Catoctin clarion. [volume] (Mechanicstown, Md.) 1871-1940, 1903-03-26
AN ELOQUENT SERMON
By DR.. Charles II. Parkhurst, Pastor OF
Madison Square Church.


"Growing In The Things Of thc Kingdom OF
God The Idea Lies Close to tho Eoun.
dation Of IFS System of Administration.
New York CITY.--Dr. Charles H. Park.
hurst, pastor of the Madison Square Pres
Kingdom of God" The text was from II
Peter iii Is: "Grow in grace and in the
knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ"
To grow; gyowing in the things of the
Kingdom of God; that is our matter this
morning 1t is great Bible word, grow
is; particularly great gospel word. The
word incarnates the idea of life, and of
life that is swelling, crowding apart the
shell and crushing up. in the direction of
becoming q tree; knocking down walls and
breaking forth into territory outlying. Il
am come that they might have life and
that they might have it more abundantly,'' -
more and more OF it, life doubling and
quadrupling upon itself.
That is one of the ideas that lie close at
the foundation of Gods system of produc-
tion and administraton--life, and more
and more of it, Everything is for the sake
Of the things that grow, What cannot
BloN Is l'l JIC SAINT VI ihdI WHICH
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 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; scaifolding and trellises
prior to the temple and the vines.
1t was a strange moment In our long his
| tnry Hu hon tho hrSt ht,o th,pv honap To, bo
' 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 ali
and drifted down from some other globe
that lad commenced harvesting before our
burrows were plowed? Which?
But it was supreme. moment-one 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 en- JOY and
see His own great divine face borne back
to Him in a small human reflection. Even
before that supreme hour struck things had
gone Oh reshaping themselves and reshap-
ing themselves; but reshaping is not grow
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
! no. grow; but the corn grows, and man
grows-at least sometimes some men.
The body grows, at any rate; that is the
rule. 1t not simply exists-a mineral does
that, block OF stone does that-but it
| lives, and, from infancy up, with life that
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
live thing, on the way from infancy to
mature manhood. and more completely
! and bt cautiously human on his animal side,
bu. 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 eye
when first lie 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 he
q striking out into some fresh channel
The body being finished body, the rising
! current of life in man-in the growing
mah-wil, nerforce, seek some new issue
for itself. No longer needed to make for
him a more highly organized body, the wax.
! ing tide overilows into the shaping of n
more finely organized mind. The life is
there, the growing life is there. and so
when one thing is finished another thing
has to b.. 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 unon
lines Of thought and research without be-
holding itself with feelings of admiration
verging close upon reverence. 1t is not
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 GER
tain impulse. certain intilling of life from
somewhere that mandates wider and wider
patches of newly reached area, as the rls-
ing tide, intowing from the sea, rolls with
each recurring billow farther up on the
| soping beach. How many thousand years
it has been since man commenced to think.
! theorize and discover nobody knows, and
the Bible does not tell u.s. but up to date
| the record is a tremendous one, and there
is no limit in sight. All of this is telling
us what wonderful thing it was that God
did when He started the race on its career
of growth and conquest. Nhcther 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
thoughts that at the beginning of time
God wrought into the glittering, fabric, OF
the heavens, or whether you think of what
at shorter range has been effected by the
study of our own globe and of the laws
that pervadc 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
discoveries of course celebrate the splendid
omnipotent wisdom of 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
discoveries, ferret out the purposes OF
things. think out in common words the
thoughts that the Creator put into things,
and go on year after year, century after
century. millennium after millennium, for.
| ever widening the area of knowledge and
creating for human thought an empire
steadily advancing upward. outward and
downward upon lines laid down by the IN
| finite mind.
1t is certainly easy to say, and it is very
common TO say, that the realities of the
spiritual world are things that cannot be
confidently gotten at. just as &c, certainaly my
was it an easy and very natural thing tor
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 g
be gotten at, or that man could not hold
instant and ineligible intercourse with
his distant neighbor 5000 miles across the
sea, bat such intercourse is now matter OF
| L 1 Ll.eh hon.rolal.r hndlnS that