wish to mock Thee by lip service. I do not wish to pile up my ordinary business thoughts, or my thoughts of pleasure, on the very steps of Thy throne; open mine eyes, then, that I may se Thee in Thy beauty, and in Thy glorious presence may lose all relish which belongs only to the things of time." It is when the soul struggles thus, in an honest spiritual agony, that it is really emancipated from the tyranny of sense, and, like the young man in the history of to-day, or rather like the dying martyr of the Gospel times, sees the heavens opened, sees Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

The Divine Development Theory.

A SERMON

PREACHED BY Robert Patterson, D. D., IN SAn Francisco, Cal.

Mark iv: 26-29.

CHRISTIANITY is a divine development of the life of God in the soul of man and in society. That life originates in the communication of a divine power, increases by the constant accessions of divine energy, according to the law of a divinely fore-ordained plan, and, like natural life, would cease by the withdrawal of the Holy Spirit, in whom we live and move and have our being.

In this busy, bustling age, when we are all so actively occupied in driving the world around on its axis, it is well to remind ourselves that God is busy also. When scientific men present to us the evidences of the operation of the great law of development in nature as a sufficient substitute for the presence of God, their error consists, not in the assertion of the law of development-which is a great fact, a Bible-taught principle-but in ignoring two other equally great supernatural facts: the fact of creation, without which there never could have been anything to develop; and the fact of crisis, without which development would be aimless and useless. Our Lord, in Mark iv: 26-29, follows a more truly scientific method, inasmuch as He includes all the facts in His theory of the law of divine development.

The law of divine development, as our Lord here illustrates by the parable of the growing corn, presents to us three distinct eras-it has a beginning, a middle, and an end-the seedsowing, the growing grain, the harvest. All development must have a beginning something rolled up which is to be unrolled, developed. All life must have a beginning, a seed. human skill, or power, can make a seed. All the universities of the earth cannot make a grain of wheat.

The next stage of the process is more gradual, but not less divine, and hardly less mysterious. For the purpose of manifesting God's glory in His works to men and angels, the growth of the growing grain is slow enough to allow us to inspect and observe it: the flash of instantaneous creation is too quick for our careful study. Nor can the savant solve the riddle any more than the plowman. What we want to know is, Whose law is it that is so powerful and beneficent in nature? Now, the Lord here comes in and informs us that this law of growth is a law of the Kingdom of God; that the power of

God is mani

growth is the power of God given to the grain. festing Himself to the believers in the growing grain no less than in Eden, or Sinai, or the Judgment.

But the question forces itself upon us, What is the object of all this growth and development? What is it to end in? Or, will the crop go on forever growing, and never ripen a harvest? But, if the crop ripens a harvest, what will the great Husbandman do with it? What will the great wheat-grower do with the twenty million of centals grown here in California? Has Almighty God less intelligence than a San Francisco grainmerchant? There is a law of crisis, as well as a law of development, in the Kingdom of God. Without the crisis the development were useless. It is the harvest that gathers up all that is valuable of the crop, gives the chaff to the winds, and gathers the grain for the support of the higher life of men and for the seed of new and larger fields. It is the harvest which gives significance to the growth. Eternal development, without any harvest, is not progress-answers no rational purpose for God or man.

But we must again carefully notice that the grain can no more harvest itself, and ship itself, than it can create itself. The harvest is wholly a process above and beyond nature. Man, in harvesting, acts a supernatural part; he arrests the natural process of development with the sickle, which is not a natural growth at all. Now, our Lord declares that such a law of development, combined with crisis, as we observe in the lower kingdom of nature, prevails also in the higher provinces of the Kingdom of God, in which men have their development and crisis. There is a divine development of men, as there is of corn. It begins with a divine, supernatural Creator, who bestows life; it proceeds by a divine force, gradually infused, according to a law or order of procedure framed by divine wisdom; it results in a supernatural crisis, in which God shall visibly harvest the crop He has ripened.

We observe, now, the working-power of Christ's development theory-God. God directs man, when the development is complete, to thrust in the sickle and gather the grain; and when man is developed, there will be a harvest of humanity also, to accomplish the purpose of God. The divine law of development is the manifestation of the Kingdom of God.

