BUT how
shall we avoid throwing ourselves into altruistic work if we are surrounded by
poverty, ignorance, suffering, and every appearance of misery as very many
people are? Those who live where the withered hand of want is thrust upon them
from every side appealingly for aid must find it hard to refrain from
continuous giving. Again, there are social and other irregularities, injustices
done to the weak, which fire generous souls with an almost irresistible desire
to set things right.
We want
to start a crusade; we feel that the wrongs will never be righted until we give
ourselves wholly to the task. In all this we must fall back upon the point of
view. We must remember that this is not a bad world but a good world in the
process of becoming.
Beyond
all doubt there was a time when there was no life upon this earth. The
testimony of geology to the fact that the globe was once a ball of burning gas
and molten rock, clothed about with boiling vapors, is indisputable. And we do
not know how life could have existed under such conditions; that seems
impossible. Geology tells us that later on a crust formed, the globe cooled and
hardened, the vapors condensed and became mist or fell in rain. The cooled
surface crumbled into soil; moisture accumulated, ponds and seas were gathered
together, and at last somewhere in the water or on the land appeared something
that was alive.
It is
reasonable to suppose that this first life was in single-celled organisms, but
behind these cells was the insistent urge of Spirit, the Great One Life seeking
expression. And soon organisms having too much life to express themselves with
one cell had two cells and then many, and still mo re life was poured into
them.
Multiple-celled
organisms were formed; plants, trees, vertebrates, and mammals, many of them
with strange shapes, but all were perfect after their kind as everything is
that God makes. No doubt there were crude and almost monstrous forms of both
animal and plant life; but everything filled its purpose in its day and it was
all very good.
Then
another day came, the great day of the evolutionary process, a day when the
morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy to behold the
beginning of the end, for man, the object aimed at from the beginning, had
appeared upon the scene. An ape-like being, little different from the beasts
around him in appearance, but infinitely different capacity for growth and
thought. Art and beauty, architecture and song, poetry and music, all these
were unrealized possibilities in that ape man’s soul. And for his time and kind
he was very good.
“It is
God that works in you to will and to do of his good pleasure,” says St. Paul. From the day
the first man appeared God began to work IN men, putting more and more of
himself into each succeeding generation, urging them on to larger achievements
and to better conditions, social, governmental, and domestic. Those who looking
back into ancient history see the awful conditions which existed, the
barbarities, idolatries, and sufferings, and reading about God in connection
with these things are disposed to feel that he was cruel and unjust to man,
should pause to think. From the ape-man to the coming Christ man the race has
had to rise. And it could only be accomplished by the successive unfolding of
the various powers and possibilities latent in the human brain.
God
desired to express himself, to live in form, and not only that, but to live in
a form through which he could express himself on the highest moral and
spiritual plane. God wanted to evolve a form in which he could live as a god
and manifest himself as a god. This was the aim of the evolutionary force. The
ages of warfare, bloodshed, suffering, injustice, and cruelty were tempered in
many ways with love and justice as time advanced.
And this
was developing the brain of man to a point where it should be capable of giving
full expression to the love and justice of God. The end is not yet; God aims
not at the perfection of a few choice specimens for exhibition, like the large
berries at the top of the box, but at the glorification of the race. The time
will come when the Kingdom of God shall be established on earth; the time foreseen
by the dreamer of the Isle of Patmos, when there shall be no more crying,
neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are all passed
away, and there shall be no night there.