's picture of nature. He knew, like the 
 Master, the power of such illustrations over 
 old and young. The teacher who has that 
 love of nature and knowledge of her ways, is 
 admirably equipped for his work. 
 
 But the aptness and fertility of illustrations 
 drawn from nature are not more striking 
 than the universality of its use. Not only all 
 ages but all races of men are best instructed 
 by analogies, drawn from the visible world. 
 The Oriental peoples, permitted or obliged 
 by their climate to spend so large a part of 
 their lives in the open air, and in lands where 
 the sun puts so much of its energy into mag- 
 nificent plants and noble animals, have a 
 literature which is full of allegory. In the 
 frozen North, the richness is transferred from 
 the snow-covered earth to the splendid lights 
 of their heavens. The bard in Iceland, like 
 his brother in the vale of Cashmere, clothes 
 his thoughts in the garb which nature offers 
 him. The one uses the meteor and the polar 
 light where the other sings of the rose and the 
 nightingale. The unity of our race is plainly
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 159 
 
 shown in the universality of this practice. As 
 water quenches the thirst of all races alike, so 
 all delight to be instructed by fable, allegory 
 and parable and such a fact shows that they 
 are of one blood. 
 
 But its universality is not more striking 
 than its variety. Would a speaker be ever 
 fresh and interesting, let him live close to 
 nature, in any of her provinces. He will find 
 his increasing store of knowledge to be an 
 inexhaustible treasury of suggestion and 
 illumination. People never grow weary of 
 first hand illustrations. To find new mean- 
 ings in familiar things is irresistibly engag- 
 ing and pleasing. It strikes one like a new 
 discovery. If the fact be new as well, its 
 power is less, but still unmistakable. The 
 infinite variety of Nature is like the infinite 
 number of melodies that may come from a 
 single instrument. Paganini, Vieuxtemps, 
 Wilhelmj, all used the same simple four- 
 stringed violin. Each drew from it a won- 
 derful series of beautiful strains, character- 
 istic of himself, and stamped with his peculiar 
 genius. No one repeated the other's com-
 
 160 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 position, yet all together, and all the masters 
 of the violin beside, have not exhausted its 
 possibilities. Future virtuosos, for centuries 
 to come, will find in it new treasures of 
 melody and harmony, and then leave thou- 
 sands of combinations of tone unrevealed. 
 Nature, like her author, is infinite. 
 
 It is remarkable that the greatest painters 
 do not paint the least thing from their own 
 imagination of what it ought to be, if by pos- 
 sibility they can get an actual model of it. 
 They seek among the faces of a crowded city 
 for the face they want. The attitude, the 
 pose of limb, the swelling muscle are all 
 copied, not conceived. They will not paint 
 the folds of a robe or the form of a clinging 
 scarf from memory or fancy. The artist may 
 have glorious visions of sky and landscape 
 of face and form. He paints not from these 
 but from nature, owning by this that she is 
 above art, and that he must humbly learn at 
 her feet 
 
 It is worth noting, that Christ, in His habit- 
 ual employment of the objects and events of 
 the world about us, to make clear divine
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 161 
 
 truth, never allows the beautiful simile to be 
 so prominent as to draw attention from its 
 object. His illustrations are always subordi- 
 nate. We have known, in the case of other 
 teachers, the illuminating comparison to be 
 made in such detail and at such length, that 
 the real purpose and meaning were lost and 
 the accessory became the principal. It is 
 then like the splendid robe in a modiste's 
 window, which draws attention away from 
 the waxen figure within whereas an illustra- 
 tion should be like the same robe on a beau- 
 tiful woman, and be only noticed on a second 
 glance. Our Saviour's practice is a valuable 
 lesson in the proper use of such rhetorical 
 adjuncts. His love of Nature is not more 
 obvious than His teaching that she is 
 handmaid not mistress. Listening to Him, 
 we think of the Father's care, then of the 
 lily and the sparrow the strait gate does 
 not hide the way to heaven, but reveals 
 it. Webster's morning drumbeat, on the 
 other hand, saluting the flag of England 
 and circling the globe, is repeated by ad- 
 miring thousands who know nothing of and
 
 162 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 care nothing for the connection in which it 
 was introduced. 
 
 In striking contrast with Christ's love of 
 nature and the constant use He made of 
 it is the barrenness of natural metaphor and 
 simile in the writings of the apostles. The 
 chiefest among them, St. Paul, is singularly 
 restrained in the use of natural events for the 
 purpose of explanation or illustration. The 
 few times in which he allows himself to intro- 
 duce such aids, emphasize themselves by their 
 rarity. He likens the resurrection of the 
 body to the germination of the seed ; and the 
 ranks of the redeemed to the different glory 
 of the stars. We may well believe that the 
 great practical features of the message which 
 the apostles bore sin, repentance, faith, 
 holiness to a world sunk beyond our imagi- 
 nation in the most outrageous and open forms 
 of vice, so filled their souls as to leave no 
 space for thoughts of illustration. Exhorta- 
 tions to a drowning man to seize the rope we 
 fling to him, are apt to be brief and unadorned. 
 The spiritual peril of their hearers absorbed 
 their entire attention, and Nature and Art
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 163 
 
 were forgotten. How else could a highly 
 educated scholar like Paul, who knew the 
 great classics, and had a soul sensitive to the 
 beautiful, stand amidst a throng of Athenians 
 on Mars Hill with the wondrous Parthenon 
 before him, crowning a mighty array of lesser 
 temples, and the great statue of Athena 
 towering above him in flashing light from 
 her helmet's plume and glistening spear, and 
 fail to notice them even by a word ? Their 
 ruins draw less gifted men from distant 
 lands and reward their journey. Paul's 
 speech as reported might have been made 
 in a desert 
 
 Is it possible that this strange oblivion of 
 his surroundings, or insensibility to them, 
 may have been partly due to a defect of 
 vision ? Quite a number of passages in his 
 letters support the familiar tradition that the 
 great apostle suffered from some affection of 
 his eyes, that was quite obvious to all who 
 saw him. May it be that Paul bore through- 
 out life marks of that memorable incident on 
 the road to Damascus, when he was stricken 
 to the ground by a brightness above the
 
 164 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 splendour of the noonday sun? It is quite 
 possible that, while his sight was restored 
 sufficiently for the ordinary daily intercourse 
 of life, his vision of distant objects was im- 
 perfect. It may be that he bore through life 
 in his face, about his eyes, the effects of that 
 dazzling stroke of light, so that those who 
 met him on the street would look at him 
 and ask about him. "This is the man," 
 they would be told, " who saw the Lord in 
 glory and was struck blind." What an affect- 
 ing sight it must have been to those who 
 loved him and his Master, to have thus con- 
 stantly recalled the stirring history of his 
 strange conversion. He had seen the King 
 on His throne he had not seen Him in His 
 humiliation at Jerusalem, for Paul was a 
 proud young Pharisee, engrossed in the 
 study of the law under the great doctors, 
 and no doubt disdained, even if the rumour 
 reached him, to seek the humble Nazarene 
 among the common herd of Galileans. But 
 he did see Him exalted and seated at the 
 right hand of God, and had little sight for 
 aught else ever afterwards.
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 165 
 
 However that may be, the fact that Paul 
 took little account of the physical world as a 
 treasury of valuable emblems for the teacher 
 need not trouble us. His Master did show 
 by His practice, that it is the highest wisdom 
 to make such use of nature. We need no 
 other example than His for our guidance. 
 The Master is greater than any servant of 
 His. Paul himself would only wish us to 
 follow him as far as he followed Christ. 
 
 After all, we must not expect the follower 
 to be more than a partial copy of his chief. 
 Christ's servants are finite and limited in 
 their powers. His service is so rich and 
 vast that it requires the special gifts of a 
 multitude of men adequately to fulfill it. 
 The man of sober, dry reason is needed. So 
 is the plodding scholar ; the man of poetic 
 genius and rich imagination is needed. So 
 too the man of hot emotion, the man of im- 
 perial will, and the gentle spirit that meekly 
 follows its leader all are needed. Paul, 
 Peter, John, Augustine, Francis, Bernard, 
 Luther, Melanchthon, and a host beside, no 
 two of whom are alike, are required for the
 
 1 66 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 infinite work of expressing their Master to 
 men. In all the coming time, in the devel- 
 opment and enlargement that awaits hu- 
 manity and the varied forms of achievement 
 which will elevate the race, the Christian 
 scheme welcomes and will find ample room 
 for all. 
 
 With the evidences of Christ's love of Na- 
 ture before us, it seems strange that in so 
 many ages of the church, Christians have 
 looked with suspicion if not with enmity on 
 the study of the visible creation. They feared 
 or believed that it led away from the Master 
 not to Him. When the honest votaries of 
 science were led to views of the world dif- 
 ferent from those which pious people had 
 formed from a hasty interpretation of Biblical 
 expressions, never meant to teach science, 
 they were at once classed with the infidels, 
 and their learning was denounced as irrelig- 
 ious. It is not Galileo, whom in this day we 
 look upon as wrong, but the churchmen who 
 pursued him. We have learned slowly that 
 to reject a creed is not of necessity irrelig- 
 ious, and that honest search for truth is a
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 167 
 
 Christian trait in the scientist's laboratory 
 or in the pastor's study. 
 
 Perhaps this antagonism to Natural Science 
 has with many good people been due to an 
 unconscious transference of the term "world" 
 in the New Testament, meaning the then ex- 
 isting society and its wicked ways, to the 
 visible world itself, coupling the wicked and 
 their habitation together. The ancient Per- 
 sian myth of this world as the theatre of the 
 activity of Ahriman, the Demon of Evil, seems 
 to have survived in Christian lands, in the 
 belief that Satan had much to do with natural 
 events. The study of them it was thought 
 led away from what was good, and at least 
 was dangerous to faith. The pious monk 
 withdrew not only from society, but often 
 into desert places, away from the beautiful 
 in nature, her singing birds and laughing 
 streams and waving forests. 
 
