In His Image | Page 5

understand the egg, but we all like eggs.
Water is essential to human life, and has been from the beginning, but
it is only a short time ago, relatively speaking, that we learned that
water is composed of gas. Two gases got mixed together and could not
get apart and we call the mixture water, but it was much more
important that man should have had water to drink all these years than
it was to find out that water is composed of gas. And there is one thing
about water that we do not yet understand, viz., why it differs from
other things in this, that other things continue to contract indefinitely
under the influence of cold, while water contracts until it reaches a
certain temperature and then, the rule being reversed, expands under
the influence of more intense cold? It does not make much difference
whether we ever learn why this is true, but it is important to the world
to know that it is so.
Sometimes I go into a community and find a young man who has come
in from the country and obtained a smattering of knowledge; then his
head swells and he begins to swagger around and say that an intelligent
man like himself cannot afford to have anything to do with anything
that he cannot understand. Poor boy, he will be surprised to find out
how few things he will be able to deal with if he adopts that rule. I feel
like suggesting to him that the next time he goes home to show himself
off to his parents on the farm he address himself to the first mystery
that ever came under his observation, and has not yet been solved,
notwithstanding the wonderful progress made by our agricultural
colleges. Let him find out, if he can, why it is that a black cow can eat
green grass and then give white milk with yellow butter in it? Will the
mystery disturb him? No. He will enjoy the milk and the butter without
worrying about the mystery in them.
And so we might take any vegetable or fruit. The blush upon the peach
is in striking contrast to the serried walls of the seed within; who will
explain the mystery of the apple, the queen of the orchard, or the nut
with its meat, its shell, and its outer covering? Who taught the tomato
vine to fling its flaming many-mansioned fruit before the gaze of the
passer-by, while the potato modestly conceals its priceless gifts within
the bosom of the earth?
I learned years ago that it is the mystery in the miracle that makes it a

stumbling block in the way of many. If you will analyze the miracle
you will find just two questions in it: Can God perform a miracle? And,
would He want to? The first question is easily answered. A God who
can make a world can do anything He wants to with it. We cannot deny
that God can perform a miracle, without denying that God is God. But,
would God want to perform a miracle? That is the question that has
given the trouble, but it has only troubled those, mark you, who are
unwilling to admit that the infinite mind of God may have reasons that
the finite mind of man does not comprehend. If, for any reason, God
desires to do so, can He not, with His infinite strength, temporarily
suspend the operation of any of His laws, as man with his feeble arm
overcomes the law of gravitation when he lifts a stone?
If among my readers any one has been presumptuous enough to attempt
to confine the power and purpose of God by man's puny understanding,
let me persuade him to abandon this absurd position by the use of an
illustration which I once found in a watermelon. I was passing through
Columbus, Ohio, some years ago and stopped to eat in the restaurant in
the depot. My attention was called to a slice of watermelon, and I
ordered it and ate it. I was so pleased with the melon that I asked the
waiter to dry some of the seeds that I might take them home and plant
them in my garden. That night a thought came into my mind--I would
use that watermelon as an illustration. So, the next morning when I
reached Chicago, I had enough seeds weighed to learn that it would
take about five thousand watermelon seeds to weigh a pound, and I
estimated that the watermelon weighed about forty pounds. Then I
applied mathematics to the watermelon. A few weeks before some one,
I knew not who, had planted a little watermelon seed in the ground.
Under the influence of sunshine and shower that little seed