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THE KING’S BUSINESS
“I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.” This is the story not of the potential, but of the actual. And what is true of the material world is true of the spiritual world. The history of the spiritual world is a history of displacement. You may account for it by the love of glory or by the sentiment of revenge, but we know that God’s glory is the final cause, and it is all explicable upon the great scale of divine providence. We all understand that there is a definite relationship between our present and the past, and that we today are the heirs of all that civilization that has gone. Our acts are the result of all that has gone before. They were the seed and we are the harvest: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The mass of this early civilization survives in the civilization of today. Where do you go to find the origin of the great principle of civil liberty? Where do you go, but to .that crowd of sturdy peoples who lived along the banks of the Rhine, and whom Tacitus describes, or to those sturdy barons at Runnymede who extorted the . Magna Charta from King John? It is just as true in the sphere of science or philosophy. It is a far cry back to Thales of Miletus, and yet our own boasted century, the nineteenth, and this which may have boasts of its own, has a close relation to the civilization of the very far past. Our astronomy is different from their astrology, and our chemistry is different from their alchemy, but they are closely associated. We see further .than they did sometimes, just because we are as pigmies borne on the shoulders of a giant. THE FRUITS OF DEATH This principle of glorification through death is illustrated once more in that a new and expanded form of life is the fruit of death. Take the railroad at the proper season of the year, and see the corn standing as a dazzling glory in the fertile
fields of the golden West. Mark how tow er^ herald the approach to the towns and cities, and ask what they stand there for. These are the nation’s treasure-houses. These are the storehouses of the world. This is the annual coronation of nature, and simply so many illustrations of the text: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it. bringeth forth much fruit.” Change the illustration and borrow one from the humbler phases of the animal world, like the caterpillar, which eats up the floor of the leaf on which it creeps, until, by and by, as it begins to realize that its life is nearly done, it sets its house in order, turns undertaker, weaves itself a silken shroud, and awaits the dawning of its resurrection day, and soars away a bright-winged butterfly—a beautiful illus tration of the text: “Except a com of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” That is the story of our life. We are born and we grow; we go on our way, renew our infancy with impaired faculties, and then we pass away. Life is a battle, and we win our greatest victory when we lie down on that battlefield and die. Life is a race> and the goal is at the grave. Life is a journey, and the path that we take lies straight for the valley of the shadow of death. The valley is dark, but beyond the darkness and across the river I see the lights of that celestial city; I get an echo of the angels’ song, and the glimpse that I get tells me that it is worth all it costs to die. The - principle of glorification through death is illustrated in the death of Juda ism. Judaism was a divinely founded insti tution—a theological seminary. The pur pose of it was to disseminate the knowl edge of the one living and true God. With the approach of the pagan world and Christianity it gathered up its energies to give birth to Jesus of Nazareth. That is what it existed for; and in the throes of the birth-struggle Judaism died. Let us not speak reproachfully of Judaism, for
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