 Against all this we must cite the example 
 of our Lord. He loved the material world. 
 And why should He not? It is the work of 
 His hands, for " without Him was not anything 
 made that was made." By His incessant
 
 1 68 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 power and oversight it is maintained. In all 
 its infinite variety of structure and function, 
 we may see the signs of His presence and ac- 
 tivity. He loves His own work, for He pro- 
 nounced it good. His followers should love 
 it too. It is full of Him, His care, His love, 
 His forethought, His wisdom. " For the in- 
 visible things of Him, from the creation of the 
 world are clearly seen, being understood by 
 the things that are made, even His eternal 
 power and Godhead." " He left not Himself 
 without witness, in that He did good and 
 gave us rain from heaven and fruitful season 
 filling our hearts with food and gladness." 
 If the men of that time could see God's power 
 and goodness in the events of nature, plainly 
 revealed in what was open to all, what shall 
 we say of our own day, when the child knows 
 more than the sage did then. Every one will 
 agree that the material universe, as we know 
 it, discloses most wonderfully the majesty and 
 might of the Creator, while the hidings of His 
 power in the great realm of electricity and the 
 world of the atom are yielding to the search- 
 ing of men ineffable lessons of His wisdom.
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 169 
 
 The rapidly increasing knowledge of Nature 
 is bringing out into clearer light that there is 
 a plan in the world, and hence there must 
 have been a Designer. What the material 
 universe taught us of God in the early ages, 
 it still teaches with increased force and added 
 richness. The multiplicity of facts accumu- 
 lating from year to year does not impair the 
 unity of creation. The great trunk is branch- 
 ing out into many limbs, and these are blos- 
 soming with a thousand beauties, but it is 
 still one tree. If Christ be the maker of all 
 worlds, there must be harmony between all 
 worlds. If the worlds visible and invisible 
 are from the same hand, correspondence and 
 parallelism between the two are to be ex- 
 pected. Neither is complete or entirely in- 
 telligible without the other. They are com- 
 plementary, because they came from the same 
 author, not by accident or self-evolution. The 
 unity of the creation, physical and spiritual 
 lies in the unity of the creator. It is vain to 
 seek for the unity of a musical composition in 
 the vibrating chords or the ivory keys, bound 
 together as they are. They have connection,
 
 170 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 but none to account for the great motif. The 
 performer explains the performance. 
 
 If these things be true, two important con- 
 clusions follow : 
 
 Firstly. The course of Nature cannot be 
 fully understood, without reference to the 
 higher world. Many lives may be spent, it 
 is true, and well spent in the research into 
 one world alone or even a small part of one 
 world. It still remains a solemn truth that 
 we shall never know the material world with- 
 out connecting it with the spiritual world, of 
 which it is the shadow. We need Christ in 
 our Natural Philosophy. 
 
 Patient work in the laboratory reveals facts. 
 A dead universe, however wonderful or vast, 
 has no power to awaken the interest of an 
 immortal being. But how is that universe 
 lifted, if its beauty and order are symbols and 
 results of the movements of the Divine mind, 
 repeating themselves by contemplation of the 
 material in the mind of the observer. Even 
 the materialist is not content with a blank re- 
 cital of the phenomena of nature, ending in 
 the enumeration. He is perpetually associ-
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 171 
 
 ating them with the men who discover them. 
 Thus, Comte said he saw in the movements 
 of the planets only the glory of Copernicus 
 and Newton. How much loftier did the Jew- 
 ish king rise when he said " The heavens de- 
 clare the glory of God and the firmament 
 showeth His handiwork " ? 
 
 The material world means nothing to the 
 brute. It means little more to the savage, 
 who may indeed see a power behind the 
 scenes, but a malignant power. How 
 worthy of its boundless extent and variety 
 it appears, when it is regarded as the handi- 
 work of the same Being whose offspring he 
 is, and for whose education it was made. 
 Then is it first seen that the smallest portions 
 of it, as well as its grandest collections and 
 systems, equally express the Creator's per- 
 fections. The tent of the fairy, Paribanou, 
 could when folded be carried in the pocket, 
 but when spread it covered a great army. 
 The stellar universe manifests, under the eye 
 of Chalmers, the infinite glory of a Maker, 
 but not more perfectly than the bit of radium 
 bromide, that is a universe in miniature.
 
 172 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 I repeat it, let us then dismiss the fears of 
 our forefathers, that the right study of nature 
 is dangerous to morals. No human knowl- 
 edge, not even the study of theology, can 
 take the place of that which is only the 
 Divine gift, attained by faith, but these 
 human sciences rightly used may power- 
 fully support and cultivate that grace in the 
 upbuilding of character. Great advances in 
 physical sciences were made during the 
 French Revolution, and were associated 
 with rank infidelity, but the science was not 
 the cause of the infidelity. The French 
 peasant thinks the brightness of the moon 
 makes him ill and wilts his plants, whereas 
 it is the thin cold air that does both. 
 
 Nature is no substitute for grace, but is 
 beautiful as a humble handmaid to it. 
 
 But secondly. The higher world is not 
 complete without the lower. The relation is 
 reciprocal but not equal. Our study of the 
 Lord's use of natural things warrants us in 
 saying, that the highest use of the temporal 
 and the seen, is to throw light upon the un- 
 seen and eternal. We have a striking
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 173 
 
 analogy in the history of astronomy. The 
 science of the heavens made slow, painful 
 advances as long as the worlds, celestial and 
 terrestrial, were regarded as independent and 
 unconnected. When Newton demonstrated 
 that they were parts of one and the same 
 system, the result was speedy and marked. 
 The physics of the earth was greatly aided 
 by studying the same forces acting in the 
 skies under far simpler conditions, and more 
 than all, the science of the heavens as- 
 tronomy was aided in turn from the earth, 
 so that it has grown more in two centuries 
 since Newton, than in twenty centuries before 
 him. 
 
 As Christ loved Nature, we should expect 
 those who are endowed with His spirit to 
 love it too. It ought to be very easy for 
 them to do so. In this connection I would 
 venture humbly to appeal to those, whose 
 conversion has been sudden, to support the 
 testimony of many such, that the world 
 around them seemed to be likewise a new 
 creation. There was a brightness in the light, 
 a beauty in the landscape, a music in the
 
 174 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 sounds of nature, as if a new-born soul had 
 seen and heard it all for the first time. 
 When a Christian is born again, all nature 
 seems to him to be born again. So general 
 is this experience, that the exception noted in 
 the recent testimony of Dr. E. E. Hale, Jr., 
 who was converted at a meeting lately held 
 in Schenectady by Dr. Dawson of London is 
 quite remarkable. Dr. Hale in a most inter- 
 esting account of his great transformation, 
 says that he became conscious of a curious 
 change in himself which he did not pretend 
 to explain. " Art, literature, scholarship, the 
 theatre, the various things that had filled my 
 mind," says he, " lost attraction." " Plans, 
 ambitions of one sort or another, of which I 
 had a number in hand, no longer interested 
 me." " The attraction of Nature held on 
 longer than the rest. I remember one morn- 
 ing looking out of the window at a row of 
 elms, that I had for years looked at with de- 
 light while dressing. I said to myself I 
 wonder if that is going too, and before I had 
 finished the sentence, I was aware that love 
 of nature had gone with the rest Doubtless
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 175 
 
 those interests will return. I am sure I hope 
 they will." Let us join him in this hope. 
 Surely his new-born love for his Lord will 
 cause those elms to whisper to him a sweeter 
 story, for they too are Christ's. 
 
 The Master's love of Nature, considered as 
 a trait worthy of our hearty imitation, is 
 especially to be commended to our own 
 American people. With us life is intense, 
 pressing, keen. We seem to drink in with 
 our mother's milk a restless spirit, that car- 
 ries us into man's responsibilities before we 
 lay aside our jackets. 
 
 When we enter the office or the shop, the 
 throttle is thrown wide open and we plunge 
 along at our highest speed all through the 
 working hours. The spirit is contagious, and 
 becomes an American characteristic in every 
 department of life. We put our hotels on 
 wheels and call them Pullman cars, for we 
 cannot do as our fathers did and stop over 
 at night. We sleep and eat while rushing 
 over the land at fifty miles the hour. The 
 telegraph does our talking, for we cannot 
 wait for the mail. This rushing habit follows
 
 1 76 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 us into foreign parts, and makes us known 
 among the quiet Europeans and still slower 
 Asiatics, as uncomfortable wonders. The 
 greatest things in the world cannot be done 
 in a hurry, and these things we miss. 
 
 As the pendulum released from one ex- 
 treme, swings to the other, so our people, 
 in their recreations, are not content with the 
 simple,' quiet humour of older, less intensely 
 active races. The London Punch seems to 
 us like a piece of didactic propriety. We 
 require the coarse extravagance of the comic 
 supplement of a Sunday newspaper Buster 
 Brown, Mr. Hooligan and Gaston and Al- 
 fonse suit us better than the cartoons of 
 Leech or Du Maurier. It is the recoil of 
 human nature from the cruel tension of our 
 business hours. 
 
 To these tired Americans, we would sug- 
 gest that they try, instead of the comic pa- 
 pers, the tonic power of a love of Nature and 
 communion with her. Our Lord found sweet 
 relief among the hills or on the wave. So 
 may His followers. The world He made has 
 inexhaustible variety. There is no mood of
 
 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 177 
 
 the human soul which may not find sym- 
 pathy in some part of the universe. 
 
 Are we meditative ? The silent forest, the 
 solitary mountain or the quiet stars seem to 
 share our seriousness and induce serenity. 
 
 Are we gay ? The songs of birds, or the 
 murmur of laughing streams form a musical 
 accompaniment to our gladness. Are we 
 craving action or longing for a struggle? 
 An hour with the oars, spent in conquering 
 the waves and facing the salt air, will give 
 new life to our bodies and new strength to 
 our hearts. 
 
