insect, in every bird and in every animal, as well as in man. Six thousand years of recorded history and yet we
know no more about the secret of life than they knew in the beginning. We live, we plan; we have our hopes,
our fears; and yet in a moment a change may come over anyone of us and this body will become a mass of
lifeless clay. What is it that, having, we live, and having not, we are as the clod? The progress of the race and
the civilization which we now behold are the work of men and women who have not yet solved the mystery of
their own lives.
And our food, must we understand it before we eat it? If we refused to eat anything until we could understand
the mystery of its growth, we would die of starvation. But mystery does not bother us in the dining-room; it is
only in the church that it is a stumbling block.
I was eating a piece of watermelon some months ago and was struck with its beauty. I took some of the seeds
and dried them and weighed them, and found that it would require some five thousand seeds to weigh a
pound; and then I applied mathematics to that forty-pound melon. One of these seeds, put into the ground,
when warmed by the sun and moistened by the rain, takes off its coat and goes to work; it gathers from
somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight, and forcing this raw material through a tiny stem,
constructs a watermelon. It ornaments the outside with a covering of green; inside the green it puts a layer of
white, and within the white a core of red, and all through the red it scatters seeds, each one capable of
continuing the work of reproduction. Where does that little seed get its tremendous power? Where does it find
its coloring matter? How does it collect its flavoring extract? How does it build a watermelon? Until you can
explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty and say just
what He would do or how He would do it. I cannot explain the watermelon, but I eat it and enjoy it.
CHAPTER XXXI 236
The egg is the most universal of foods and its use dates from the beginning, but what is more mysterious than
an egg? When an egg is fresh it is an important article of merchandise; a hen can destroy its market value in a
week's time, but in two weeks more she can bring forth from it what man could not find in it. We eat eggs, but
we cannot explain an egg.
Water has been used from the birth of man; we learned after it had been used for ages that it is merely a
mixture of gases, but it is far more important that we have water to drink than that we know that it is not
water.
Everything that grows tells a like story of infinite power. Why should I deny that a divine hand fed a
multitude with a few loaves and fishes when I see hundreds of millions fed every year by a hand which
converts the seeds scattered over the field into an abundant harvest? We know that food can be multiplied in a
few months' time; shall we deny the power of the Creator to eliminate the element of time, when we have
gone so far in eliminating the element of space? Who am I that I should attempt to measure the arm of the
Almighty with my puny arm, or to measure the brain of the Infinite with my finite mind? Who am I that I
should attempt to put metes and bounds to the power of the Creator?
But there is something even more wonderful still--the mysterious change that takes place in the human heart
when the man begins to hate the things he loved and to love the things he hated--the marvelous transformation
that takes place in the man who, before the change, would have sacrificed a world for his own advancement
but who, after the change, would give his life for a principle and esteem it a privilege to make sacrifice for his
convictions! What greater miracle than this, that converts a selfish, self-centered human being into a center
from which good influences flow out in every direction! And yet this miracle has been wrought in the heart of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]