THE K I N G ’ S BUS I NESS of stars along the vast and incalculable roads of the sky, hurrying upon their measureless orbits like messengers who haste before the coming night. The Carpenter of Nazareth created them all. “For all things are made t>y Mm and without him was, not one ' thing made that was made.” Informed men no longer smile at the statement “And Jehovah God formed man out of the dust of the ground.” (A. R. Y.) “So Jehovah created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” (“Male and female created he them” ). The statement seems a sub limity if not an audacity! It may be the profoundest and truest word ever written of us! At least the men of science have gone down to the garden and out of the dust of the ground have reproduced every atom of man’s being save that which thinks, wills, loves, sorrows, joys, fears, hopes, prays. And I for one love to go reverently toward that morning when Christ bent his knees and took the dust of the earth and lovingly mingled it in the rarest form and wove the tissue, drilled the nerve, domed the brain, then enwrapped, inbreathed the stark dust with his own breath and “man became a living soul,” a combination of dust and Deity. A few years ago when Mr. Darwin inti mated that he knew things about our ancestry not any too flattering and Mr. Huxley was telling us that the physical structure of the ape and man was identi cal, some of us were a little nervous about it and secretly hoped Darwin would never set eyes on some folk we knew lest he would claim fresh evidence. We have at least regained composure, and courage to go on while we wait for further knowl edge. In his last address as President of the British Scientific Society, Lord Kelvin said: “I marvel at the undue haste with which teachers in our universities and preachers in our pulpits are restating
841 truth in the terms of evolution while evolution itself remains an unproved hypothesis in the laboratories of science.” That is, a man of science who had given his life to the labor of research and in vestigation, marvels that men who had' never spent forty-eight hours at work upon the problem, should in the name of science assume the point in hand, bolt the difficulties and announce as. the sober fact and findings of scholars what the scholars themselves confess to be search ing for, because as yet unfound, unproven. In one of his conversational moods so memorable to all who really knew him, Bishop Fowler, that preaching prince of Israel, told us of preaching a baccalau reate sermon at Syracuse University. His theme was Christian Evidences. He said, “You know, a university with its profes sors dry as cork and members of the sophomore class able to make suggestions to the Almighty, is the worst place in the world to preach. So I spent six weeks preparing that sermon and had a fair time preaching it. At the close, one of those educational specimens with hair plastered back, ears wide set, trousers turned up at the south, a cuff buttoned on in place of a collar, fingers yellow with the stain of cigarettes and exhaling a freakish odor, said: “Well, Bishop Fow ler, I can’t for my life see as it would make a particle of difference with me if my grandfather had been an ape.” Bishop Fowler looked him over, removed his glasses and said, “No, sir, I can’t see as it would. But it would have been hard on your grandmother.” And the boys laughed the fellow out of the university. So we still say it after Paul: “For in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things vis ible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him and unto him and in him all things con sist (or hold together).” A Humiliated Jesus Paul not only preached a Divine Jesus. He preached a Humiliated Jesus.
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