By Rev. Francis l a .
Fatten President ©2 Pstneet©®» Semiiaagy
Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.—John 12:24.
but few opportunities; there is no lack of opportunity for them. I had many a rough encounter when I first set out in the world; they shall have the advantage of my accum ulated earnings to set them up in life.” Sure enough, the boys grow up and fill positions that the father and mother did not fill, and could not fill; and by and by they all come home again, and as they look on the dead man’s face they say, or rather, they seem to say, “Father did well by us,” and they may very well say it. His hand had wrought for them; his head had thought for them; his heart had beat for them; this is the long result—the father lies in his coffin, and the children go their several ways in life, and repeat in their own experience the story; and so, “the indi vidual withers, and the world is more and more.” And this principle of glorification through death is illustrated further in the fact that, •when the lower forms of life or civiliza tion disappear to make room for the higher, the one dominating phase of the doctrine of evolution is the seeming unity with which it invests everything; because, imag ine it true, and there at once you see how moving are the poet’s words; y
© s f F ^ E . A L L know that it was nec- M W M W essary *or Christ to die, and
that His path lay through the valley of the shadow of death. I do not take this
text to illustrate this idea, but to concern myself with a line of illustration which has no reference to His death, and so will avoid the suggestion. We have here, in the first place, the enunciation of a prin ciple which goes far toward unifying the moral and spiritual history of our world. Glorification through death is a principle that may be seen in various spheres of observation, and in the relation of the indi vidual to the race. For instance, a man of ordinary education has a family of boys and girls. He has reached that time of life, the sure sign of middle age, perhaps a lit tle beyond, when he ceases to raise the question that he has been raising about himself, How shall I make the best of myself? and he begins to raise the ques tion—the only question he thinks of after that—What shall I do for them? “Well,” he says, “I had but a limited education; they shall have the best the country can give or they are willing to take. I had '
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