"Ay," but you say, "those miracles in the life of Jesus Christ, how
strange those are; how strange that He should have touched the water and
the water become wine; how strange that He should have called to the
dead man and he should have come forth from the tomb; how strange that
He should have spoken to the waters and the storm grow still!" Ah, my
friends, it seems to me that there again we are dishonoring nature as
just before we did dishonor man. There again we are thinking that we
have exhausted the capacity of this wondrous world in which we live.
What is the glory of that world? That it answers to human kind. In the
mystic tradition of the Book of Genesis it is told how, when God first
made man, He set him master of this world and all its powers; and, ever
since, the world has been answering to man, who is its master, and every
message that comes back to him, every response that the field makes to
the farmer, or that the rock makes to the scientist, is but an assertion
and the culmination and the fulfilment of that which God did back there.
As man has been, so has the world responded to his touch and call.
Suppose that to-morrow morning the perfect man should come, not the man
simply of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first, who shall be
greater in his humanity than we, but suppose the perfect man, the
perfect man because the divine man, comes. I cannot dream that nature
shall not have words to say and a response to make to him that it will
not make to these poor hands of mine. I can do something with the rock
and field, I can do something with the sea and sky. What shall he do who
is to my humanity what the perfect is to the absolutely and dreadfully
imperfect? What shall the divine man do? When Paul speaks in that great
verse of his and tells us how the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
waiting for the manifestation of the Son of God, the whole future
history of human science, of man's knowledge and use of the world, is in
his words. The world shall know man as fast as man shows himself, and
when the Son of God shall be manifested, then the groaning and