In His Image

William Jennings Bryan

In His Image

EAN 8596547228578

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

BIBLE STUDY

WORK AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE

EVANGELISTIC WORK

SELF-HELP

I

Table of Contents

IN THE BEGINNING—GOD

Religion is the relation between man and his Maker—the most important relationship into which man enters. Most of the relationships of life are voluntary; we enter into them or not as we please. Such, for illustration, are those between business partners, between stockholders in a corporation, between friends and between husband and wife. Some relationships, on the other hand, are involuntary; we enter into them because we must. Such, for illustration, are those between man and his government, between man and society, and between man and his Maker.

Tolstoy declares that morality is but the outward manifestation of religion. If this be true, as I believe it is, then religion is the most practical thing in life and the thought of God the greatest thought that can enter the human mind or heart. Tolstoy also delivers a severe rebuke to what he calls the Cultured crowd—those who think that religion, while good enough for the ignorant (to hold in check and restrain them), is not needed when one reaches a certain stage of intellectual development. His reply is that religion is not superstition and does not rest upon a vague fear of the unseen forces of nature, but does rest upon man's consciousness of his finiteness amid an infinite universe and of his sinfulness. This consciousness, Tolstoy adds, man can never outgrow.

Evidence of the existence of an Infinite Being is to be found in the Bible, in the facts of human consciousness, and in the physical universe. Dr. Charles Hodge sets forth as follows the principal arguments used to maintain the existence of a God:

I. The a priori argument which seeks to demonstrate the being of a God from certain first principles involved in the essential laws of human intelligence.

II. The cosmological argument, or that one which proceeds after the posteriori fashion, from the present existence of the world as an effect, to the necessary existence of some ultimate and eternal first cause.

III. The teleological argument, or that argument which, from the evidence of design in the creation, seeks to establish the fact that the great self-existent first cause of all things is an intelligent and voluntary personal spirit.

IV. The moral argument, or that argument which, from a consideration of the phenomena of conscience in the human heart, seeks to establish the fact that the self-existent Creator is also the righteous moral Governor of the world. This argument includes the consideration of the universal feeling of dependence common to all men, which together with conscience constitutes the religious sentiment.

V. The historical argument, which involves: (1) The evident providential presence of God in the history of the human race. (2) The evidence afforded by history that the human race is not eternal, and therefore not an infinite succession of individuals, but created. (3) The universal consent of all men to the fact of His existence.

VI. The Scriptural argument, which includes: (1) The miracles and prophecies recorded in Scripture, and confirmed by testimony, proving the existence of a God. (2) The Bible itself, self-evidently a work of superhuman wisdom. (3) Revelation, developing and enlightening conscience, and relieving many of the difficulties under which natural theism labours, and thus confirming every other line of evidence.

A reasonable person searches for a reason and all reasons point to a God, all-wise, all-powerful, and all-loving. On no other theory can we account for what we see about us. It is impossible to conceive of the universe, illimitable in extent and seemingly measureless in time, as being the result of chance. The reign of law, universal and eternal, compels belief in a Law Giver.

We need not give much time to the agnostic. If he is sincere he does not know and therefore cannot affirm, deny or advise. When I was a young man I wrote to Colonel Ingersoll, the leading infidel of his day, and asked his views on God and immortality. His secretary sent me a speech which quoted Colonel Ingersoll as follows: I do not say that there is no God: I simply say I do not know. I do not say that there is no life beyond the grave: I simply say I do not know! What pleasure could any man find in taking from a human, heart a living faith and putting in the place of it the cold and cheerless doctrine I do not know? Many who call themselves agnostics are really atheists; it is easier to profess ignorance than to defend atheism.

We give the atheist too much latitude; we allow him to ask all the questions and we try to answer them. I know of no reason why the Christian should take upon himself the difficult task of answering all questions and give to the atheist the easy task of asking them. Any one can ask questions, but not every question can be answered. If I am to discuss creation with an atheist it will be on condition that we ask questions about. He may ask the first one if he wishes, but he shall not ask a second one until he answers my first.

What is the first question an atheist asks a Christian? There is but one first question: Where do you begin? I answer: I begin where the Bible begins. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. I begin with a Creative Cause that is sufficient for anything that can come thereafter.

Having answered the atheist's first question, it is now my turn, and I ask my first question of the atheist: Where do you begin? And then his trouble begins. Did you ever hear an atheist explain creation? He cannot begin with God because he denies the existence of a God. But he must begin somewhere; it is just as necessary for the atheist as for the Christian to have a beginning point for his philosophy.

