In His Image | Page 4

and the fishes in the deep,
and the little child will mock him and tell him, and tell him truly, that
he, the little child, knows just as much about the mystery of life as does
the most learned atheist. We have our thoughts, our hopes, our fears,
and yet we know that in a moment a change may come over any one of
us that will convert a living, breathing human being into a mass of
lifeless clay. What is it, that, having, we live, and, having not, we are as
the clod? We know as little of the mystery of life to-day as they knew
in the dawn of creation and yet behold the civilization that man has
wrought.
And love that makes life worth living is also a mystery. Have you ever
read a scientific definition of love? You never will. Why? Because a
man does not know what love is until he gets into it, and then he is not
scientific until he gets out again. And even if we could understand the
mysterious tie that brings two hearts together from out the multitude,
and on a united life builds the home, earth's only paradise, we still
would be unable to understand that larger mystery that manifests itself
when a human heart reaches out and links itself to every other heart.
And patriotism, also, is a mystery--intangible, invisible, and yet eternal.
Because there has been in the past such a thing as patriotism, millions
have given their lives for their country. Patriotism could command
millions of lives to-day. Our country is not lacking in patriotism; we
have as much as can be found anywhere else, and it is of as high a
quality. There ought to be more patriotism here than elsewhere; as
citizenship in the United States carries more benefits with it than

citizenship in any other land, the American citizen should be willing to
sacrifice more than any other citizen to make sure that the blessings of
our government shall descend unimpaired to children and to children's
children. The atheist knows as little about these mysteries as the
Christian does and yet he lives, he loves and he is patriotic.
But our case is even stronger: Everything with which man deals is full
of mystery. The very food we eat is mysterious; sometimes man-made
food becomes so mysterious that we are compelled to enact pure food
laws in order that we may know what we are eating. And God-made
food is as mysterious as man-made food, though we cannot compel
Jehovah to make known the formula.
We encourage children to raise vegetables; a little child can learn how
to raise vegetables, but no grown person understands the mystery that is
wrapped up in every vegetable that grows. Let me illustrate: I am fond
of radishes; my good wife knows it and keeps me supplied with them
when she can. I eat radishes in the morning; I eat radishes at noon; I eat
radishes at night; I eat radishes between meals; I like radishes. I plant
radish seed--put the little seed into the ground, and go out in a few days
and find a full grown radish. The top is green, the body of the root is
white and almost transparent, and around it I sometimes find a delicate
pink or red. Whose hand caught the hues of a summer sunset and
wrapped them around the radish's root down there in the darkness in the
ground? I cannot understand a radish; can you? If one refused to eat
anything until he could understand the mystery of its growth, he would
die of starvation; but mystery does not bother us in the dining-room,--it
is only in the church that mystery seems to give us trouble.
In travelling around the world I found that the egg is a universal form
of food. When we reached Asia the cooking was so different from ours
that the boiled egg was sometimes the only home-like thing we could
find on the table. I became so attached to the egg, that, when I returned
to the United States, for weeks I felt like taking my hat off to every hen
I met. What is more mysterious than an egg? Take a fresh egg; it is not
only good food, but an important article of merchandise. But loan a
fresh egg to a hen, after the hen has developed a well-settled tendency
to sit, and let her keep the egg under her for a week, and, as any
housewife will tell you, it loses a large part of its market value. But be
patient with the hen; let her have it for two weeks more and she will

give you back a chicken that you could not find in the egg. No one can