There is another theory of development or evolution now pressed upon our notice, which differs totally from Christ's plan of development. It has neither beginning nor end, nor has any of its advocates ever succeeded in stating the object which it works to accomplish. For there is no God to work it. It is simply a big machine, working itself, for no useful purpose, after the manner of the perpetual-motion man's reel in

the bottle. By the operation of light and heat, and the chemical reactions of the mud of the earth, maggots were generated. which grew bigger because they could not help it. From this base origin these philosophers deduce your lineage; and not yours only, but all that is great and God-like in man, they tell us is only the result of an eternal process of development of the dust of the ground, without any inspiration of the breath of God in his soul, and without any object.

Now, this is Satan's caricature of God's plan of evolution. It bears the same relation to the divine plan of development that its favorite ape does to the Son of man. Note the four

principal absurdities of the atheistic plan:

I. It postulates the eternity of matter.

2. The spontaneous generation of life. 3. The transmutation of species.

4. The brutalizing of man.

I. This theory demands that we believe in the eternity of matter that everything that now exists always did exist, in some form or other. There is nothing which its German and some of its English and American advocates scout with greater disdain than the Hebrew myth of creation. They dismiss the notion of a Creator to the realm of ghosts, alleging that the idea of a self-existent Creator is utterly unthinkable. But, on the other hand, is not the idea of a self-existent universe equally unthinkable? It is an idea not only beyond, but contrary to, all the intuitions of our reason. There is no intuition of the human mind more clearly and certainly perceived than that every compound has been put together by some one; that every construction is the work of a constructor. If a boy finds on the street two bricks laid side by side, and two others laid across them at right angles, all the evolutionists in the world could not argue him into the belief that those four bricks had been there, and so arranged, from all eternity; nor yet that they had made themselves, and placed themselves in that position. If the savants should endeavor to show the lad how the bricks developed and built up themselves, he would simply tell them they were talking nonsense.

The notion of the eternity or self-existence of matter is an equal absurdity to every well-regulated mind. It is simply the assertion that the bricks made themselves. For every piece of matter with which we are acquainted is made, manufactured, put together-consists of several parts, arranged most skillfully. A grain of sand from the sea-shore is a piece of architecture, compared with which the castle is but a brick-pile. You might as well say that an Elgin watch existed from eternity as that a grain of sand was eternal. And so of any other piece of matter in the world. And if you go back of the present state

of the grain of sand to some former state, where it was melted in water, or where it was evaporated into gas, you would still find the same complexity and regularity and order, and the reign of law, compelling every atom to assume its proper chemical arrangement. And if your microscopical and chemical analysis could be extended more and more, you would continue to find, as science has always continued to find hitherto, the increase of complexity and the reign of law and order among the parts of a law and order of the origin of which lifeless atoms are utterly incapable-in a word, the reign of a law which proclaims a Lawgiver and Creator. The invention of the spectroscope has utterly overthrown Spencer's nebular development theory. Neither in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth, can man discovc: a particle of matter without the stamp of the Creator upon it.

II. The second grand absurdity of this theory of development is the notion of the self-origination of life-of vegetable and animal life, by the powers of electricity and chemical action and reaction among the particles of the eternal matter, without any supernatural creation of life. But this notion is a product of ignorance. It was once thought that Samson's lion produced the bees whose honey he divided among his comrades; and that putrid meat bred the maggots which soon swarm in it when exposed to the air. More careful observation showed that the bees built their comb in the skeleton; that the blow-flies laid their eggs in the meat, that the air we breathe is a stirabout— thick with the floating seeds of all manner of microscopic plants and animals, which you may see dancing in a sunbeam admitted through a crack or key-hole into a dark room. Every lady knows that by excluding the atmospheric air, laden with these seeds, from her cans of fruit or meat, by filling them with steam and soldering them tight, she can prevent the growth of mould or insects, and thus demonstrate, on her own kitchen stove, the absurdity of the notion of spontaneous generation.

It is manifest that this is a fatal gap in the evolution theory. Accordingly, scientific men have labored to produce life by chemical means for over fifty years. Once it was thought that Mr. Cross had electrified some mites into being, but it was afterward discovered that he had only hatched out their eggs in the bath of his battery. Professor Tyndall has experimented for the last eight months, continuously, upon all sorts of solutions, and states the result thus: "From the beginning to the end of the inquiry, there is not, as you have seen, a shadow of evidenc in favor of the doctrine of spontaneous generation. *

In the lowest, as in the highest of organized creatures, the method of nature is, that life shall be the issue of antecedent life." Inductive science thus dismisses the dream of spontane ous generation.