Keowee courier. [volume] (Pickens Court House, S.C.) 1849-current, 1908-11-04
departed from that law and adopte1

departed from that law and adoptes
the law Of love?
| But while do not accept the Dar-
winian theory, ] shall not quarrel
with you about 1t; I only refer to IL
to remind you that 1t does not solve
the mystery of life or explain human
progress. l fear that some have ac-
cepted 1t in the hope of csc aping
from the miracle. but why should The
miracle frighten us?
1t bothered me once, but am in
clined to think that 1T is one of the
test questions with the Christian.
The Miraculous i'm Religion.
Christ cannot be separated from
the miraculous; His birth, his minis
trations and His resurrection all in
volyo the miraculous and the change
which His religion works in tie hu-
man heart Is continuing miracle
Eliminate the miracle, and Christ be
comes merely human being and His
gospel is stripped of divine authority,
| The miracle raises two questions:
Can God perform miracle?" and
Would He want to-" The first is
easy to naswer. A God who can make
a world can do anything He wants to
do with 1t. The power to perform
miracles is necessarily implied in the
power to create. But would God
want to perform a miracle? This is
the question which has given most OF
the trouble. The more / have consid-
cred 1t, the less inclined I am to an
swer In the negative. To say that
God would not perform a miracle is
to assume more intimate knowledge
Of Gods plans and purposes than
claim to have. l will not deny that
| God does perform miracle, or may
| perform one, merely because do not
| know how or why He does 1t. The
| fact that we are constantly learning
| OF the existence of new forces sug-
| gests the possibility that God may
| operate through forces yet unknown
to us, and the mysteries with which
We deal every day warn me that
| faith is as necessary as sight. Who
| would have credited a century ago
the stories that are now told of the
| wonder working electricity? For
| ages man had known the lightning,
| but Only to fear it; now this invisi-
! Bile current is generated by O man
made machine, imprisoned in a man.
made wire, and made to do the bid
ding Of man. We are even able to
| dispense with the wire and hurl
| wJrds through space, and the X-ray
! has enabled us to look through sub
| stances which were supposed, until
| recently, to exclude all light. The
| miracle is not more mysterious than
many of the things with which man
now deals-it is simply different.
| The immaculate conception Is not
more mysterious than the other myr-
| lad resurrections which mark each
annual seed-time.
| TO- 4 4
| not suspend one Of His laws without
stopping the universe, but do we not
suspend or overcome the law of gravi-
tation every day? Every time we
| move a foot or lift a weight, we tenn
| pOrarily interfere with the operation
of the most universal Of natural laws
and yet the world is not disturbed.
The Mystery of Life.
Science has taught us so many
things that We are tempted to con-
clude that we know everything, but
there Is really great unknown which
is still uneXplored, and that which we
| have learned ought to increase our
reverence rather than our egotism.
Science has disclosed some Of the ma
chinery of the universe, but science
has not yet revealed to us the great
secret-the secret of life. 1t is to be
found in every blade Of grass, in
every insect, in every bird. and in
every animal as well as in man. Six
| thousand years of recorded history
and yet we know no more about the
secret Of life than they knew in the
beginning. We live, We plan; we
| have our hopes, our fears; and yet in
| moment q change may come over
| any one Of us and this body will be-
| is it that, having, we live, and, hav-
ing not, we are as the clod? We
know not, and yet the progress Of the
race and the civilization which we
now behold are the work Of men and
women VINO have not solved the mys-
terry Of their own lives.
And our food, must we understand
1t before we eat it? If We refused
to eat anything until we could under
stand the mystery Of it's growth, we
would die Of starvation. But mys-
terry does not bother us in the dir
ing room! 1t is only in the cburch
that it is an obstacle.
/ was eating a piece of watermelon
some months ago and was struck
with it's beauty. | took some of the
seed and dried them and weighed
them and found that it would re-
quire some five thousand seed to
weigh a pound. And then l applied
mathematics to that forty-pound
melon. One OF these seeds, put into
the ground, when warmed by the sun
and moistened by the rain, goes to
work; it gathers from somewhere
two hundred thousand times its own
weight, and, forcing this raw mate
rial through tiny stem, constructs a
watermelon. 1t covers the outside
with q coating of green. inside of tho