But the conflict that ends in such results can not be called misfortune, any more than Hercules’ labors through which the legendary hero won his immortality can be pronounced a misfortune for him. Once more, then, the saint who has overcome discovers, at least in retrospect, that there is good ground for loving his “enemies”!
The farmer, in his unceasing struggle with weeds, with parasites, with pests visible and invisible, with blight and rot and uncongenial weather, sometimes feels tempted to blaspheme against the hard conditions under which he labors and to assume that an “enemy” has cursed the ground which he tills and loaded the dice of nature against him. The best cure for his “mood” is to visit the land of the bread-fruit tree, where nature does everything and man does nothing but eat what is gratuitously given him, and to see there the kind of men you get under those kindly skies. The virile fiber of muscle, the strong manly frame, the keen active mind that meets each new “pest” with a successful invention, the spirit of conquest and courage that are revealed in the farmer at his best are no accident. They are the by-product of his battle with conditions, which if they seem to come from an “enemy,” must come from one that ought to be loved for what he accomplishes.
These critics of ours who harshly review the books we write, the addresses we give, the schemes of reform for which we work so strenuously—do they do nothing for us? On the contrary, they force us to go deeper, to write with more care, to reconsider our hasty generalizations, to recast our pet schemes, to revise our crude endeavors. They may speak as “enemies,” and they may show a stern and hostile face; but we do well to love them, for they enable us to find our better self and our deeper powers. The hand may be the horny hand of Esau, but the voice is the kindly voice of Jacob.
All sorts of things “work” for us, then, as St. Paul declared. Not only does love “work,” and faith and grace; but tribulation “works,” and affliction, and the seemingly hostile forces which block and buffet and hamper us. Everything that drives us deeper, that draws us closer to the great resources of life, that puts vigor into our frame and character into our souls, is in the last resort a blessing to us, even though it seems on superficial examination to be the work of an “enemy,” and we shall be wise if we learn to love the “enemies” that give us the chance to overcome and to attain our true destiny. Perhaps the dualism of the universe is not quite as sharp as the old Persians thought. Perhaps, too, the love of God reaches further under than we sometimes suppose. Perhaps in fact all things “work together for good,” and even the enemy forces are helping to achieve the ultimate good that shall be revealed “when God hath made the pile complete.”
CHAPTER III
THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US
I
WHERE THE BEYOND BREAKS THROUGH
If we sprinkle iron filings over a sheet of paper and move a magnet beneath the paper, the filings become active and combine and recombine in a great variety of groupings and regroupings. A beholder who knows nothing of the magnet underneath gazes upon the whole affair with a sense of awe and mystery, though he feels all the time that there must be some explanation of the action and that some hidden power behind is operating as the cause of the groupings and regroupings of the iron particles. Something certainly that we do not see is revealing its presence and its power.
Our everyday experience is full of another series of activities even more mysterious than these movements of the iron. Whenever we open our eyes we see objects and colors confronting us and located in spaces far and near. What brings the object to us? What operates to produce the contact? How does the far-away thing hit our organ of vision? This was to the ancient philosopher a most difficult problem, a real mystery. He made many guesses at a solution, but no guess which he could make satisfied his judgment. Our answer is that an invisible and intangible substance which we call ether—luminiferous ether—fills all space, even the space occupied by visible objects, and that this ether which is capable of amazing vibrations, billions of them a second, is set vibrating at different velocities by different objects. These vibrations bombard the minute rods and cones of the retina at the back of the eye and, presto, we see now one color and now another, now one object and now another. This ether would forever have remained unknown to us had not this marvelous structure of the retina given it a chance to break through and reveal itself. In many other ways, too, this ether breaks through into revelation. It is responsible apparently for all the immensely varied phenomena of electricity, probably, too, of cohesion and gravitation. Here, again, the revelations remained inadequate and without clear interpretation until we succeeded in constructing proper instruments and devices for it to break through into active operation. The dynamo and the other electrical mechanisms which we have invented do not make or create electricity. They merely let it come through, showing itself now as light, now as heat, now again as motive power. But always it was there before, unnoted, merely potential, and yet a vast surrounding ocean of energy there behind, ready to break into active operation when the medium was at hand for it.