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Arthur Conan Doyle - "Beyond the City"

Jerome K. Jerome - "Told After Supper"

Richard Harding Davis - "The Nature Faker"

A. Light - "The Moravians in Georgia, 1735 1740, by Adelaide L. Fries"

The Crown of Thorns

E >> E. H. Chapin >> The Crown of Thorns




But if we take a wider view of things, and consider this material
universe in which we live, the great fact of mystery and the need
of faith will be urged upon us by a larger and more impressive
teaching. The more we learn of nature the more clearly is
revealed to us this fact--that we know less than we thought we
did; positively, we know more, but relatively we know less,
because as we have advanced nature has stretched out into wider
and wider relations. The department that was unknown to us
yesterday is explored to-day. Yesterday, we thought it was all
that remained to be explored, but the torch of investigation that
guided us through it now flares out upon new regions we did not
see before. Like one who goes with a candle into some immense
cavern, presently a little circle becomes clear, the shadows
vanish before him, and undefined forms grow distinct. he thinks
he is near the end, when lo! what seemed a solid boundary of rock
dissolves and floats away into a depth of darkness, the path
opens into an immense void, new shapes of mystery start out, and
he learns this much that he did not know before, that instead of
being near the end, he is only upon the threshold. We do not
mean to imply by this that we have no positive knowledge, or that
we do not increase in knowledge. With every new discovery we
positively know more and more. But the new discovery reveals the
fact that more is yet to be known; it lays open new regions, it
unfolds new relations that we had not before suspected.

We follow some tiny thread a little way, and hold it secure, but
it is connected with another ligament, and this branches out into
a third; and instead of exhausting the matter, we find ourselves
at the root of an infinite series, of an immense relationship,
upon which we have only just opened; and yet what we have is
positive knowledge, is something more added to our stock. The
circle of the known has positively widened, but the horizon of
the unknown has widened also, and, instead of being to us now, as
it seemed some time ago, a solid and ultimate limit, it is only
an ethereal wall, only to us a relative boundary, and behind are
infinite depths and mystery. Our scientific knowledge at the
present day reaches this grand result--it clears up the deception
that the system of nature is mere flat, dead materiality, a few
mechanical laws, a few rigid forms. It shows that these are only
the husks, the outer garments of mighty forces of subtile,
far-reaching agencies; and the most common, every-day truths,
that seemed stale and exhausted, become illuminated with infinite
meaning, and are the blossoms of an infinite life.

The wider our circle of discovery, the wider our wonder; the more
startling our conclusions, the more perplexing our questions. We
have not exhausted the universe;--we have just begun to see its
harmony of proportion and of relations, without penetrating a
fathom into its real life. How and what is that power that works
in the shooting of a crystal, and binds the obedience of a star;
that shimmers in the northern Aurora, and connects by its
attraction the aggregated universe; that by its unseen forces,
its all-prevalent jurisdiction, holds the little compass to the
north, blooms in the nebula and the flower, weaves the garment of
earth and the veil of heaven, darts out in lightning, spins the
calm motion of the planets, and presides mysteriously over all
motion and all life? And what is life, and what is death, and
what a thousand things that we touch, and experience, and think
we know all about? O! as science, as nature opens upon us, we
find mystery after mystery, and the demand upon the human soul if
for faith, faith in high, yes, in spiritual realities; and this
materialism that would shut us in to death and sense, that denies
all spirit and all miracle, is shattered like a crystal sphere,
and the soul rushes out into wide orbits and infinite
revolutions, into life, and light, and power, that are of
eternity,--that are of God!

Thus the scale is prepared for us to rise from things of sense to
things of spirit, to rise from faith in nature to faith in
Revelation, from the faith of LaPlace to the faith of Paul. No
one who has studied nature will reject Christianity because it
reveals truths that he cannot see with his naked eye,--because it
speaks of things that he cannot comprehend. No one who has
considered the shooting of a green blade will dogmatically deny
its miracles. No one who has found in the natural world the
intelligent wisdom that pervades all things, will wonder that he
discovers a revelation of perfect love in Jesus Christ. "We walk
by faith, not by sight," said Paul. So says every Christian; and
it is of all things the most rational. Faith in something higher
and greater than we can see, faith in something above this narrow
scene, faith in something beyond this present life, faith in
realities that are not of time or sense; from all that we have
now considered we claim such faith to be most rational, most
natural. God, spirit, immortality, instead of being inconsistent
with what we know, are what we most legitimately deduce from
it,--what we might expect from the light that trembles behind the
curtain of mystery which bounds all our sensuous knowledge. We
do believe, the veriest skeptic believes in something behind that
curtain of mystery; nor can he withhold his faith because it
attaches to that which is unseen and incomprehensible, without,
as has already been shown, cutting every nerve that binds us to
practical life, and smothering every suggestion that speaks from
outward nature. If he do not believe in a God, then, or in
Christ, or in immortality, let him not sneer at others because
they walk by faith and not by sight; for he also must do so,
though his faith be not in such high truths, such spiritual
realities.

