As a Grain of Mustard Seed.

Thames Star, Volume XV, Issue 4970, 13 December 1884, Page 1

As a Grain of Mustard Seed.

When the seed of the forest tree begins to germinate, and the cotyledons burst their ligaments aud lift themselves into light, the growing plant thenceforward gathers its nutriment out of the air. The massive trunk of the oak which has stood for a thousand years, is composed chiefly of vapours absorbed through the leaves and organised into fibre by the cunning chemistry of nature. Some few mineral substances enter into its composition, and are taken up out of the soil through the roots. But these grosser elements are slight in comparison wilh those of more ethereal origin: how slight, may be measured by the handful of dust which remains when the log has been consumed in the furnace, and the carbon and hydro-, gen hare returned to the, source from whence they came. An animal is formed of the same materials, and is developed by analogous laws. A single cell with the force called life in ifc, collects a congregation of gaseous atoms, and out of these atoms fashions a man. Men, again, are taken hold of by a further action of the living principle, and are formed into families and nations, societies and institutions ; each held together by vital force, and dissolving when the force disappears. But all of them, individuals and nations alike, are made out of atoms lent to them for a while out of the aerial envelope of the globe, to be reclaimed after a brief incarnation. The smallest urn suffices to preserve such remants of a man as cannot be decomposed into vapour. Spiritual organisations are the counterpart of the material. Intellect and imagination are for ever scattering in millions the seeds of aspirations or speculations. From time to time some one out of these millions is " brought to bear," and becomes a theory of politics, a system of philosophy, a tradition, a poem, a creed, j The idea is the life ; the organised form is assimilated out of the opinions and desires already floating in the minds of mankind. Some root in fact there may be. But the facts which CBn be seen and handled, and verified by experience, are infinitessimally . small. Accidental conditions may be needed to quicken an idea into an active force. But when once the idea has begun to grow, and organic tissue to be formed, the sole source of nourishment is again the spiritual-r-aiV. It was once supposed that man was made of clay; that all things which had visible form and bulk were formed out of elements possessing a property of solidity ; that air could not become solid, nor solids become air : and much illusory physiology was based on this hypothesis. There has been similar waste of labor and ingenuity in looking for historical facts as the basis of national traditions. The facts which we discover will not accouut for the con« sequences which seemed to grow of them. The Komaus traced their Romulus to the gods; the modern historian regards came which developed the shepherd's Romulus as a robber shepherd, but he has still to expla.'n whence the idea descendants into an imperial race : and when he looks for his reasons iv the " soil," in thecircumstanoes of the situation, he is like a man who would find the secret of the tree in its ashes, or would explain the lifting of the Himalayas by a force which would not elevate a mole heap. The philosopLy of history is gradually discerning that the amount of fact discoverable in early legends is extremely small, and that when discovered it is extremely unimportant. Legends are perceived to have rises out of the minds, and characters, and purposes of the people to whom they beloDg, and are only interesting as they show what those minds, and I characters, aud purposes were. In. like • mauuer, theological critics aro throwing away valuable effort over the facts supposed to underlie the origin of Christianity. They forget the simile of the grain "of j mustard-seed to which the kingdom of heaven was orapared by Christ himself ;

sod they seek for the living in the dead. They sift the Gospel to separate the true from the false. They desire to ascertain precisely the events which occurred in Palestine eighteen or nineteen centuries ago; and such events as survive the process, and can he accepted after passing through the critical crucible, will be but ash or charred cinders. The truth, as it was, can never be discovered. The historical inquirer can look only through the eyes of the early Christian writers; and those writers neither saw as he sees, nor judged as he judges. The historical inquirer sees with the eye of reason; tbe Nearly Christians saw with the eye of faith. The historical inquirer is impartial; the early Christian was enthusiastic and pre ■ possessed. The historical inquirer de mands evidence such as would satisfy a British jury in a criminal case; to the early ..Christians the life, and death, and resurrection of Christ were their own evidence, each detail of it the symbol of some spiritual reality, and every event of it intrinsically probable as it availed for the edification and elevation of the human soul. Thus the data do not exist to establish an evidential conclusion. The early Christians did not inquire, and therefore left no record of inquiry. St. Paul was converted by a vision. The vision wag sufficient for him, and he pointedly abstained from examining witnesses or strengthening his conviction.by outward testimony. To us the ultimate fact is existence of belief—belief created by such evidence as was convincing to the minds of the first converts. The evidence was sufficient for them, but they did not argue as we argue; their methods of ) fihfierence were not our methods of in-, ference; we can only see Christianity coming into existence as a living force; and, as of the oak tree, we do not ask, Is it true, or is it false ? We ask, Is it alive ? So with Christianity : we see- a spiritual germ, quickened suddenly into active being, which grew and took possession of the human race, overthrowing every other force with which it came into collision, and eventually revolutionising the entire character of human thought and energy. Life is not truth merely, but something above truth and more than truth; a force in visible operation which remains a mystery to the intellect; and it is immortal not as the properties of the circle are immortal, but as it propagates itself in eternal descent, body after body which it has animated successively perishing, but for ever reorganising itself anew in fresh and developed forms. The individual oak tree grows old. Its functions become 1 torpid. Its boughs clothe themselves more scantily with leaves. It ceases to expand. At length it decays, and is resolved into the elements. But it has dropped its acorns from its branches, and in the acorn it lives again, in a new body i the essential qualities unchanged, the unessential and accidental passing away into other combinations. The Christianity of the first century was, and was not, the Christianity of "tbe fourth century. The Christianity of the fourth century was, and was not, the Christianity of feudal .Europe. The Christianity of feudal Europe died at the Reformation, and was born again in Protestant Chris tianity. Even things which we call dead are still subject to the eternal law of : change. Forces are for ever at work, integrating and disintegrating the atoms of which the inorganic world is composed. Only in the intellectual abstractions of geometry, or in numbers which have no existence save in the conceptions of the inteJ ect do we find propositions of which we 1 can predicate with certainty unalterable truth. Whatever has its being in time and space is under the conditions of transiency; but t iho transient is interpenetrated with life; every living thought which has quickened into vital organization, and has developed 1 into flower and fruit, renews its energies while time endures ; and, in the strictest V sense of the wor. s, the gates of death do not prevail against it. , ; Keligion as a rule of life, neither is, nor can be, a record of events which once occurred on a corner of this planet. It is the expression and statement of our duties to one another, and of our relation to the Sovereign Power which has called us into existence. And these duties and these relations arp not conditions which once were or will be hereafter. They are conditions of our present being, as much as what we call the laws of nature. For tbe laws of bodily health we are not depen« dent on the observations of Gralen, or the history of the plague at Athens. We learn from present experience, as Galen himself learned, and we refer to the records of tbe past only as a single chapter in the vast volume of our instructions. The evidence of the truth of religion is not the testimony of this or that person who saw, or thought they saw, long ago, something which seemed to him an indication of a supernatural presence. The evidence is tbe power which lies in a religion " to cope with moral disease, to conquer and bind the brutal appetites and intellectual . perversities of maD, and to lift him out of grossness and self-indulgence into higher and nobier.desires. This was what Christianity effected as no creed or system of philosophy ever did before or has done since, and Christianity was thus, as Goethe declares, beyond comparison the grandest work which was ever accomplished by humanity. It is a height from which, having once risen to it, mankind can never again descend ; and thus of all the studies the most interesting to us is that of the conditions under which so extraordinary a force developed itself.—Froude.