The Penn's Grove record., 1903-03-27
A SERMON FOR SUNDAY
AN ELOQUENT AND CONVINCING DIS.
COURSE BY REV. DR.. PARKHuRST.
Subject: Growing in the Things Of the
of God-The Idea Lies Close
at The Foundation OF His System of
Production and Adminfstrat fon.

AA05 NAOSE
at the Foundation OF His system n,
Production and Administration.
New YORK CITY.--Dr. Charles II. Park
hurst, pastor of the Madison SQUARE Pres
byterian Church, preached Sunday morn
ing on Growing in the Things of the
Kingdom of God" The text was from III.
Peter III: ID: "Grow in grace and in the
knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ
10 grow; growing in the things Of the
Kingdom OF God; that is our matter this
morning. It is a great Bible word, "grow"
IS; particularly a great gospel word. The
word lncarnates the idea of life. and of
life that is swelling, crowding apart the
Shell and crushing up in the direction of
becoming a tree; knocking down walls and
breaking forth into territory outlying. II
am come that they might have life and
That they might have it more a~bundantly."
more and more of it, life doubling and
quadrupling upon itself.
That is n of the ideas that lie close at
the foundation of Gods system of produc-
ton and administration-life, and more
and more OF it. Everything is for the sake
OF the things that grow. What cannot
grow is for the sake of that which can
scaffolding along which the living walls can
be built, trellis up which the growing vines
can Chamber. The first two days Of Gods
great week were only a sort of creative pre-
lude, getting things ready, the seas collect
ed, the land dried off, in readiness for the
fish that live, the grass and the trees that
grow-and man.; scaffolding and t~rellises
prior to the temple and the vines.
1t was a strange moment in our long his
tory when the first live thing began to be,
something that was no rock, no mineral.
And the old torturing problem is. where It
came from-out of the ground? Out of
Gods hand that had been holding it till
the right moment came? Out of the air
and drifted down from some other globe
that lad commenced harvesting before our
burrows were plowed? which,?
But 1T was a supreme monochrome of
the moments when it almost seems that
God must have stopped an instant to ru-
inmate, as the Genesis record intimates
he did when at last there began to be a
man. something that God could enjoy and
to Him in a small human reflection. Even
before that supreme hour struck things had
gone on reshaping themselves and reshap-
ing themselves; but reshaping is not grow
ing. The glacier in every step of it's frozen
journey reshapes itself, but the glacier does
not grow. The great hills, the earth itself,
take all kinds of shapes from century to
century, from aeon to aeon, but they do
grow; but the corn grows, and man
grows-at least sometimes; some men.
The body grows, at any rate; that is the
that, a block of stone does that-but it
lives, and, from infancy up, with a life that
is more and more a life blade, ear, full
corn; which is the physical side of that
verse in John, that they might have life
and have it more ~abundantly." And not
only is there the kind of growth that
makes the individual more and more richly
a live thing, on the way from infancy to
mature manhood, and more completely
and b. auteously human on his animal side,
but the race as a whole appears to have
been progressing in that respect till we
may suppose that man. as the last forty or
more centuries show him-is about as good
a thing physically as he can be; the sort of
human animal that God had in His eve
when first He went about to produce man.
We have reached the limit in point of stat
ure and presumably in point Of refinement
of organization.
Arrived at this stage, any new growth
that the race might make would have to be
a striking out into some fresh channel.
The body being a finished body, the rising
current of life in MANN the growing
man-will, perforce, seek some new issue
for itself. No longer needed to make for
him a more highly organized body, the wax
ing tide overfows into the shaping of a
more finely organized mind. The life is
there, the growing life is there, and so
when one thing is finished another thing
has to BE- taken up, and when, in the
course Of long year of development, man
had become perfect as an animal he started
In upon the course of making himself per-
feet as an intelligence.
That is what he is doing now, and it is
inexpressibly wonderful what he has al
ready achieved in this direction. The race
cannot contemplate itself in respect of the
advance made within historic times upon
lines of thought and research without be-
holding itself with feelings of admiration
verging close upon reverence. It is not
to understand how one can take ac-
count of the steadily advancing line of pro-
gress made by man into the domain of
truth, the truth of the physical world at
any rate, without becoming aware of a GER
tain impulse, a certain milling of life from
that mandates wider and wider
patches of newly reached area, as the ris-
tide, inf1owing from the sea, rolls with
each recurring billow farther up on the
beach. How many thousand years
it has been since nan scommenced to think.
theorize and discover nobody knows, and
VIC DlOlC dOSo uOL tEA us, Dut up W ndCC
the record is a tremendous one, and there
is no limit in sight. All of this is telling
us what a wonderful thing it was that God
when He started the race on its career
of growth and conquest. Whether you
think of the way in which the human eye
has penetrated into the stellar spaces and
read out in terms of every day English the
that at the beginning of time
God wrought into the glittering fabric of
heavens, or whether you think of what
at shorter range has been effected by the
that pervade it, of the forces that actuate
it and Of the ways in which its mysteries
have been solved and converted into COM
monplace utilities, the story is one and
the same all the way through. All these
of course celebrate the splendid
wisdom of a God that could
make such a world, but they celebrate the
magnifcence of the human creature that
could, in point of intelligence, grow far
enough toward God to be able to make the
ferret out the purposes OF
things, think out in common words the
that the Creator put into things,
millennium after millennium, for
widening the area of knowledge and
for human thaaght an empire
advancing upward, outward and
downward upon lines laid down by the in
mite mind.
1t is certainly easy to say, and it is very
to say, that the realities OF the
world are things that cannot be
gotten at. Just as certainly
it an easy and very natural thing for
The denizens of the olden centuries to say,
or at any rate to think. that the great
lights that shone in the heavens could not
Be gotten at, or that a man could not hold
and ineligible intercourse with
lis distant neighbor 5000 miles across the
Yea, bit such intercourse is now matter OF
and as to the heavenly bodies that
we're once but an impossible and unlnter-
vision, the human mind up to a
certain point contemplates them to-day
With as assured and as steady a thought as
hat with which it marks the flight OF d
bird or the hutter of a leaf.
In the realm of the spiritual, on the con-
rary, not a great deal has been achieved
-et that the spirit of man can encourage
tself with or that it can found great ex-
'ectations upon and profound anticipa-
ions. So tar as such matters are con-
erned we are not much farther along in
he realities Of the world spiritual than
he Wi rid was along geographically in the
avs when Columbus was wondering it
here were not more beyond the shores of !
pain than the fifteenth century yet knew
{, or much farther than the world was
long ~astronoEically when David shep-
erded his focks and musingly watched