The Christian's faith is an Infinite Father and an immortal life,
and though he cannot see them, cannot come in material contact
with them, he believes them to be the greatest of all realities,
and he sees them by faith, a medium as legitimate as that of
sight. They are mysteries, but everything contains a mystery;
they demand of him what every day's, every hour's events demand
of him--faith. Let us understand, however, that faith is not the
surrendering of our minds to that which is irrational and
inconsistent. These terms should not be confounded with the
mysterious and the incomprehensible. That the earth moves and
yet stands still is not a proposition that demands faith. It is
in the province of reason to say that it cannot move and stand
still at the same time. It is an inconsistency. But how the
earth moves on its axis, what is that law that makes it move, is
an incomprehensibility. An incomprehensibility is one thing, an
inconsistency is another thing. The one conflicts with our
reason, the other is beyond it. In that which conflicts with our
reason we cannot have faith, but as to that which is beyond it we
exercise faith every day; for we literally walk by faith and not
by sight.

Who shall say, then, that God, immortality, and those high truths
revealed by Jesus, are inconsistent? Do they not conform to the
highest reason? Do not our deepest intuitions demand that these
revelations should be true? Consult your nature, examine your
own heart, consider what you are, what you want, what you feel,
deeply want, keenly feel, and then say whether the Revelation of
a God, a Father, and an immortal life, satisfies you as nothing
else can. Take them away, and would there not be a dreary and
overwhelming void? And because you have not seen God, because
you have not realized immortality, because they reach beyond your
present vision, because the grave shuts you in, because they are
high and transcendent truths, will you reject them? Do so, and
try to walk by sight alone. With that nature of yours, so full
of love, with that intellect of yours so limitless in capacity,
you are apparently a child of the elements, a thing of physical
nature, born of the dust, and returning to it. With desires that
reach out beyond the stars, with faculties that in this life just
begin to bud, with affections whose bleeding tendrils cling
around the departed, wrestle with death, and say to the grave,
"Give up the dead! they are not thine, but mine; I feel they must
be mine forever," with all these desires, capacities, affections,
you walk--so far as mere sight helps you--among graves and decay,
with nothing more enduring, nothing better, than three-score
years and ten, the clods of the valley, the crumbling bone, and
the dissolving dust! Because God and immortality are mysterious,
incomprehensible, reject them, and walk only by sight? The
humblest outpouring of human affection rebukes thy skepticism;
the most narrow degree of human intellect prophesies beyond all
this; the darkest heart, with that spark of eternal life, the
yearning that moves beneath all its sensualities, and speaks for
better, for more enduring things,--that rebukes thee; and in
man's moral nature, in his heart and his mind, there is that
which only can be satisfied, only can be explained by God and
immortality. They alone, then, are rational, they alone have
comprehensive vision, who walk by faith, and not by sight.

Mystery and faith, then; let what we have said concerning these
be not alone for the skeptic, but for the Christian who has faith
but cannot fully justify and confirm it, or who feels it
faltering under some heavy burden, or who is overwhelmed by the
magnitude of the truths to which it attaches, or who wishes, with
a kind of half-doubt, that these things might be seen and felt.
They are great, they are incomprehensibly great; but are they
therefore untrue? Does not your heart of hearts tell you they
are true? Does not that Revelation of Christ steal into your
soul and feed it, satisfy it, as nothing else can, with a warm,
benignant power, that makes you know its truth?

Mysteries are all about us, but faith sees light beyond and
around them all. Have you recently laid down the dead in their
place of rest? Cold and crushing, then, is that feeling of
vacancy, that dreary sense of loss, that rushes upon you, as you
look through the desolate chambers without,--through the desolate
chambers of the heart within. But will not He who calls out from
the very dust where yon sleepers lie the flowers of summer, and
who, in the snows that enwrap their bed, cherishes the germs of
the glorious springtime, will not He who works out this beautiful
mystery in nature bring life back from the tomb, and light out of
darkness? It is truly a great mystery; but everything within us
responds to it as reasonable; and though it demands our faith,
who, who, in this limited and changing world, can walk by sight
alone?

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