 Are we depressed by the ingratitude of 
 men ? A brief time spent daily with the hoe 
 in our garden, will teach us how grateful are 
 our humble friends, the plants, that reward 
 our attention with a return it may be of a 
 hundredfold ; or if we like it better, we may 
 ramble with the faithful dog, who will show 
 us that a lowly brute may feel an attachment 
 in which there is no insincerity and no in- 
 constancy. 
 
 The Master has many higher ways of 
 meeting His people in prayer and song, in
 
 1 78 CHRIST'S LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 meditation in closet and church, but He 
 may be met too, as He meant us to meet 
 Him, in His works, if we only look for Him. 
 And so, in words familiar from childhood, 
 yet always fresh and beautiful, 
 
 " Our lives, exempt from public haunt 
 May find tongues in the trees, books in the running 
 
 brooks 
 Sermons in stones and ' Christ in everything." 
 
 1 " Why callest thou Me good ? "
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 CHRIST THE MODEL FOR THE 
 TEACHER OF SCIENCE
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 CHRIST THE MODEL FOR THE 
 TEACHER OF SCIENCE 
 
 THE knowledge of the physical world 
 is largely acquired, not by personal 
 research but from the testimony of 
 others. Science, for even the most learned, 
 is mainly " the knowledge of many men, 
 orderly and methodically digested and ar- 
 ranged, so as to be attainable by one." l Per- 
 sonal research in physics is confined for each 
 student to a limited portion of Nature. As 
 the years go on, this possible field for any 
 individual is getting smaller and smaller. 
 Philosophers once could survey the universe: 
 to-day they find too vast a field in a single 
 molecule. The atom has become a universe. 
 For our knowledge of Nature, except a mi- 
 nute portion, even the student of science 
 must rely exclusively on the accumulated re- 
 
 1 Sir J. F. W. HerscheL 
 181
 
 182 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 suits of the researches of others, conveyed to 
 him by such interpreters as he believes to be 
 competent and true. Laboratory cannot re- 
 place the lecture-room, any more than the 
 lecture-room can replace the laboratory. 
 Each is indispensable and complementary. 
 Testimony must not be disparaged as a 
 means of knowledge, for the larger part of 
 what one knows has always, and will always 
 be derived from it. He who takes nothing 
 on the witness of others, and demands per- 
 sonal immediate knowledge of all he accepts, 
 will have a short creed, and be but little 
 better than an ignoramus. The accumulated 
 experience of our race, preserved, arranged, 
 and conveyed to us in books and discourse 
 in library and lecture-room is man's price- 
 less heritage. The function of the teacher in 
 university, college or school is to be this in- 
 terpreter between the past and present. He 
 may seek to increase knowledge and ought 
 to do so, but his greater duty is to diffuse it. 
 It is for him to acquaint himself with the 
 augmenting stores of discovery, to coordi- 
 nate them, to convey them in proper order
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 183 
 
 to the pupil and to train him to make use of 
 them. The teacher has always been a re- 
 spectable member of society. If his profes- 
 sion has not been as highly honoured as it 
 deserves to be, perhaps it is often because 
 the teacher himself has not estimated it at 
 its real value. He belongs to a noble line. 
 Great teachers have been great figures in 
 history. They have left more enduring 
 marks upon our civilization than kings, or 
 marshals, or ministers. 
 
 The teacher, I venture to think, may learn 
 useful lessons in the practice of his important 
 calling, from the life of Christ. He was, of 
 choice, a teacher. He might have come to 
 earth as a philosopher, or a prince, or a great 
 soldier. He chose to come as a teacher and 
 so forever lifted that calling to primacy among 
 all professions. 
 
 He came not merely as a teacher, but as a 
 college teacher. He founded a college. The 
 civil law had it, that it took three to make a 
 college. A master and two pupils were 
 enough. In Jerusalem at the time of the 
 Advent, there were colleges with famous mas-
 
 184 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 ters. The names and something of the teach- 
 ing of Hillel and Shammai and Gamaliel have 
 come down to us. The college was not so 
 large as to require more than one master. 
 He made the entire faculty and taught all 
 the branches offered. This had been the 
 style in Athens for centuries. Socrates, Plato 
 and Aristotle had been heads of such schools. 
 The head master taught his scholars in an 
 apartment, or walking in a portico, or in the 
 shade of a leafy grove. They appear to have 
 had access to him, not only at stated hours, 
 but often as companions for a large part of 
 the day, asking him questions, and answering 
 them. 
 
 When He, whom we worship as omniscient 
 became a teacher, we may well study His 
 methods, in the communication of knowledge 
 and the training of His pupils. Surely the 
 humble teacher of human science may hope 
 to find some valuable light for his guidance 
 in a secular profession from the life of the 
 great Teacher. 
 
 Should we find the methods used by Christ 
 to be often those to which, in the long cen-
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 185 
 
 turies since His time, teachers having no ref- 
 erence to Him, have been slowly led by pain- 
 ful experience after many mistakes and fre- 
 quent retirement from disappointing experi- 
 ment, it will only confirm our faith in Him 
 as the source of light and truth. It will make 
 teaching-science also Christo-centric. 
 
 LET US REVERENTLY STUDY THE MASTER'S 
 COLLEGE METHODS 
 
 We are first struck with the fact that Christ 
 chose His more intimate pupils, not they 
 Him. At the close of the course, He re- 
 minded them of this. They had before en- 
 trance to pass under His scrutiny. These 
 picked learners lived with their Master, 
 journeyed with Him, ate with Him, listened 
 to Him in the walk, and at the resting place, 
 and held His words in tenacious memories, 
 more durably than if they had been cut in 
 stone or metal. They saw His mighty works 
 which gave new meaning and force to His 
 words. The twelve formed His inner circle. 
 They were to be His heralds to all the world. 
 Beside these, there was a number much 
 greater who were also disciples, but probably
 
 186 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 not constant attendants. They gathered 
 about Him when they could. To them He 
 spoke, too, and showed His power, and used 
 them as His messengers to the region near by. 
 
 The modern professor, with his seminarium 
 of selected students, and his large class of 
 beginners who are admitted to the elements, 
 but not to the penetralia of the subject, is 
 doing in the twentieth century what the Mas- 
 ter did in the first. 
 
 Christ's method of teaching is most in- 
 structive. It was, of necessity, oral, and not 
 text-book, teaching, We may well believe 
 that formal discourses at great length were 
 few. The remark dropped on a journey, the 
 brief answers to questions, the interviews in 
 their presence with other inquirers or object- 
 ors, together with the wealth of meaning em- 
 bodied in His works of mercy, all together 
 constituted a priceless curriculum. A few of 
 His extended discourses are reported at length. 
 What we may call the introductory and vale- 
 dictory lectures are given in full ; they throw 
 wonderful light on our study of the great 
 Teacher.
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 187 
 
 Shortly after the choice of the twelve, what 
 we would at this day call their matriculation, 
 we are told that Jesus, seeing the multitude, 
 withdrew to a mountain, whither His disci- 
 ples followed Him. Certainly the twelve were 
 there, and finally, doubtless many others 
 but His evident wish was to speak to His 
 disciples. Here He delivered what may be 
 regarded as the introductory lecture of His 
 course. It has ever been esteemed as a most 
 precious deliverance. Many pious people 
 have been disturbed at not finding in this 
 fully reported discourse a complete exposition 
 of the Christian Scheme. It contains no 
 gospel of Sacrifice or Substitution, no call to 
 repentance, no emphasis of faith, no assertion 
 of His Deity. The beautiful form of prayer 
 it sets does not ask forgiveness in the Sa- 
 viour's name. Can that be a model sermon 
 that makes no mention of the Cross ? 
 
 Such difficulties disappear if we are entitled 
 to regard the Sermon on the Mount as the 
 opening lecture of a course. In such a dis- 
 course we do not look for and ought not to 
 find a summary of the course. Such would
 
 188 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 be unintelligible. We may look for a brush- 
 ing away of impeding prejudices, a clearing 
 off of obstacles to entrance on the new way, 
 and a glimpse at some old things in the new 
 light. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount begins with 
 some startling paradoxes calculated to arrest 
 the attention and stir the expectation of the 
 young pupils. They had spent their boy- 
 hood in what the Jews regarded as the out- 
 skirts of civilization. Galilee was to Judea 
 what the Smoky Mountains are to Knox- 
 ville. Yet these hill-people had heard of the 
 great Emperor at Rome, of his power and 
 wealth, and had seen something of the mag- 
 nificence of his vassal, Herod Antipas, at 
 Tiberias, near by. They had at times gone 
 up to the great feast at Jerusalem, had looked 
 upon the splendid temple, its gorgeous priests 
 and solemn ritual, and had gone back to their 
 humble homes and weary lives. To them 
 happy and enviable were the rich and proud. 
 Happy were those who rejoiced; who were 
 richly fed and clothed; who hungered only 
 after more wealth and power; who were
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 189 
 
 haughty towards inferiors, and who delighted 
 in war; whom poets sang of and all men 
 praised. 
 
 Nay rather, began their teacher, happy 
 are the humble, the meek, the pure, the 
 merciful, the despised and persecuted. Such 
 are the salt of the earth and the light of the 
 world. 
 
 What a tumult must these words have 
 caused in such hearts ! They stir us after 
 nineteen centuries of progress. What an up- 
 setting of cherished ideals and sweeping 
 away of prepossessions ! Christ has here 
 given, if I mistake not, a valuable hint to 
 the teachers of to-day. Paradox is inevit- 
 able when wrong notions are to be replaced 
 by right ones. Surprise and wonder are the 
 necessary concomitants and badges of igno- 
 rance. Nil admirari is only possible to om- 
 niscience. To awaken wonder is contempt- 
 ible when it is done to mystify or mislead, 
 and only then. 'Tis a natural prelude to 
 the conveyance of truth and in this use it is 
 not only admissible but commendable. Our 
 pupils must be aroused from intellectual
 
 IQO CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 slumber, and paradox is a shake of the 
 shoulder to them. 
 
