Shall only the children of Adam behold
Such glory unrolled?
Shall only the gaze of the earthborn desire
The miracle wrought with these wreathings of fire?
Not so. In the calm of the white sunrise
The Maker looks down with His holy eyes,
And the seraphs that stand
At His left and right hand
Chant the song of the season of sacrifice:
The psalm of the earth when, her harvesting done,
She lifts up her arms to the path of the sun.
And offers, with tithes of her vines and her sheaves,
The life of her leaves —
Their beauty of burning as praise
To the Ancient of Days.^
3. Are there any signs that the redemption of man is to work out the redemption of creation ? Two lines of conquest over the powers of darkness go on together, the one overcoming physical obstacles, and the other spiritual
(1) The physical process moves at an increasing rate. It began far back in history, and depends on the mental energies of man. Even the Syrian desert is not mere sand and rock, but consists of excellent soil — desert only by reason of man's neglect.
^ Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, Poems, 67.
ROMANS VIII. 19 39
The barren sides of Lebanon have once had beautiful terraces in high cultivation. The terraces remain, but the culture has ceased with man's apathy or relapse towards barbarism. In all civilized countries the soil is useful exactly in the degree in which man's energy defends it from returning to wildness. Modern discoveries have in two ways lengthened life — by preserving health on one side, and by crowding into a given time far more achievement. All these conquests are gifts of God to man, and obtained through man. They are poured out profusely, and at the same time they are educating into higher skill the race that discovers them ; and the race which produces more Newtons, and Watts, and Nasmyths, more Harveys and Pasteurs, will become the channel of a greater flood of beneficent inventions.
^ Here, for instance, is the extraordinary power which we call electricity. It is a creation of God. It has had its mysterious origin and history through all the clash and movement and conflict of the universe of God. It has gone its way, flashing and dancing across the sky, and giving men vague lessons of the power of God. But it was meant for more than this. It was meant to be the minister of human ends, of social utility. And for this it waits, until at last the ingenuity of man takes hold of its higher capacity. The force was always there, expectantly waiting — eager to serve the wants of man; but God's purposes through it could be worked out only by the skill and insight of the sons of God. Finally, after ages of a patient creation, the inventor thinks God's thoughts after Him, the sons of God are revealed in their relation to Nature, and then the creation moves on into its higher uses, and liglits us, moves us, warms us — the familiar instrument of our days and nights.
^ Creation waits for man. The work of God is in the hands of the sons of God. Here is a vessel eager to reach her port, and God's winds sweep gently over the sea and invite her to move on. But not the fairest wind can bring her on her way unless man does his part. The earnest expectation of the vessel waits until the captain spreads her sails ; and then, man working with God, the creation which lay dead and lonely on the sea becomes a thing of life and motion, and leaps on her way. So it is, the Apostle seems to say, with all the higher movements of God's creation. The method of God works through the participation of man. The whole creation pauses until the spirit of life takes command of the mechanism of life, like a captain giving orders on his ship. Grod may create the best of circumstances, but the
40 AN EXPECTANT CREATION
whole creation simply groans and labours, like a vessel labouring in a sea until man steadies her with his sails and spreads them to catch God's favouring breeze. The patient expectation of the vessel waits for the manifestation of the captain's will.^
^ It was the laws of Evolution as we call them, meaning the laws of God, that gave man muscles and bones to lift and carry, but it was not till sons of God appeared who discovered that wind, and water, and steam, and electric energy were going man's way and might fetch and carry for him, that he was delivered from his rude and animal drudgery. Natural law made man to be racked with ague in a fen, but creation had to wait till some son of God discovered the antidote under the bark of a tree. It was with many a bitter groan that the slaves waited for Wilber- force, that the prisoners of England waited for Elizabeth Fry, or the women of our city slums for Catherine Booth. Our whole complex civilization indeed, half godless though it still be, is what it is, in its care for human life, and its varied social activities, because of the sons of God who have already been manifested, the men and women who have given their brains and their hands and their hearts to the service of God and their fellows. It is on their forgotten shoulders that we stand to-day. It is through them that God's plans have run.