The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

I.

The possession of a will and the capacity for choice make man a moral being. Man’s will is bounded on every side by the laws of God. These laws are only another name for God’s will. Man is made in God’s image and has a will, as far as it goes, just like God’s will.

By choosing to act and to move along the lines of law which gather from every whither about his will, he finds he can go somewhere, that he can leave the narrow, provincial, and local neighborhood of ease and sense and subjection, and find his life in that broad realm of freedom, that belongs to him as a thinking and willing being.

At the termini of some railroads there are huge contrivances called turntables. They are constructed of immense timbers and balanced on pivots. They are large enough to accommodate the full length of a steam engine. Iron rails are laid across these tables, of the same size and the same distance apart as the rails which make up the lines of the main track. When the train comes in from the far interior, the engine is run out on one of these tables and turned round, so that the headlight faces the main track again. Before the engine is ready to leave the short track, however, the rails on the turntable must exactly correspond to the rails on the main road. Then the engineer pulls the throttle, and the great locomotive rolls past the circumference of its pivoted and temporary resting place into commerce with the railways of the globe. Imagine railway lines coming together about such a revolving table from all the earth, so that an engine could pass from this circular platform toward any quarter of the globe, the only condition being that the short track on the table correspond to the rails of the long track on which it was proposed for the engine to run, and you have an illustration, which in some degree helps us to understand the relation of man’s will to the laws of God.

Should the engineer undertake to get the engine from the table without reference to the lines upon which it was intended to run, we know very well what the consequences would be. He would not go far, and even the little distance he should manage to make would be attended with tremendous bumping and friction. All movement would be in the direction of chaos and confusion. However great the expenditure of energy, no point would be reached, and the end of the undertaking would be waste and failure. If, on the other hand, we should imagine an engine on such a revolving plane, capable of making fifty miles an hour, with no tracks leaving it, we know it could not go anywhere, and besides there would be no reason for its being. It would be without meaning. Before the distance between one point and another can be passed by a train, two things are necessary, an engine and a railroad. The one may be called subjective, the other objective. The one implies the other. They are the necessary elements of transportation. As long as the train keeps to the iron rails laid for it, it moves without friction. It is only when the subjective element jumps the track and essays to determine its own objective direction, that trouble comes. Then it is that cars are ditched and people killed or crippled. The laws of God run to and fro throughout the whole earth. They cross and recross every realm. They pass through every domain, physical, mental, and moral. They go straight through matter and straight through mind. They lead under the sea and over the sea and through the sea. Down through the earth and up through the air they may be noted, embracing with their invisible tracks every square inch of soil and sky. They insure the order of the universe, visible and invisible, tangible and intangible. They reach from globe to globe and make possible the commerce of the spheres. They run out into the infinitely great and back into the infinitely small, and bind in unity the atoms and the stars.

When man, by the aid of his reason, discovers the truth of things, which is the provision for his intellect, these laws appear as provision for his will.

So truth and law, reality and righteousness, expressions of the thought and will of God, are the everlasting facts to which man is to adjust his intellect and will, if he is to cross the oceans, travel the continents, and claim the possessions which in the universe belong to him. If he misreads the facts, he will of course misread the laws which govern the facts, and will thus be unable to get facts or laws to serve him. But clearly seeing the truth of things, he is able to avail himself of the laws of things. As long as he only saw things in the lump, and looked upon the world as so much air and earth and fire and water, he missed the subtle laws which regulate the atomic and molecular structure of bodies, and failed to make them his servants. When, by the aid of observation and experiment, he reduced the earth to its ultimate particles and came to such knowledge of it as corresponded to the facts of it; when he came to see the laws and drift of things, the tendencies and affinities of things; he had only to put the productions of his will in line with the way things were going, to have them serve him. Seeing that forces have power to do work in proportion to their energy of position, and applying this insight to the river with forty feet fall, he builds his mill beside it and thus utilizes it to grind his wheat. Seeing what soil and sunlight and rain can do when they combine to unwrap the life in a seed, he commits his wheat to their benevolent tendencies and gets a harvest of twenty bushels for every one he seems to lose. He studies fire. He sees it wrap in flame and level in an hour fortunes it took a lifetime to accumulate. He learns what a furious and awful force it is. He gets insight into its real nature. He gets knowledge of it that corresponds to the reality of it. He sees that it is only a flaming and lurid method of movement. With the truth of it he gets the law of it. So by the aid of volition, put forth in accordance with intelligence, he contrives a machine corresponding to the laws of heat, as a mode of motion. In this way he utilizes the heat that burned up his cities, to transport him in ease and comfort over the country. He studies the stars until his knowledge of them corresponds to them as they are; along with this knowledge, he comes to an understanding of their laws, their uniform methods of action. Then he builds his great ships and commits them to the wild and storm-tossed sea, sure that his power to guide them will never fail as long as law and order remain in the heavens.

That there is a natural order, with certain inhering laws, men readily accept. That this order has the consistency of being developed in one way; that there is a dip to things that must be followed; that there is a clew, in accordance with which things may be worked; that there is a trend, drift, and law of things that must be accepted and followed; all this, men readily assent to. They do not attempt to farm the Sahara Desert, for they know the conditions of harvests are not there. They do not put out orange groves in Minnesota, nor plant cotton in Canada, nor sow rice in British Columbia. They do not expect the soil that spews up the ice to produce watermelons at the same time. They do not pretend to navigate ships over the continents, and to lay their railway lines on the surface of the sea. They fix their telegraph wires to poles by means of little glass contrivances, and never attempt to send electricity through the grape vine. Natural laws they know inhere in the facts of nature, and are not read into earth and rock and river and atmosphere. They know that necessary laws reside in the facts of condition, and that they must study these laws to know the line of practical work they require. In building a house of stone they know it is necessary to defer to the law of gravity, that this law cannot be ignored or set aside, so they carry up the edifice in such conformity to rule and line as that the center of gravity falls in a line inside the base. They might prefer a house built with reference to a different order of things, one in which the center of gravity would fall in a line outside the base. But it is very well understood among men that the law of gravity must be respected. Even anarchists and nihilists, who seem to have irrepressible antipathy for all ancient orders and laws and establishments, do condescend sufficiently to respect the time-honored, even if slightly belated, laws of gravity.