 After this unique introduction the disciples 
 were left in the state of men who, where 
 they thought the way plain, have unexpect- 
 edly tripped over an obstacle. They were 
 humbled, but intellectually wide awake. 
 Their teacher, having their undivided at- 
 tention, proceeds to disabuse them of the 
 idea that these opening sentences may have 
 suggested to them. He is no destructive in- 
 novator. He exalts the law and the prophets 
 whom they have been taught to revere from 
 earliest childhood. He is come to fulfill not 
 to destroy to complete not to lessen. The 
 law is eternal. Its human excrescences are 
 temporal. It is hard for us to realize the 
 attitude of the Jewish mind of that day 
 towards their law. Their religious leaders 
 seem to have largely abandoned all reference 
 to it as a rule for the inner life. Sin was 
 altogether in the external, visible act. So 
 was righteousness. The law had no eye for 
 motive. The commandment to do no work 
 on the Sabbath could not be violated by any
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 19 1 
 
 amount of thought about business, but it 
 would be broken by having one nail more in 
 one shoe than in the other. The teaching of 
 the synagogue doubtless like that of the 
 scribes, was filled with such petty and ab- 
 surd trivialities, and under such tuition these 
 young fishermen had grown up. To them 
 comes now by the word of Christ a revela- 
 tion of the spirituality of the law. It was a 
 voice from heaven at whose divine accent 
 these incrustations of human ingenuity fell 
 away, disclosing the perfect beauty they had 
 hidden. The key-note of this memorable dis- 
 course seems to be the infinite worth of the 
 spiritual put against the vanity and transi- 
 toriness of the visible. Ritual is not worship. 
 It may help it, but at best it is only the body 
 whose soul is the real service, Such a foun- 
 dation truth deserved such a place of honour 
 in the gospels. Human nature requires to 
 be held to it by iteration and reiteration 
 under divine influence. We swing away from 
 it so easily and lapse into formalism and mere 
 outside cleanliness. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount has many strik-
 
 192 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 ing features beside, which are of value to the 
 instructor. The simplicity of the language, 
 preserved so admirably in our chief English 
 version a simplicity not childish but child- 
 like the clearness of a deep pool is a model 
 which every one should imitate, though few 
 or none can reach it. Magniloquence often 
 hides poverty of thought. Simple language 
 is the badge of strength, and the natural garb 
 of truth. The Bible, and especially the gos- 
 pels are the " well of English undefiled." In 
 its style, it is the noblest pattern of our mother 
 tongue in its most perfect form. 
 
 Note too the Saviour's use of common 
 things for illustrations. He found ample ma- 
 terial in the familiar matters of daily life. A 
 far-fetched, novel or laboured incident, draws 
 attention to itself and so instead of setting the 
 theme in clearer light, darkens and obscures 
 it. Teachers and pupils alike dread triteness. 
 Like the Athenians, they demand some new 
 thing. Triteness however is not in the thing 
 or its frequent recurrence, but in the way it is 
 used. The flowers of spring, the stars of 
 heaven are with us always. Though seen
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 193 
 
 again and again, they are never trite. Our 
 Master here gives us a profound lesson for 
 our guidance in trying to teach others. Use 
 familiar things by preference for illustration, 
 but use them freshly. They all have mean- 
 ings yet undiscovered. Let us seek to bring 
 out the hidden significance of common things. 
 Our industry or penetration is exhaustible, 
 not their richness. 
 
 In a previous connection we have noted 
 Christ's constant employment of the events 
 of Nature in His teaching. His inaugural 
 lecture, the Sermon on the Mount, is full of 
 them. The light, the rain, the wind, the lily 
 and the sunshine are cited and forever iden- 
 tified in the thought of after ages with spirit- 
 ual truth. The light suggests personal influ- 
 ence, the lily assures of the Father's care, 
 while the rock and the storm typify the se- 
 curity of the godly. 
 
 What we may call the college course of 
 the apostles covered according to the com- 
 mon understanding about three years ; rather 
 less, perhaps, than more. Of the Master's 
 instruction there is preserved no systematic
 
 194 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 account, if indeed there was a system as we 
 understand the term. His method, as we 
 have before indicated, was education by con- 
 stant personal intercourse, continuous in in- 
 fluence, yet as to speech fragmentary. There 
 were searching questions on what had been 
 taught; the putting of instructive cases for 
 their meditation ; and, at times the puzzling 
 of them with seeming contradiction between 
 prophecy and fact. These things He often did 
 in their presence with His objectors and foes. 
 He seemed fond of the Socratic method of 
 making the learner teach himself. Doubtless 
 what He did with others, He did also with His 
 immediate disciples. Christ's example puts 
 an emphasis upon the necessity of personal 
 individual work with the student if we would 
 accomplish the best result. The great as- 
 sembly with its hundreds of eager listeners, 
 and its speaker, stirred to his highest effort 
 by the stimulus of the subject and the hour, 
 has its place in the university. Large classes, 
 in some subjects and some aspects of every 
 subject, are useful and even indispensable, 
 But they are not best for training. Like the
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 195 
 
 rapid dash of an express train through a lovely 
 country, they reveal the great features of the 
 landscape in their large outlines and compo- 
 sition, but to know that country will require 
 also the pick and the spade, the level and the 
 tape. Neither can do the work of the other. 
 It is curious to watch the oscillation in our 
 educational centres between the extremes of 
 class-teaching solely and of individual teach- 
 ing solely. The happy mean is the true 
 and wise way, and that was our Saviour's 
 way. In the English universities, in former 
 days, lectures to great classes held an insig- 
 nificant place. In our own land they once 
 held almost exclusive place. 
 
 Meanwhile we suggest that it would much 
 add to the value of such important changes, if 
 their success or failure could be promptly 
 communicated to sister institutions for their 
 guidance. We seek the same great ends, 
 through methods of various merit. 
 
 We note also that Christ taught His pupils 
 how to do things by letting them see Him do 
 those very things. His mighty works were 
 done in their presence. These works relieved
 
 196 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 suffering and manifested His divinity, but 
 had besides an educational value. We who 
 never saw a miracle cannot perhaps realize 
 the tremendous impression which such an 
 act must have made on the beholders. 
 Apart from awe and reverence, in presence 
 of power, was the lesson of the spiritual 
 nature of Christ's lordship, when, often the 
 forgiveness of sins went with the healing of 
 the body. 
 
 But the Master did not limit His teaching 
 to words, or to acts of His own. First among 
 great instructors, He gave emphasis to what 
 we call now laboratory work, that is to put- 
 ting the pupil to practical use of his knowl- 
 edge and to personal testing of asserted 
 truth. Very soon in His ministry He sent 
 them out into the villages and country sides 
 of Galilee, to preach and to heal to do, in 
 fact, what they had seen Him do. He gave 
 them minute directions as to their conduct 
 both among friends and enemies. We may 
 well imagine the excitement made in a Jewish 
 village by the coming of a disciple of the 
 Great Prophet of whom they had heard so
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 197 
 
 much. He would surely appear in their 
 synagogue and then in their streets and 
 houses, telling them the good news, healing 
 their sick, and casting out demons from 
 notorious subjects. The missionaries re- 
 turned to the Master exulting in their newly- 
 found powers. Here is a profoundly phil- 
 osophic feature of pedagogy, lying before 
 our eyes for centuries, but without serious 
 recognition. The necessity in an all-round 
 system of education that the pupil should 
 make his knowledge an intimate personal 
 possession, which he cannot fully do without 
 coming into such close contact with truth 
 as practice involves, has been slow of ad- 
 mission. The antiquated systems made the 
 student merely an absorber. The new sys- 
 tem makes him in a sense, a rediscoverer. 
 Once the teacher and text-book were every- 
 thing. Now the laboratory is also essential. 
 But, as in all reforms, the pendulum preserves 
 its centre only by swinging to extremes. 
 When instructors waked up to a conscious- 
 ness of this serious defect in their arrange- 
 ment, there were not wanting enthusiastic
 
 198 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 men who demanded nothing but laboratories 
 in the educational apparatus. They utterly 
 deprecated lectures and book work as mere 
 telling about things imperfectly, when in the 
 laboratory the things themselves were at 
 hand, waiting for recognition. Happily the 
 good sense of trustees and boards resisted 
 the pressure. They sought to adjust ration- 
 ally the balance between oral teaching and 
 practice. In fact, they have settled upon the 
 plan shown near twenty centuries ago by our 
 Lord, of combining judiciously the lecture- 
 room and laboratory the map and the 
 journey the model and the copy. 
 
 In our reverent study of even the minutiae 
 in the practice of the greatest teacher of the 
 world, we mark that He sent out no one 
 alone. His missioners went in pairs. He, 
 Himself, needed no coadjutor, but He knew 
 that each young disciple would be the better 
 for a companion. In wisdom, in courage 
 and strength, two are better than one. The 
 English Methodists find it so and station their 
 ministers in pairs. Part of the success of the 
 false system of the Latter Day Saints is
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE IQ9 
 
 doubtless due to their sending ministers to 
 foreign or hostile places always two and two. 
 Even in physical laboratories it is found often 
 to be wise to have the students work in pairs. 
 
 Note also another delicate point, full, is it 
 not? of suggestion and inspiration to the 
 plodding teacher the frequent repetition by 
 the Master of statements or illustrations. 
 This seems to have given to some harmonists 
 a world of trouble. Assuming that there was 
 no such repetition and that the same sentences 
 in the different gospels must refer to the same 
 occasion, great pains have been taken by some 
 to harmonize the narratives even by violent 
 wrenchings of the text. 
 
