ARTICLE V.

SCIENCE AND CHRIST.

BY WILLIAM W. KINSLEY, WASHINGTON, D. C., AUTHOR OF

VEXED QUESTIONS."

"VIEWS ON

I NOW call attention to the second and third divisions of my theme, whether it was absolutely necessary for a Divine Visitant to come, and whether we have in the characteristics and career of the historic Christ convincing evidences that he was the Messiah foretold by Jewish prophets and by the world's most pressing needs.

Every plant is an organic unit. Its parts are complemental and are linked so intimately that no one can be separated from the others without fatal results. Root, stem, branch, and leaf are vitally essential, each to each, must remain in intimate union, and each play its part. There is a life-current flowing from the tiniest rootlets that weave their network in the dark and damp of the underworld, to the veined leaves that hang, wind-shaken and sun-kissed, from the outermost branches that reach toward the sky. Sever the connection and you stop the flow and end the life. The very forces which, before the severance, were invigorating and developing become destructive. The sunlight now scorches and withers, and the moisture in the air and soil rots the plant into unorganized dust again.

There has been established a vital union between not only the different parts of an organism but also between the organism and its environment, the ingredients of the soil, the air, the raindrop, and the sunbeam,-severance here being attended with equally fatal results. The central germ

force reaches with vitalizing influence to the remotest corner of the organism, directing where every particle of matter shall go and precisely what office it shall perform in perfecting the embodiment of the divine ideal entrusted to its keeping. There is thus an interplay, an interdependence, binding together not only the different parts of an organism, but the clod of the valley with the cloud of the sky, even reaching through space the almost inconceivable distance of ninety-five millions of miles.

A more perfect and complex organization may be observed in the higher realm of animal life. Not only is every body, whether of mote or mammoth, an organized whole, a combination of parts by whose joint action a certain pre-determined purpose is carried out, but each organ also in the combination is made up of interdependent parts, each differently endowed and commissioned and having significance and efficiency only when conjoined with the others into one harmonious whole. The human eye, for example, has been found composed of hundreds of such complemental parts, some of the more noticeable being a self-adjusting window, carefully curved and accurately placed lenses, an elaborately prepared plate, susceptible of the slightest impression, consisting of a closely woven network of the frayed ends of the optic nerve, oil and tear glands, sets of minute muscles to roll the balls and lift the lids with their fringed edges, and change the curvature of the crystalline lens. These have evidently been built with reference each to each, as only by a concert of action can they effect an outlook to the spirit housed within. In this highly organized body of ours, we find the brain in such close telegraphic communication with every fibre of flesh that nowhere, over the wide area which the skin covers, can even the fine point of a cambric needle find entrance without a message of warning being flashed over the wires to the central office. Along the motor nerves the will reaches, with its mandates, thou

sands of waiting muscles in that vast army that lies encamped throughout its kingdom.

The vital organs are also most closely conjoined, and are constantly sending out, along canals that ramify everywhere, rich cargoes of vitalized atoms, that, under the supervision of the all-dominant, organizing central force, are incorporated into muscle and bone, tendon and nerve-fibre, cuticle, cord, cartilage, and brain tissue. Here, too, break the union, and you end the life. Any part of the body wrenched from this quickening contact with the controlling germ-power soon falls a prey to the ever-waiting, hungry hordes of chemical forces, which tear it in pieces and despoil it of its glory.

And, also, between every animal organism and its environment there must be maintained an equally constant union, or life will cease. It seems to be the special, if not sole, office of those marvellous animal instincts which are unquestionably none other than a divine informing, to promote and regulate this union as God first planned it.

This scheme of organization, which we find to prevail thus universally in these lowest kingdoms of vegetable and animal existences, has been discovered to be equally dominant in the higher realms of self-conscious thought and of moral choices. Careful grouping of parts, the widely reaching centralization of purpose and of power, is here as unmistakably present and as ineradicable. For example, our powers of reasoning and reflection cannot be exercised without the aid of the memory; for we must be able to recall and retain former conceptions, in order to pass our thoughts in review, institute comparisons, draw inferences, reach conclusions; and for the exercise of the memory the imagination is indispensable, for we must picture whatever past incident or idea we recover to consciousness. The imagination must have, as its ready servitors, the mind's powers of association and suggestion, of comparison and contrast, and of memory,

for its office is not to create outright, but to fashion new combinations, selecting its material from former perceptions and experiences. Thus the mind acts as a unit, thought being the result of a combined operation of its faculties. As the brain is the instrument used in all thought-processes, and as all crude thought-material must come through the five bodily senses, the union of the intellectual world with the physical is also close and constant, and the deeply laid plan of organization in the one leaves its indelible impress on the other, is fairly inwrought into its very structure, so that the two may safely be considered parts of a still wider organization, all of whose vast multitude of members are in vital union with each other and with some central Over-Soul, its author and organizing spirit.

This union has been found to extend still further, linking mind with mind, each individual endowment of personality being essential to the healthful and efficient exercise and unfolding of the others, each having its peculiar fashioning with reference to this world-wide relationship. Here, too, the penalty of severance is death. This was not known until revealed by quite recent results of state prison discipline. Solitary cell confinement has so uniformly ended in hopeless insanity or idiocy, that the authorities have felt compelled to abandon this mode of punishment. While occasional solitude serves as a tonic and regulator, as a positive medicine to the mind, it will, if obstinately persisted in, turn into deadly poison. We must maintain communication with the ever-flowing thought-currents of the world and of nature, must never suffer to wholly cease within us that beat of pulse which is but God's beat of heart, by whose mighty enginery the world's thought-arteries are fed with a divine vitality. This fact of a world-organism is brought out still further, and with ever-increasing emphasis, in the unmistakable drift of modern civilization towards a more intimate and organized interplay of all individual forces in society, as may

be noted in the increased facilities for travel and for interchange of thought, the multiplication of machinery, closer combinations of industries, the formation of great trusts and co-operative associations, the international federations for reform and for the forwarding of the researches of science. The Duke of Argyll in his "Reign of Law," but more recently in his work on "The Unity of Nature," has presented certain phases of it with great learning and force. Walter Bagehot has attempted to show the extension of natural law to the political world; Herbert Spencer, its application to the social; and Professor Henry Drummond, its reaching up even into the spiritual life of the soul.

The fact that we are parts of one vast, closely linked organism in our intellectual as well as our physical nature is again made evident, whenever we attempt to develop any theme of thought. We work most effectively when we place ourselves as far as we can in a receptive frame, freeing our minds from all trammels of passion and preconceived opinion, being resolved to know only the truth and fearlessly to state and stand by it, then inform ourselves as to all discovered pertinent facts, institute original investigations when possible, search through nature, among the world's libraries, its customs, industries, its religions, political and social institutions, its exhibits of art, all the multiform phenomena of its ever-varying life, and after having thus thrown open every avenue of approach, placed ourselves in closest vital union with the thought-movements of the planet and through them with the God of the planet, the great central thoughtsource, and having thus become fairly alive with our theme, quickened and filled, we hold our attention unswervingly to the subject of our purposed contemplation, and suffer our mental faculties to evolve their thoughts-products according to the methods predetermined by their Creator. Our minds are, we shall find, most consummately constructed pieces of mechanism, with most complicate yet most nicely adjust