We know nothing
ultimately. Who can tell me what a particle of matter is? Who can tell
me what a ray of light is, as it comes from a star? Who can tell me how
the movements in the particles of air striking my eye run up into nerve
and brain, and become translated into thought, into light, into form,
into motion, into all this wondrous universe that surrounds us on every
hand?
Then take the element of trust. People used to think they could trust
in their gods. Rebecca, for example, stole her father's gods, and hid
them in the trappings of her camel, and sat on them. She thought, then,
that she had a god near her who would care for her. The old Hebrew,
with an ox-team, carried his God, in a box that he called the ark, into
battle, and supposed that he had a very present help in time of need.
But we have the eternal stability and order of the universe, a God that
never forgets, a God on whom we can lean, in whom we can trust, who is
not away off in heaven, but here, closer to us than the air we breathe,
a God in whom we live and move and have our being.
And has this evolution of the religious life of the world threatened
the stability of truth? There never was a time on earth when there was
such a passion for truth as there is today. What means all this intense
activity of the scientific world? these men that devote their lives to
some little fraction of the universe which they study through their
microscope, not for pay, to find one little fragment of the truth of
God; these critics that are rummaging the dust-heaps of the ages in
the hope that they may find one little, bright-glittering particle of
truth in the midst of the rubbish? There never was such a passion for
truth as there is here and now.
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