 Is it beneath the dignity of a wise teacher 
 to repeat his phrases in dealing with imma- 
 ture minds ? Nay, does not experience con- 
 vince us that it is both wise and necessary ? 
 Learning is a slow painful process, advancing 
 not steadily but like walking by constant fall 
 and recovery. It is by incessant repetition, 
 as the wearing of marble by long dropping 
 of water, that lasting impressions are made 
 on the young mind. Those studies in the
 
 200 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 curriculum in which such repetition is most 
 frequent and natural are just those which the 
 verdict of ages has declared to be the best 
 instruments of culture. I venture to think 
 that this is one of the reasons why the study 
 of the ancient classics as an educational 
 gymnastic has held so high a place in the 
 schools for thousands of years. The re- 
 lations of words in discourse are phenomena 
 which in their elementary facts are simple, of 
 easy analysis and within the grasp of the 
 beginner, while in their more delicate features 
 they require and reward the highest ability of 
 the scholar. 
 
 The construing and parsing of page after 
 page from day to day is ever bringing to view 
 the same principles in a variety of relations, 
 so that the rules of grammar are at last graven 
 ineffaceably on the memory. It is inductive 
 science, too, which the pupil is practicing, for 
 he is taught that the rule flows from the prac- 
 tice, not the practice from the rule. In teach- 
 ing the physical sciences such repetition is 
 not so common, while the phenomena are not 
 so easily apprehended by an immature mind,
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 2OI 
 
 for taken singly they are such as seem to 
 disprove our laws. It is only when the tol- 
 erably mature student has somewhat mas- 
 tered the science of errors, that he is able to 
 rest in truth derived from inexact results. 
 Hence it seems to some that such studies are 
 not the best for beginners. 
 
 Genuine classical study, as a branch of in- 
 ductive science, instead of being unfriendly 
 as a preparation for the study of the natural 
 sciences, should be an admirable introduction 
 to it. In the old curriculum, the judicious 
 mingling of classical and mathematical study 
 formed a happy introduction to the study of 
 nature, opening up a new and beautiful field 
 in which the methods were familiar while 
 their application was novel. 
 
 The Master was not always with the disci- 
 ples. There were frequent solemn hours 
 when He withdrew to the desert or the soli- 
 tude of the mountain top, some lonely spot 
 where no one intruded. Sometimes a whole 
 night passed before He sought again the com- 
 pany of His followers. The teacher must 
 have much time alone. Without those hours
 
 202 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 of meditation and separation from the press- 
 ing throng of active duties, his ministry will 
 be jejune indeed. The hidden life supplies 
 the public life. The sources of our great riv- 
 ers are not in their visible fountain-heads, but 
 in the invisible air in which those waters are 
 dissolved, which presently will fill their chan- 
 nels. We have Christ's great authority for 
 the teacher's demanding large time apart 
 from lessons and lectures, time for recrea- 
 tion in its highest sense the revival of his 
 powers the renewal of his zeal the nourish- 
 ment of his mind. Some teachers find in 
 society or in charge of work a great relief. 
 They unbend the bow, they say, and thus 
 maintain its elasticity. The recreation I 
 speak of is something different from mere 
 amusement. It is communion with a higher 
 world. To do that best the man must be 
 alone. Solitude, not society, best promotes 
 this flow of new energy into his soul. From 
 such hours he comes forth to his followers 
 with his face shining with a new light. 
 
 On the other hand, human nature is so com- 
 plex that our needs are wonderfully varied.
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 203 
 
 The Master often retired so as to be alone. 
 But again, He sometimes left the familiar, well- 
 trodden paths of Galilee, and with His chosen 
 followers resorted to the capital city, with the 
 throngs of worshippers from all parts of the 
 earth, converging to the great feasts. There 
 in the great assemblies, gathered in the courts 
 of the splendid Temple and overflowing into 
 the streets and over the surrounding hills, 
 they caught the inspiration and uplift which 
 come from sympathy and contact with our 
 fellow men. 
 
 The teacher's life, if spent entirely with his 
 pupils, apart from the great world, may be 
 rich with the fruits of meditation and study, 
 but is in danger of narrowness and self-centre- 
 ing. Now and then, he should abandon soli- 
 tude, and seek to touch the great throbbing 
 world outside. Man was made for society 
 and such occasional approaches enlarge the 
 teacher's views, brush away the cobwebs of 
 provincialism and freshen his sympathies. 
 His pupils will notice the added spirit and 
 life of his teaching, and catch new interest 
 themselves.
 
 204 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 There is another fact in Christ's life, to 
 which the attention of American teachers may 
 profitably be drawn. " He began to be about 
 thirty years of age," says St. Luke, when He 
 commenced to teach. The long period of 
 preparation, in the little village hidden away 
 among the hills of Galilee, covered childhood, 
 youth, and apprenticeship in the carpenter's 
 shop thirty years of training for a service of 
 three. 
 
 We think of those seasons of waiting at 
 school or synagogue or workman's bench, 
 and cannot help wondering that Divine wis- 
 dom and power should seemingly have been 
 kept in obscurity so long. To our poor dark- 
 ened apprehension it is so mysterious that 
 the transcendent gifts for which the earth was 
 waiting and groaning should be delayed or 
 postponed. Of course it is all due to our ig- 
 norance. Doubtless could we know all, we 
 would see that great blessings to our race 
 were secured by those silent years of tutelage. 
 One blessing at least we may thankfully re- 
 ceive. Our race and especially our age needs 
 the great lesson that preparation for duty,
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 205 
 
 ample and minute, had best be made before 
 undertaking that duty ; and that deliberate 
 careful training is no waste of time. Better 
 thirty years of drill and three years of service, 
 than three years of training and thirty years 
 of imperfect work. The one changes the 
 world, the other does not often outlast the 
 worker. 
 
 By no nation on earth is a warning of this 
 sort more sorely needed than by our own 
 American people. The character of our en- 
 vironment ; the freedom of our institutions ; 
 the vast things that may be done and that 
 press on our attention before we are grown ; 
 the possibilities of wealth and honour, nay 
 the very tension of our eager, bright atmos- 
 phere producing a singular nervousness and 
 excitability ; all conspire to push our young 
 people into the business of life before they 
 are mature. 
 
 In no profession is this more frequent than 
 in the responsible one of teaching whether 
 in the pulpit or the recitation-room. Here 
 the example of the great Teacher supplies us 
 with a warning and a pattern. Would we
 
 206 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 be successful in the high calling? Let us 
 make sure of it by patient, thorough prepara- 
 tion. Let our American public be impressed 
 with the need of this, and cease to tempt 
 bright but immature young candidates to 
 premature exertion. This stimulus some- 
 times kills. Let our faculties, boards and 
 friends of colleges make impossible for Amer- 
 ican youth to spend double the present period 
 at school, and then let them make it neces- 
 sary. 
 
 Teaching from the sacred desk is held in 
 highest honour in our land. Secular teach- 
 ing, too, should be a profession as honour- 
 able, as exacting and as well paid, as that of 
 law or medicine. To that end, it should be 
 life-work not a makeshift leading to some- 
 thing regarded as more worthy. The teacher 
 is more often the butt of the village wit than 
 the doctor or the lawyer, because his calling 
 stands lower in public esteem than theirs. 
 It stands lower, because teachers themselves 
 often have a low estimate of it. This wil] 
 never be changed, while it is regarded as a 
 profession, requiring little or no preparation,
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 207 
 
 and which almost any person may fill. Our 
 divine Master honoured the office by choos- 
 ing it for Himself, and in His short, active 
 life gave us a model in every aspect of it 
 which we would do well to follow. 
 
 With two exceptions, Christ's discourses 
 are reported by the evangelists only par- 
 tially. There are two, however, which are 
 given at greater length. One of them was 
 the Sermon on the Mount, which we have 
 ventured to call Christ's introductory lecture 
 to His college course. The other may be 
 called His valedictory, the closing lecture 
 of His course. They are given by differ- 
 ent evangelists. Plain, businesslike, Judaic 
 Matthew was chosen to tell us of the 
 former. It was doubtless a labour of love 
 with him to magnify the law of Moses 
 and exhibit its unsuspected contents to his 
 readers. 
 
 But when the last words were to be said 
 to the same men, enlarged and developed by 
 years of association with a lofty character, 
 another type of reporter was needed, one 
 of warmer feeling and finer mould, an eagle,
 
 208 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 not a man or ox or lion a poet, not a 
 writer of prose. Of all the four evangelists 
 John was the one best fitted for the task and 
 John was selected. The inaugural was given 
 on a mountain apart, away from the multi- 
 tudes, but to a small company that grew 
 perhaps into a crowd. The valedictory was 
 spoken in a small room again to the dis- 
 ciples alone, yet in the midst of a city 
 crowded always but then overflowing with 
 visitors. The little company was alone with 
 their teacher but not far from the crowds He 
 came to save. His parting accents fell upon 
 their ears mingled with the hum of voices, 
 and tread of feet, of the outside multitude, 
 decreasing at that hour, but not yet hushed 
 to silence. 
 
 The two discourses, the first and the last, 
 are strikingly dissimilar. In the Sermon on 
 the Mount, their Master in His divine offices, 
 is not mentioned at all. In the final dis- 
 course He is prominent. In the one the 
 endearing relation between His pupils and 
 Himself is not emphasized. In the other it 
 forms the warp and woof of the discourse.
 
 FOR THE TEACHER OF SCIENCE 2CX) 
 
 One is all law, the other all gospel. The 
 fatherhood of God is in both. The brother- 
 hood of Christ is only in the latter. The 
 Holy Spirit is not named in the first. In the 
 last He is conspicuous. 
 
 The Christian teacher of science may 
 humbly accept the lessons here suggested, 
 as to the natural and wise conduct of his 
 lectures. At the outset he may begin with a 
 clear awakening statement calling his pupils 
 away from prejudice and giving them a 
 glimpse into the region about to be entered ; 
 aiming at the creation of interest and the 
 removal of stumbling blocks. But at the 
 end comes the parting. How different is it 
 then after years of personal contact, when 
 the expanded minds of the scholars, informed 
 and disciplined, have qualified them to begin 
 independent life for themselves ! Surely 
 then, along with summaries of truth already 
 conveyed, there will come parting words 
 from the heart. The light of the final lecture 
 will not be the less for the warmth of the 
 parting friends. 
 
