Among the Forces

by Henry White Warren

But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly welcome man's aid. Has he? Yes. Obviously he wants things done he cannot do alone. Worlds are dead. Trees do not think. Morning stars may sing together, but they cannot love. None of them have character. None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power and love that flush the universe. None of them are permanent, or worth keeping forever. They are only scaffolding. He wants something greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels together can make. He wants not mere matter acted upon from without, but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting, and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away. God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.

Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many. Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.

But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a full expectation of the aid of the forces without us. Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin. He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling.

There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and hand of mastery. They all work for and with him. Does he want his burdens carried? The river will convey the Indian on a log or the armaments of the greatest nations. The wind fits itself into the shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land than all the human race together. Does he want swiftness? The lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am I." Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work into man's plans.

Is not our whole question settled? If these fundamental forces, these oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them, so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed, until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible signs and exponents, are working together with man? Then, in all probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man. God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the highest. He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of eternal life.

Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes. He upholds all things by the direct exercise of his power. "The uniformities of nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under the pressure of a higher law." There can be no general providence which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not number all the hairs. The Old Testament doctrine of a special and minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16). The cold glacial period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man, making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds and hearts has commenced.

It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man's life is not the title to a thousand acres. He is soon dispossessed. It is not all the bonds and money he can hold. A dead man's hands are empty. It is not reputation that the winds blow away. But it is character that he acquires and carries with him. He has a fidelity to principle that is like Abdiel's. He is faithful among the faithless. He has allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth cannot swerve for a moment. He counts soul so much above the body that no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against even the existence of the body.

Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained? Not altogether by individual evolution. Ancestral tendencies, parental example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out this greatest result of heaven and earth. Of some men you expect nothing but goodness and greatness. They would belie all the tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good. Some are constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds. What could be expected of the men of '76 when the air was electric with patriotism? What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty? What could be expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves exiled for liberty to worship God? What can be expected of men who have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold? Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations been strengthened out of God? Besides the strength of development by the resistance of evil, they have found that God made a way of escape, that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men?

But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs, a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal aids of a present God, cooperate with his plans and works.

Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth, wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it believes in the divine co-operation to that end. It must be born of the Spirit. God sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father! It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us.