A prospect-glass or a forceps is an instrument; they have each a final cause; that is, they were each made and adjusted for a certain use. The use of the prospect-glass is to assist the eye; the use of the forceps is to assist the hand. The prospect-glass was made the better to see; the forceps, the better to grasp. The use did not make these instruments; they were each made for the use—which use was foreseen and premeditated in the mind of the maker of them. We say of each of them without a shadow of hesitation: If this had not first been a thought, it could never have been a thing.
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UTILITY, DIVINE
Preaching, like every other thing that God permits or ordains, can not be limited by human regulations. Rev. W. H. Fitchett says of John Wesley:
John Wesley heard at Bristol that his helper, Maxfield, had crossed the mystic border-line which separates an exhortation from a sermon, and the story has already been told of how Wesley rode post-haste to London to trample out the first sparks of what might prove to be a conflagration. His mother’s calm eyes and quiet speech arrested him. She made the one appeal which, to Wesley’s reason and conscience alike, was irresistible. This new and alarming phenomenon must, after all, be judged by the question: “Does God use it?”—“Wesley and His Century.”
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UTILIZATION
Darwin made the great experiments which have changed the whole aspect of natural history, with the common glasses of his house, and the common flower-pots in his garden.
There is a legend of an artist who sought long for a piece of sandalwood out of which to carve a Madonna. He was about to give up the search when in a dream he was bidden to shape the figure from a block of oak-wood which was destined for the fire. Obeying the command, he produced from the log of common firewood a masterpiece.—Hugh Macmillan.
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