 Great Master, thou art the way to all truth
 
 210 CHRIST THE MODEL 
 
 in heaven and earth, and through the truth, 
 to the highest life ! That life is only com- 
 plete, when heaven and earth both contrib- 
 ute to its richness.
 
 LECTURE VI 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF
 
 LECTURE VI 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 THE gospels reveal to us a grand 
 character in presence of which their 
 other contents fade from our view, 
 as lesser lights always do before a brighter 
 one. When we contemplate Him, all thoughts 
 about methods of teaching are forgotten and 
 we are engrossed with the teacher Himself. 
 
 Other biographies give us often a principal 
 figure in a background so interesting as to 
 divide the attention of the reader. In a life 
 of Napoleon, we may see more of France 
 than of him. Marshall's life of Washington 
 is perhaps most valuable as a history of the 
 times in which he lived. The life of Christ 
 is a canvas in which the background is un- 
 seen, while we gaze on Him. Every detail 
 contributes to the prominence of the central 
 figure. Some human biographies have ap- 
 proximated to this and are famous in pro- 
 213
 
 214 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 portion as they do. The greatest among 
 them is doubtless Boswell's great work. In 
 it, well nigh every paragraph teaches us 
 something of Johnson. But after all there 
 are Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick, 
 Langton, Beauclerc and a long list of distin- 
 guished names beside. They stand around 
 Johnson on the same level and while revolv- 
 ing about him, divide our attention with him. 
 But Christ and His companions are not on 
 the same level. In our first study, we see 
 " no man but Jesus only." Upon a second 
 view, we may discern Christ's comrades at 
 His feet 
 
 Another striking difference between the 
 gospels and other biographies is this. Great 
 human characters require a lifetime for their 
 complete exhibition. They must be studied 
 in youth, in manhood and in old age. The 
 revelation of a great life is usually slow. 
 The complex demands the threescore years 
 and ten for its development. The richest 
 part of such a life is its old age. In this 
 alone we fully see the harvest sown in early 
 life. The fire and passion of youth, the vigour
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 215 
 
 and activity of manhood, are replaced by the 
 higher serenity and calm wisdom of the sage, 
 in which we discern what is best and noblest 
 in the man himself. Surely a human biog- 
 raphy is unfinished, if it stop short of the 
 afternoon of life. Yet Christ's biography 
 covers less than three years of His life. A 
 few glimpses only of His infancy and boyhood 
 are given. Like instantaneous photographs, 
 they raise questions which they do not an- 
 swer. Beside these, only a fourth of a dec- 
 ade of His manhood is revealed. Then the 
 curtain falls. The cross has suddenly closed 
 His career as a man. For Him, there is no 
 afternoon or sunset He passes behind the 
 veil in the fullness of His manly strength. 
 Children may draw near to Him who was 
 once a child. The youth and the mature 
 man may feel encouraged to trust in Him 
 who knew, by personal experience, the dan- 
 gers and needs of both. But the aged man 
 must seek for other sources of hope. Christ 
 was never old, Yet no one has ever found 
 His portrait incomplete. In some strange 
 way, this fragment of a life, disclosed the
 
 whole man. They tell us that the smallest 
 fragment of a diamond, has in perfection all 
 the properties of the gem. For its complete 
 description in angle, lustre, form and colour, 
 we need only the tiniest sparklet. So it 
 seems to be with this great life. 
 
 The biographers of other men are greatly 
 helped by having indeed, for any serious 
 work find it indispensable to have writings 
 of their hero his own letters, or journal, or 
 essays. In some cases, a man's correspond- 
 ence with little besides, makes up what we 
 call his life. He writes his own biography 
 unconsciously in his familiar letters, or his 
 more serious compositions. So true is this, 
 that in writing the life of another, he 
 may also write his own. Boswell's John- 
 son is Boswell's Boswell. The Evangelists 
 give us no line written by Christ. If He ever 
 wrote a line, we have no record of it. Once, 
 'tis said that, stooping down, He traced with 
 His finger in the dust on the temple floor 
 words we would give our libraries to know, 
 but which the next breeze or the next foot- 
 print obliterated. His words were from day
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 217 
 
 to day committed to the most transient thing 
 in the world, the idle air, to be lost apparently 
 when their echoes were gone. They were 
 not lost, but have been ringing round the 
 world ever since. He committed them to 
 the minds of loving pupils, and loving mem- 
 ory is a record more durable than engravings 
 on marble or brass. Horace in a memorable 
 ode boasted that by his writing he had made 
 for himself a monument loftier than the pyra- 
 mids. Jesus Christ, without writing, made a 
 monument which will outlast the stars. This 
 fragment of a life, reported by His humble 
 friends, has by universal consent, taken the 
 highest place in literature a place unique 
 and solitary, high over all in its class. Even 
 His enemies, through the long ages since He 
 was on earth have virtually said with Pilate, 
 "We find no fault in this man," and with the 
 officers of the temple, " Never man spake like 
 this man." We recall the familiar story of 
 Charles Lamb, that in a convivial company 
 the question was asked what they would do 
 if certain great characters of history were to 
 appear among them. One said, "What if
 
 218 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 Shakespeare were to enter ? " " Oh, we 
 should all get upon our feet," said Lamb. 
 At last it was asked, " And what if Christ 
 should appear?" All levity faded from 
 gentle Ella's face, and after a pause he 
 quietly exclaimed, " Then we would all fall 
 upon our knees." That is the attitude which 
 the finest spirits of the earth feel like taking 
 in the presence of Jesus Christ, and of no one 
 else born of woman. 
 
 What amazes us in this is that the char- 
 acter of Christ is not the one which poets, 
 sages and historians have drawn as the ideal 
 of humanity. Homer's hero was Achilles, 
 active, passionate, inexorable, fierce. Con- 
 fucius exalts the " superior man," dignified, 
 just, correct, but concerned only with the 
 visible and the present. Buddha crowns the 
 man imperturbable, immovable, unconcerned. 
 Carlisle's heroes are men of strength, like 
 Cromwell or Frederick the Great, feared by 
 thousands, loved by none. Perhaps the 
 qualities most admired by man are seen in 
 that romantic hero of our boyhood, Richard 
 Plantagenet, fearless, strong, unselfish in
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 219 
 
 some things, chivalrous, hating his enemy, 
 quick in revenge, but merciful to the weak. 
 This great figure of the third Crusade, like 
 the other leaders of the Christian hosts, is in 
 marked contrast with the character of Him 
 whose sepulchre they devoted life and fortune 
 to repossess. Meekness to them was con- 
 temptible ; to Him it was blessing. They, 
 when smitten, would smite again. He would 
 turn the other cheek. He exalts forgiveness. 
 They honour revenge. Kill your enemy, said 
 the Crusaders. Love your enemy, said Christ. 
 Is our ideal to-day, much higher than that of 
 the Crusaders ? We laugh at their chivalry 
 and count it fantastic. Yet that was the en- 
 nobling feature of those strange expeditions. 
 
 It was unselfish. It called for sacrifice. 
 The object was a mistaken one, but the spirit 
 was noble. Cervantes meant to hold chivalry 
 up to ridicule by connecting its practice with 
 the freaks of a lunatic. Yet such is our 
 homage for courage, truth and loyalty that 
 our laughter at the absurdities of Don Quixote 
 is lost in our involuntary respect for his 
 bravery,, his unselfishness, his respect for
 
 220 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 woman, his abhorrence of oppression. If the 
 great writer meant to make the knight con- 
 temptible, as well as comical, he has signally 
 failed. The gaunt horseman, with his un- 
 worldly life, has captured our esteem. Far 
 higher is it to take a drab for a lady than to 
 degrade a lady into a drab. Don Quixote is 
 a finer gentleman than Charles the Second. 
 
 May I say, in parenthesis, that to some of 
 us it seems that society in our own land, may 
 well cultivate and honour what is best in chiv- 
 alry. Our critics say, we seek and worship 
 money. The pursuit of wealth is not wrong, 
 if we join to it reverence for the uncommer- 
 cial, unselfish, altruistic qualities in human 
 nature. May we not have in our social rela- 
 tions, our dealings with one another, those 
 great traits we are showing as a nation in our 
 lifting the weak and poor, and in reconciling 
 the bloody wars of the rich and strong ? As 
 a people we can be gentle, though great ; 
 peace-makers, though powerful ; liberal, 
 though rich. May we not wisely seek to 
 show these qualities in our homes? Our 
 American character is bound to be a complex
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 221 
 
 one, and in this fact doubtless stands our hope 
 of its final excellence. Upon our Anglo Saxon 
 stock have been grafted branches from all 
 the countries of Europe. To the push and 
 energy, the common sense and common law 
 of the Briton, have been added the dash of 
 the Frenchman, the patience of the German, 
 the ardour of the Italian and the reverence of 
 the Swede. These streams coming to us from 
 widely different sources, do not remain sepa- 
 rate. The open pulpit, the public school, the 
 daily newspaper the party platform the 
 railroad and the telegraph, are so many stir- 
 rers, which at no distant day promise to make 
 us a homogeneous people. All patriots will 
 pray that the composite American character 
 may be a chivalrous one in the highest sense. 
 Have not Christians a peculiar interest in this 
 result ? Can we leave chivalry out of our re- 
 ligious culture, without having a defective 
 result ? Christians speak of their Master as 
 their brother. They bring Him down to their 
 side. They delight to think of Him as walk- 
 ing with them in the paths of life and sharing 
 their daily struggles. It is a beautiful and
 
 222 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 comforting conception. But is there not an- 
 other? That brotherhood also lifts them to 
 His side. He is a Prince. If they are His 
 brethren, they are children of a King. Their 
 conduct should conform to their high rank. 
 Noblesse oblige. In humble discharge of daily 
 duties, one may, by sweet serenity show a 
 loyalty to high lineage a spirit of other- 
 worldliness which will make his simplest 
 action noble and his " meanest work di- 
 vine." 
 