Where does the atheist begin? He usually starts with the nebular hypothesis. And where does that begin? In the beginning? No. It begins by assuming that two things existed, which the theory does not try to explain. It assumes that matter and force existed, but it does not tell us how matter and force came into existence, where they came from, or why they came. The theory begins: Let us suppose that matter and force are here, and then, according to the theory, force working on matter, created a world. I have just as much right as the atheist to begin with an assumption, and I would rather begin with God and reason down, than begin with a piece of dirt and reason up. The difference between the Christian theory and the materialistic theory is that the Christian begins with God, while the materialist begins with dull, inanimate matter. I know of no theory suggested as a substitute for the Bible theory that is as rational and as easy to believe.

If the atheist asks me if I can understand God, I answer that it is not necessary that my finite mind shall comprehend the Infinite Mind before I admit that there is an infinite mind, any more than it is necessary that I shall understand the sun before I can admit that there is a sun. We must deal with the facts about us whether we can understand them or not.

If the atheist tells me that I have no right to believe in God until I can understand Him, I will take his own logic and drive him to suicide; for, by that logic, what right has an atheist to live unless he can understand the mystery of his own life? Does the atheist understand the mystery of the life he lives? No; bring me the most learned atheist and when he has gathered all the information that this earth can give, I will have a little child lead him out and show him the grass upon the ground, the leaves upon the trees, the birds that fly in the air, and the fishes in the deep, and the little child will mock him and tell him, and tell him truly, that he, the little child, knows just as much about the mystery of life as does the most learned atheist. We have our thoughts, our hopes, our fears, and yet we know that in a moment a change may come over any one of us that will convert a living, breathing human being into a mass of lifeless clay. What is it, that, having, we live, and, having not, we are as the clod? We know as little of the mystery of life to-day as they knew in the dawn of creation and yet behold the civilization that man has wrought.

And love that makes life worth living is also a mystery. Have you ever read a scientific definition of love? You never will. Why? Because a man does not know what love is until he gets into it, and then he is not scientific until he gets out again. And even if we could understand the mysterious tie that brings two hearts together from out the multitude, and on a united life builds the home, earth's only paradise, we still would be unable to understand that larger mystery that manifests itself when a human heart reaches out and links itself to every other heart.

And patriotism, also, is a mystery—intangible, invisible, and yet eternal. Because there has been in the past such a thing as patriotism, millions have given their lives for their country. Patriotism could command millions of lives to-day. Our country is not lacking in patriotism; we have as much as can be found anywhere else, and it is of as high a quality. There ought to be more patriotism here than elsewhere; as citizenship in the United States carries more benefits with it than citizenship in any other land, the American citizen should be willing to sacrifice more than any other citizen to make sure that the blessings of our government shall descend unimpaired to children and to children's children. The atheist knows as little about these mysteries as the Christian does and yet he lives, he loves and he is patriotic.

But our case is even stronger: Everything with which man deals is full of mystery. The very food we eat is mysterious; sometimes man-made food becomes so mysterious that we are compelled to enact pure food laws in order that we may know what we are eating. And God-made food is as mysterious as man-made food, though we cannot compel Jehovah to make known the formula.

We encourage children to raise vegetables; a little child can learn how to raise vegetables, but no grown person understands the mystery that is wrapped up in every vegetable that grows. Let me illustrate: I am fond of radishes; my good wife knows it and keeps me supplied with them when she can. I eat radishes in the morning; I eat radishes at noon; I eat radishes at night; I eat radishes between meals; I like radishes. I plant radish seed—put the little seed into the ground, and go out in a few days and find a full grown radish. The top is green, the body of the root is white and almost transparent, and around it I sometimes find a delicate pink or red. Whose hand caught the hues of a summer sunset and wrapped them around the radish's root down there in the darkness in the ground? I cannot understand a radish; can you? If one refused to eat anything until he could understand the mystery of its growth, he would die of starvation; but mystery does not bother us in the dining-room,—it is only in the church that mystery seems to give us trouble.

In travelling around the world I found that the egg is a universal form of food. When we reached Asia the cooking was so different from ours that the boiled egg was sometimes the only home-like thing we could find on the table. I became so attached to the egg, that, when I returned to the United States, for weeks I felt like taking my hat off to every hen I met. What is more mysterious than an egg? Take a fresh egg; it is not only good food, but an important article of merchandise. But loan a fresh egg to a hen, after the hen has developed a well-settled tendency to sit, and let her keep the egg under her for a week, and, as any housewife will tell you, it loses a large part of its market value. But be patient with the hen; let her have it for two weeks more and she will give you back a chicken that you could not find in the egg. No one can understand the egg, but we all like eggs.

Water is essential to human life, and has been from the beginning, but it is only a short time ago, relatively speaking, that we learned that water is composed of gas. Two gases got mixed together and could not get apart and we call the mixture water, but it was much more important that man should have had water to drink all these years than it was to find out that water is composed of gas. And there is one thing about water that we do not yet understand, viz., why it differs from other things in this, that other things continue to contract indefinitely under the influence of cold, while water contracts until it reaches a certain temperature and then, the rule being reversed, expands under the influence of more intense cold? It does not make much difference whether we ever learn why this is true, but it is important to the world to know that it is so.

