Among the Forces - Henry White Warren (books for 8th graders TXT) 📗

prayer for divine guidance. God has more efficient men for his Church than we know of. He is thinking of Paul when we see only Matthias (Acts i, 26). When Paul had to depart asunder from Barnabas God sent him Silas, the fellow-singer in the dungeon, and Timothy, who was dearer to him than any other man.

We may expect opposition to be diminished or thwarted. Let Hezekiah spread every letter of Rab-shakeh before the Lord and pray (2 Kings xix, 14). The answer will be, "I have heard" (v. 20). Let the answer to every slander that Gashmu repeateth among the heathen be, "O Lord, strengthen my hands" (Neh. vi, 9); "My God, think thou upon Tobiah and Sanballat according to these their works" (v. 14). Then all the heathen and enemies will "perceive that this work was wrought of our God" (v. l6). "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." The purpose of the manifestation of the Son of God was "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John iii, 8).

Lastly, we may expect actual help. These plans are all dear to God. He wishes them all accomplished. They have been wisely made. Opposition has been diminished. It only remains that our hearts be open to guidance and strengthening. Moses was sure I AM had sent him. Elijah had the very words to be uttered to Ahab put into his mouth. Nehemiah told the people that for building a city "the joy of the Lord is your strength." God strengthened the right hand of Cyrus. The three Hebrew children and Daniel knew that God was able to deliver them from fire and lions. "Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thy heart." And the great promise of the Lord to be with his disciples to the end is not so much a promise for comfort as for the accomplishment of their mission. Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." And all great doers for God, in all ages, have gladly testified that they have been girded for their work by the Almighty.

The designed outcome of this paper is that every reader should get a fresh revelation of the immanency of God in the kingdom of nature and grace; that the reader is more intimately related to him and his plans than is gravitation; that there are laws as imperative, exact, and sure to yield results in the mental and spiritual realms as in the material; that he is a part of God's agencies, and that all of God's forces are a part of his; that he may sing with new meaning,

"We for whose sakes all nature stands
And stars their courses move;"

that in the burning vividness of this new conception each man may boldly undertake things for God--conversions, purifications, missionary enlargements, business enterprises--that he knows are too great for himself; that he may find new helps for spiritual victories as great as this age has found for material triumphs in steam and electricity; and that in all things man may be uplifted and God thereby glorified.

How shall it be done?

First, by a vivid conception that cooperation is designed, provided for, and expected. We are children of God; there can be but one great end through the ages in the universe. There should be cooperation of every force. There have been thousands of evident cooperations--waters divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned, exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man. Promises of aid are abundant. Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner than one jot or tittle of these words fail. We are invited to test them: "Come now, and prove me herewith, and see if I will not open the windows of heaven once more, as at the deluge, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

Second, select some definite work too great for us to do alone, as the preparation of a sermon that shall have unusual power of persuasion to change action, the conduct of a prayer meeting of remarkable interest, the casting out of some devil of evil speech or action, the conversion of one individual, the raising of more money for some of God's purposes, and then go about the work, not alone, but in such a way that God can lead and we help. Let the fasting and prayer not be lacking. When the right direction comes let Jonathan take his armor-bearer and climb up on his hands and knees against the Philistines, let Paul go to Macedonia, Peter to Cornelius, Wesley send help to America. Bishop Foss said, in regard to several crises in a most serious sickness, that Christ always arrived before it came. So in regard to work to be done. The Lord was in Nineveh before Jonah, in Caesarea before Peter, and will be in the heart of every sinner we seek to get converted before we arrive. Any man who wants to do an immense business should seek a good partner. We are workers together with God. What is being done worthy of the copartnership?


WHEN THIS WORLD IS NOT*

*Reprinted from the _Methodist Review_.

"The day of the Lord will come . . .; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

What is there after that?

To this question there are three answers:

I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there were before the world was created. They are not dependent on it. The sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore. The world is not the main thing in the universe. It is only a temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose. When that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away. The time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." We already have a kingdom that cannot be moved. "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."

It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an empty desert. God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent. Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power. David could think of no place of hiding from that presence. The first word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven." And the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer, swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed. What God created with things that are therein is not empty. Poets, the true seers, recognize this. When Longfellow died one of them, remembering the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him say of his wife long since gone before:

And now I shall seek her once more,
On some Mississippi's vast tide
That flows the whole universe through,
Than earth's widest rivers more wide.

Evangeline I shall not miss
Though we wander the dim starry sheen,
On opposite sides of rivers so vast
That islands of worlds intervene.

But what is there in space? There is the great ceaseless force of gravitation. Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic. Tie an apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl it around your finger, noting its pull. That depends on the weight of the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the head of Goliath. But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the tensile strength of the string? If we covered the whole side of the earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not run around among them.

There swings the moon above us. Its best service is not its light, though lovers prize that highly. Its gravitative work is its best. It lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast. Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and deposit of sewage along the shore.

Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not. This force is universally present and effective. In the possibilities of a no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter. What gravitation does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to assert. But as will be seen in our second division there is still ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be.

In space empty of worlds there is light. It flies or runs one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. There must be somewhat on which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power. Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of a pound of ponderable matter. It is too fine for our experimentation, too strong for our measurement. We must get rid of our thumby fingers first.

What is light doing