 The character of Christ is strikingly distin- 
 guished from the highest ideals of mere hu- 
 man creation in another feature. In our por- 
 traitures, we make a clear difference between 
 the manly and the womanly model. In much, 
 they are so distinct as to be contrasted. The 
 traits we call by the two names are as differ- 
 ent from one another as womanly beauty of 
 face and form from the manly type of both. 
 It is counted a reproach for a man to be fem- 
 inine, or for a woman to be masculine. 
 Raphael, in his "School of Athens" has been 
 thought by some to have exceeded the paint- 
 er's license, in representing some of his men
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 223 
 
 with the features of women. In our family 
 discipline, the models held up for our boys 
 are always men, and for our girls they are 
 always women. We would no more propose 
 Robert Lee as a pattern for the latter, than 
 Mary Lee for the former. Yet we feel no in- 
 congruity in pointing both sexes to Christ as 
 an example of the highest excellence. This 
 is another mark of the loftiness and eternity 
 of the Christian ideal. The Master Himself 
 tells us that in heaven they neither marry nor 
 are given in marriage, but are as the angels 
 of God. In that higher sphere all that is tem- 
 porary and provisional disappears. The 
 diamond there is divested of its setting. 
 Whether it came from a wedding ring or a 
 sword hilt, it flashes out with the same splen- 
 dour. Christ's character on earth was con- 
 nected with the shop and the synagogue, but 
 it was the same which now shines out among 
 the seraphim ; the same yesterday, to-day and 
 forever. 
 
 Seeing then that the portrait drawn in the 
 gospels is universally reverenced, while it is 
 so unlike that which our race admires, the
 
 224 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 contradiction involved need not put us to 
 permanent mental confusion. The inquiry is 
 aside from our purpose, but we may suggest 
 that human nature is complex, including a 
 higher and lower self. We have every day 
 judgments for passing events, and we have 
 solemn, deliberate judgments for august oc- 
 casions. The two are not always harmonious. 
 Our secular heroes are apt to be mere en- 
 larged projections of ourselves, like the spec- 
 tres of the Brocken. But our divine hero is 
 an image from heaven. The difference be- 
 tween the two conceptions appears to be 
 largely in the place assigned to the gentler 
 virtues in the two, and also to the different 
 idea of courage embodied in them. Napoleon 
 at the bridge of Lodi, or Winkelried at Sem- 
 pach, is the expression of the one view. The 
 courage of Christ is of a higher type. 
 " Strength," says Carlisle, " is best shown not 
 in spasms, but in stout bearing of burdens." 
 It takes a finer manliness to endure in pa- 
 tience the malice of evil men, than to rush 
 upon a hostile rank. The British line at 
 Waterloo showed a rarer fortitude in standing
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 225 
 
 under fire for hours without flinching, than in 
 the final dash at the supreme moment, which 
 swept away the broken foe. The idea that 
 meekness is inconsistent with manliness is a 
 fallacy resulting from taking self-control for 
 weakness, as if in mechanics one should take 
 equilibrium for rest. There are two things 
 one cannot injure by a blow, a mountain and 
 a mote. There are two beings one cannot 
 insult by reproach a baby and an archangel. 
 Both are meek, one is strong. The loftiest 
 natures are both gentle and brave. The Scot- 
 tish ballad made Douglas tender as well as 
 true. Dr. Gessner Harrison's definition of a 
 gentleman, was that he was a gentle man. 
 
 We have thus gotten some glimpses of the 
 Great Teacher as delineated by those who 
 were with Him. Two of them were His pu- 
 pils, and two were so near to His daily as- 
 sociates that their record is practically that of 
 eye witnesses. We may well believe that the 
 society of such a teacher, the observation of 
 His daily life in every detail was a commen- 
 tary on His spoken words, explaining, ex- 
 panding and enforcing them. The simple
 
 226 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 narrative of the few of these smaller incidents 
 which were preserved is full of pathos. " Jesus 
 hungered," " Jesus wept," " Jesus looked on 
 Peter." If these words have such a world of 
 meaning for us who read them after nineteen 
 centuries, what must the acts have meant to 
 those who saw them ! Christ's words " blessed 
 are the merciful," must have had new and 
 never forgotten meaning to those who shortly 
 after, saw Him touch the bier at Nain and 
 give back to the weeping mother her only 
 son. Christ's example magnifies the impor- 
 tance of the personality of the teacher, The 
 matter taught and the method of conveying 
 it are not all. The teacher himself counts for 
 a great deal. Christ said, " I am the truth." 
 No written page or spoken sermon could take 
 the place of the living, moving incorporation 
 of the truth, seen in Himself. The highest 
 truths must be personified, to be fully com- 
 prehended. There is such a thing as living 
 our lessons before our pupils. It may be a 
 mark of immaturity, but learners are always 
 less impressed by the abstract than by the 
 concrete. When the great sage was asked.
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 227 
 
 what is motion ? he might have gone into a 
 disquisition, which would have made his own 
 reputation, while it left the inquirer in a state 
 of admiring ignorance. He did not do this, 
 but merely arose and walked across the room, 
 saying, " you see it." 
 
 The teacher's life may not only be valuable 
 as a commentary on his teaching, but the 
 very warp and woof of his lessons may take 
 a tinge from his character. I have heard it 
 asked sarcastically, " Is there such a thing as 
 Christian mathematics ? " "Is there a Meth- 
 odistic demonstration of the binomial the- 
 orem ? " To the surprise of the inquirer, we 
 may answer, yes. A demonstration may be 
 slovenly and in bad taste ; it may be careless 
 and therefore defective ; it may be forced and 
 so fallacious. A slovenly, careless, illogical 
 demonstration is unchristian. The teacher 
 who daily sets before him as a part of his 
 religion, the striving for the things that are 
 lovely and true and honest will make his 
 mathematics graceful and sound, and so, 
 there is such a thing as Christian mathe- 
 matics. Are not those in error who regard
 
 228 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 any part of science as beyond the domain of 
 ethics? The true can in thought be sepa- 
 rated from the beautiful and good, but not in 
 practice. The Principia of Newton, or the 
 Analysis of Sturm or Poinsot awaken in the 
 competent student not only satisfaction with 
 the logic but a sense of the beautiful and 
 often the sublime, just as the Pantheon satis- 
 fies the engineer by its stability, while it fills 
 the soul of a poet with its grace and rich- 
 ness. If I may be pardoned for personal 
 reference, the culture given by the study of 
 Greek and that of the mixed mathematics 
 seemed to me to be much the same. A play 
 of Sophocles and the Lunar Theory were 
 much alike in the faculties they appealed to 
 and helped to discipline. Each exercised 
 both reason and taste, and each demanded 
 earnest, strenuous effort. Science is every- 
 where penetrated by the moral qualities of 
 the teacher. His work and words are him- 
 self. A noble man transfuses his nature 
 largely into his teaching, and happy are the 
 students who walk with him. For the high- 
 est form of education, one must therefore
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 229 
 
 touch and enter the life of a great man 
 Familiarity does not breed contempt, except 
 it be with people really contemptible. Great 
 teachers are like the great mountains. To 
 be fully known, they must be seen near at 
 hand, as well as afar off. The distant view 
 reveals the grand outlines and the compara- 
 tive height. The nearer aspect opens up 
 characteristic details and interesting peculi- 
 arities. The tourist looking from the top of 
 Righi admires the Alps. The Swiss moun- 
 taineer loves the Alps. So a really great 
 teacher, admired and honoured by the dis- 
 tant public, loses not by the near approach 
 of his pupils, but warms their admiration into 
 affection. 
 
 The importance of the teacher himself as a 
 factor in Education is made more obvious, 
 when we abandon the ordinary narrow mean- 
 ing of the word and rise to the thought that 
 Education includes the discipline of the en- 
 tire man, heart, head and hand, and fills the 
 whole life, not merely a few school years. 
 The catalogue of any university is largely 
 taken up naturally and rightly so with
 
 230 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 what concerns the intellect; the subjects 
 taught, the methods pursued, the text-books 
 used. But we all know that a student gets 
 a vast deal more at college than what is 
 taught in the lecture-room or learned in the 
 study. The large life outside of the lecture- 
 room, the association on equal terms with 
 picked young men from all parts of the land, 
 each one, like himself, the centre of interest 
 to a distant household, and representing their 
 social status : this attrition polishes his man- 
 ners, enlarges his sympathies, removes nar- 
 rowness and bigotry. He meets his fellows 
 in the classroom, in the debating-hall, and at 
 the dining-table. He is learning how large 
 the world is, and how small his native village 
 appears. There, too, is the athletic field. 
 When properly conducted it is a training- 
 ground for the mind and heart as well as 
 the body. It may develop self-control, cour- 
 age, patience and a high tone of honour 
 and truth, if, as the directors should aim 
 to bring about, the contestants prefer de- 
 feat to unfair advantage. Thus the college 
 diploma represents but a small part of what
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 231 
 
 the college does for him. The fine col- 
 legian is a rounded man ; in mind, a scholar ; 
 in manners, a gentleman ; in body an ath- 
 lete ; in all things a Christian. The pro- 
 fessor's duty does not consist of his lecture 
 merely. If that were all, we might replace 
 him with a phonograph. The assembled 
 class might see upon the platform, not a 
 living form, but a machine charged with the 
 wisdom of Kant or Hamilton or Helmholtz. 
 But the " vox et preterea nihil " would never 
 do. We need the flash of the eye, the wave 
 of the hand or the stamp of the foot, giving 
 emphasis and life to the utterance. The 
 teacher's duty too does not cease with his 
 lectures. Some of his most enduring work 
 is done outside of his lecture-room. His 
 daily walk before the student body, his 
 cheery greeting, his word of courage to the 
 faint and of warning to the erring constitute 
 no small part of his value to the institution. 
 What, I may ask of the older men present, of 
 all the impressions made upon us at college 
 do we retain most vividly now? Are they 
 the demonstrations and lessons of the recita-
 