Sometimes I go into a community and find a young man who has come in from the country and obtained a smattering of knowledge; then his head swells and he begins to swagger around and say that an intelligent man like himself cannot afford to have anything to do with anything that he cannot understand. Poor boy, he will be surprised to find out how few things he will be able to deal with if he adopts that rule. I feel like suggesting to him that the next time he goes home to show himself off to his parents on the farm he address himself to the first mystery that ever came under his observation, and has not yet been solved, notwithstanding the wonderful progress made by our agricultural colleges. Let him find out, if he can, why it is that a black cow can eat green grass and then give white milk with yellow butter in it? Will the mystery disturb him? No. He will enjoy the milk and the butter without worrying about the mystery in them.

And so we might take any vegetable or fruit. The blush upon the peach is in striking contrast to the serried walls of the seed within; who will explain the mystery of the apple, the queen of the orchard, or the nut with its meat, its shell, and its outer covering? Who taught the tomato vine to fling its flaming many-mansioned fruit before the gaze of the passer-by, while the potato modestly conceals its priceless gifts within the bosom of the earth?

I learned years ago that it is the mystery in the miracle that makes it a stumbling block in the way of many. If you will analyze the miracle you will find just two questions in it: Can God perform a miracle? And, would He want to? The first question is easily answered. A God who can make a world can do anything He wants to with it. We cannot deny that God can perform a miracle, without denying that God is God. But, would God want to perform a miracle? That is the question that has given the trouble, but it has only troubled those, mark you, who are unwilling to admit that the infinite mind of God may have reasons that the finite mind of man does not comprehend. If, for any reason, God desires to do so, can He not, with His infinite strength, temporarily suspend the operation of any of His laws, as man with his feeble arm overcomes the law of gravitation when he lifts a stone?

If among my readers any one has been presumptuous enough to attempt to confine the power and purpose of God by man's puny understanding, let me persuade him to abandon this absurd position by the use of an illustration which I once found in a watermelon. I was passing through Columbus, Ohio, some years ago and stopped to eat in the restaurant in the depot. My attention was called to a slice of watermelon, and I ordered it and ate it. I was so pleased with the melon that I asked the waiter to dry some of the seeds that I might take them home and plant them in my garden. That night a thought came into my mind—I would use that watermelon as an illustration. So, the next morning when I reached Chicago, I had enough seeds weighed to learn that it would take about five thousand watermelon seeds to weigh a pound, and I estimated that the watermelon weighed about forty pounds. Then I applied mathematics to the watermelon. A few weeks before some one, I knew not who, had planted a little watermelon seed in the ground. Under the influence of sunshine and shower that little seed had taken off its coat and gone to work; it had gathered from somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight, and forced that enormous weight through a tiny stem and built a watermelon. On the outside it had put a covering of green, within that a rind of white and within the white a core of red, and then it had scattered through the red core little seeds, each one capable of doing the same work over again. What architect drew the plan? Where did that little watermelon seed get its tremendous strength? Where did it find its flavouring extract and its colouring matter? How did it build a watermelon? Until you can explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty, or tell just what He would do, or how He would do it. The most learned man in the world cannot explain a watermelon, but the most ignorant man can eat a watermelon, and enjoy it. God has given us the things that we need, and He has given us the knowledge necessary to use those things: the truth that He has revealed to us is infinitely more important for our welfare than it would be to understand the mysteries that He has seen fit to conceal from us. So it is with religion. If you ask me whether I understand everything in the Bible, I frankly answer, No. I understand some things to-day that I did not understand ten years ago and, if I live ten years longer, I trust that some things will be clear that are now obscure. But there is something more important than understanding everything in the Bible; it is this: If we will embody in our lives that which we do understand we will be kept so busy doing good that we will not have time to worry about the things that we do not understand.

In The Grave Digger, written by Fred Emerson Brooks, there is one stanza which is in point here:

"If chance could fashion but a little flower,

With perfume for each tiny thief,

And furnish it with sunshine and with shower,

Then chance would be creator, with the power

To build a world for unbelief."

But chance cannot fashion even a little flower; chance cannot create a single thing that grows. Every living thing bears testimony to a living God and, if there be a God, then every human life is a part of that God's plan. And, if this be true, then the highest duty of man, as it should be his greatest pleasure, is to try to find out God's will concerning himself and to do it. When Job was asked, Canst thou by searching find out God? a negative answer was implied, but we can see manifestations of God's power everywhere; in the suns and planets that, revolving, whirl through space, held in position by forces centripetal and centrifugal; we see it in the mountains rent asunder and upturned by a force not only superhuman but beyond the power of man to conceive. Captain Crawford, the poet-scout, in describing the mountains of the West has used a phrase which often comes into my mind: Where the hand of God is seen.

We see manifestation of God's power in the ebb and flow of the tides;