Every matter hath two handles-by the one it may be carried; by the other, not. If thy brother do thee wrong, take not this thing by the handle, He wrongs me; for that is the handle whereby it may not be carried. But take it rather by the handle, He is my brother, nourished with me; and thou wilt take it by a handle whereby it may be carried. -EPICTETUS. XI THUNDER AND THE ANGEL "The multitude therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it had thundered: others said, An angel hath spoken to Him."-JOHN xi. 29. SOME said that it thundered. Others said an angel spoke. But suppose it did thunder: is that any reason why we should not also say that an angel spoke? Herbert Spencer once wrote that "Evolution is a change from an indefinite coherent heterogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity through continuous differentiations and integrations." And a writer in The Contemporary Review observed that "the universe may well have heaved a sigh of relief when, through the cerebration of an eminent thinker, it had been delivered of this account of itself." The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Well, now, let us assume that evolution is the change from an indefinite coherent -and all the rest of it: what is there in that to prevent us saying, "In the beginning, God"? Herbert Spencer has tried to define life for us. He says that life is "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." Let us admit it; but where is the reason in that definition for our refusing to say, "And this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent "? Time was when man saw arbitrary interferences of deities in every wind that stirred the forest trees, in every fleecy cloud that dimmed the azure blue, in morning's radiant flush, and in the stars that break up the night and make it beautiful. We can account to you precisely for the wind. The clouds are no difficulty to us. As for the stars, we weigh them and measure them, tell their places and their relations to each other, point out in advance where they must be at any moment of time a hundred years hence, and man's intellectual lordship we plant above the Milky Way. This is all clear gain-or it may be. But it is not gain, it is exceeding great and perilous loss, if because we know that it thunders we cannot also hear that an angel speaks, if beyond and behind and above all visible phenomena we cannot find an eternal Mind and an everlasting Love. In this day of an aggressive atheism we, who believe in God and in the Incarnation of His Son, in the resurrection and immortality, cannot too often remind you that science, by the mouthpiece of her chosen prophets, has proclaimed that she is and must be silent as to the cause and origin of the phenomena which she catalogues and describes. In his day, Darwin drew back from |