 232 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 tion-room, or the memories of our teachers 
 and of the friends we made and kept ? The 
 most of us have vivid pictures of the splendid 
 men who taught us, but very dim ones of 
 much of their teaching. At our alumni 
 meetings, the speeches of the old boys are 
 full of personal reminiscences, but contain no 
 hint of those valuable lectures. It has been 
 so always. The teacher himself is more than 
 his message. We know Dr. Arnold of Rugby, 
 by his pupils' loving description of him and 
 his ways, but Tom Brown has forgotten all 
 about the doctor's elaborate views of ut and 
 the subjunctive ; the doctor was a real pres- 
 ence to his boys throughout their lives. To 
 them, Arnold was Rugby and Rugby was 
 Arnold. When we read his sermons to his 
 pupils and good manly talks they are they 
 do not suggest to most of us the greatness of 
 the man. What is that nameless atmosphere 
 that surrounds a truly lofty character; that 
 electric aura that can neither be denied nor 
 explained ? It is not great mental power, nor 
 strong will nor saintliness. Perhaps we shall 
 have to go beyond this world to find the secret
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 233 
 
 Among our prominent teachers in Virginia 
 two generations since, was a man who in his 
 way was as remarkable as Thomas Arnold., 
 I refer to Gessner Harrison a name hon- 
 oured by thousands, including many who 
 never saw him. A scholar, original and 
 advanced, he revolutionized the teaching of 
 Latin and Greek in this land. Trained in the 
 formal methods of the English school, he 
 early discerned and became familiar with the 
 superior insight and freedom of the German 
 scholars. He made use of their results years 
 before they were mentioned in any lecture- 
 room of our own country and when they 
 were unrecognized in many schools of Ger- 
 many itself. He became famous as a teacher, 
 but was quite as remarkable as a man. His 
 simplicity of manner, kindliness of speech and 
 act, his thoughtful regard for the young and 
 his unselfish labour for others, converted re- 
 spect for the scholar into love for the friend. 
 Doctor Harrison was a very decided man 
 in all his convictions. He was passionately 
 devoted to the South in the days leading 
 up to the war between the states. He would
 
 234 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 have been called an extremist by some. Yet 
 when just after the first battle of Manassas, 
 certain wounded Northern prisoners were 
 brought to Charlottesville to be cared for, he 
 was seen, with his Bible under his arm, 
 quietly seeking these poor fellows, trying to 
 relieve their misery, and point them to a 
 Saviour. He was a conspicuous example of 
 the teacher himself, humbly imitating the 
 model set by his Master. 
 
 If I desired an instance nearer our own 
 time, I need not go beyond your own uni- 
 versity grounds. There walked among these 
 scenes a few years since a great man, whose 
 memory should ever be a precious heirloom 
 of this institution. He was remarkable for 
 the extent, variety and accuracy of his knowl- 
 edge. In his day it was quite possible for a 
 man to be a master in several departments. 
 Now a small section of one department must 
 engross his labour, if he wishes to speak with 
 authority. Learning was telescopic then. 
 Now it is microscopic. The old-time men 
 had a wider range. Doctor Landon Garland 
 was a mathematician, a physicist, an astrono-
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 235 
 
 mer, a mineralogist and botanist, proficient 
 in all and remarkable in some. It was how- 
 ever in a sphere beyond this that his greatest 
 work lay. His wisdom in council, his dignity 
 and seriousness in public, his simplicity and 
 sincerity in private relations, all crowned by 
 his steady devotion and consistent piety, 
 united to form a character unique and in- 
 fluential. Long will he be remembered. 
 His opening addresses each year in your 
 university chapel should be preserved and 
 heeded. Hundreds, who came under his in- 
 fluence here, will cherish a loving regard for 
 his worth, coupled with admiration of his 
 intellectual strength. While he lived, he 
 was your grand old man, the Gladstone of 
 your academic circle and of the Methodist 
 Church South. Among the conspicuous men 
 who have served Vanderbilt University in 
 board or faculty, none stand higher than 
 Landon Cabell Garland. 
 
 Did time allow, I might speak of Tutwiler 
 of Alabama, Thornwell of South Carolina, 
 Broadus of Kentucky and a distinguished list 
 besides, who in their lives illustrated the
 
 236 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 thought suggested to us by the example of 
 Christ, that the personality of the teacher is 
 a most important factor in the result of his 
 work. 
 
 It is timely to say that the American col- 
 lege teacher, at least, must be more than an 
 expert in the subject he teaches. Our gov- 
 erning Boards do well to look beyond the 
 candidate's diplomas and list of published 
 papers. The American teacher must know 
 his specialty and how to teach it, but he must 
 be a man fitted by character, manners and 
 proper respect for youth to be trusted with 
 the training of our sons. No skeptic or im- 
 moral man should have access to these young 
 lives, with the sanction of our Boards of 
 Trustees. Freedom of thought always, but 
 freedom of conduct never. The academic 
 liberty, for which some are loudly contend- 
 ing, means apparently in some cases, freedom 
 to mislead and destroy. If we can have the 
 right men in our teachers' seats men who 
 may be safely followed by our boys in con- 
 duct as well as in learning, questions about 
 the Bible in schools become easy to settle.
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 237 
 
 The living Epistle will be known and read of 
 all the pupils. 
 
 We have tried in these studies to present 
 Christ as the centre of science a place that 
 belongs to Him as the Lord and Maker of all 
 worlds. We have attempted to show that 
 the greatest things in the book which reveals 
 Him to us are in accord with the soundest 
 science both as to fundamental truths, and 
 the moral qualities inculcated. We have es- 
 sayed to point out that the teachers of science 
 may get valuable lessons in their profession 
 from the study of the Master's example. We 
 have ventured to look aside from the lofty 
 theme of His mission, the salvation of the 
 world, and we think we have found that this 
 sublime strain is attended by subordinate 
 harmonies of this lower world, and that Christ 
 is Lord of matter as well as of spirit. The 
 recognition of this grand unity of creation, 
 with Him as the head, is plainly advancing 
 among men to-day. His sceptre bids fair to 
 stretch over the Orient. No one will be sur- 
 prised, if the great movements of our day
 
 238 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 should make of Japan a great Christian peo- 
 ple. Then China will follow, and as once be- 
 fore the Wise men came from the East, so the 
 faith of these Western lands may in their turn 
 be quickened and purified by messengers 
 from these new-born kingdoms of our Lord. 
 
 It will be a glorious day when the recogni- 
 tion of Christ as the Master of all worlds, the 
 source and support of all activity in all 
 spheres, shall be complete ; when we shall not 
 only admit but realize that we may serve 
 Him, and must serve Him if we would suc- 
 ceed, in the laboratory and the gymnasium 
 as well as in the closet and the church ; that 
 whatever we do well is done for Him. His 
 name may not be mentioned, but His spirit 
 will be in the act. Life, in all its details will 
 be service. It will be lifted to a higher plane. 
 Our daily work will be better, because it is no 
 longer toil, but obedience. 
 
 Christian believers are sometimes depressed 
 in these days, because of the skeptical tone of 
 much of our literature the hostility of some 
 leaders in science and the indifference or even 
 the loose conduct of some who are classed
 
 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 239 
 
 as Christians. Nominal Christians are so 
 numerous, and nations called Christian are 
 so faulty. We must not judge too hastily, 
 or take a few perhaps as specimens of all. 
 
 Judging of our world by what is true of 
 large communities, we may say that never 
 were there so much mercy and love in the 
 world as now. We have more Bibles, more 
 churches, more missionaries, more hospitals 
 more sacrifice of money and life for what 
 is good. Never was the National Conscience 
 so true and so potent. We have an inter- 
 national decalogue, supported not by force, 
 but by the public sentiment of the worldo 
 Acts of injustice or of cruelty, once so com- 
 mon, between nations, are now well nigh im- 
 possible, A great war has recently been 
 brought to an end by the pressure of the 
 Christian sentiment of the world. This will 
 grow, and some day wars will cease. 
 
 The movement of the age is towards Christ, 
 not away from Him. The supreme rulers of 
 the great nations of the world are nearly all 
 Christians, two of them are pronounced and 
 active followers of the Master. Never before,
 
 240 THE GREAT TEACHER HIMSELF 
 
 since the Saviour came upon earth, has Chris- 
 tianity such cause for gratulation as now. The 
 Christian to-day feels that he belongs to a 
 living, growing, triumphant cause. The signs 
 of the time are, to him, full of encouragement. 
 It is not so much the growth of any one de- 
 nomination, as the growing union of all de- 
 nominations, which is the striking feature of 
 the Christianity of our day. The followers of 
 the Lord are touching elbows. The great 
 convention in Carnegie Hall early in this 
 year 1906, and the more recent gathering of 
 the young Christian manhood of our Country 
 in your own city of Nashville, were a revela- 
 tion even to the men who took part in them 
 and stirred the hearts of Christ's followers all 
 over the earth. 
 
 The sound thinkers of the world are more 
 and more turning towards Christ. Skepti- 
 cism is less arrogant than it was fifty years 
 ago. The world will not find the Lord by 
 wisdom but by love. 
 
 The day is already dawning when fair sci- 
 ence will cast her crown at His feet, and hail 
 Him Son of Mary ! Son of God 1 of whom 
 and through whom and to whom are all 
 things.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 
 
 
 Form L9-25m-9,'47(A5618)444
 
 3 1158 00669 514 
 
 Ftp 
 
 A 000 605 638 6