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Press, Volume L, Issue 8625, 28 October 1893, Page 2

Sermon. gIBLE TAL K. SUBJECT — " GREAT, GREATER, GREATEST." SERIES No. 43. Psalm m., 2. Stenographic Report of Mr Worthing - ton's Bible Talk at the Templk of Truth, Sckdat, October Ist. 1893. The hifihest thought of which the human raiad is capable is the thought of God. This conception must of necessity be as varying as the many conditions and growths of evolution in miud. Kant, one cf tbe greatest thinkers the \rot Id as produced, said that *' he found God most in the voice of the consciousness within, and in the silence of ihc stars above." The poet Wordsworth found God most in the beauty of divine life in nature. Cousin, the logician, said, that which appealed to him most as witnessing to the existence of Supreme love was the order, the beauty, the relation and continuity of material eurroundiugs. To the skilled mind God is ever nearest in the sens; of and duty. Matthew Arnold's conception of God was that "power within ourselves that makes for righteousness." The O«d Testament defines God as Creator, World-makzr, the Strong One, Ruler, King, Holy One; Jesus, John, and Paul say God is Spirit, Father, Lov-e. Now 'upon whatever path we start to discover a definition of God that shall please us, we inevitably find ourselves iv the realm of the affections, the emotions. Down through the depths of rational thought, into the siteoceof spiritual search in the ultimate analysis of which we mnst find our God, whether we stand upon the platform of the theist or the atheist, the result is the same ; all search of mind mnst begin aud end with that which is. Start in any direction you please and you are instantly confronted by this fact. You are shut in by a universe of fact, whether you are exploring the sea of spiritual thought or the realm of outward manifestation. i The universal -assumption of all mind is, chat nothing could not produce something, but as something is, it foilows that something always teas. Well that is a veiy healthy premise for j Theist or Atheist, is it not? Standing j there you have a hypothesis that is not a presumption, standing there you have the premise from which to construct the fabric of your thought, and you say "that which is must have had a cause." The possibility of something existing produced from nothing, you wiil not admit for one moment; that something, then, must have been, and must be now predicated upon another something which was and is and must for sver be.. That seif-existent fact stares you in the face from whatever plane of thought you begin your inquest. If you will stand outside the material universe and think of the forces there, you will still bs confronted by the question, What is that outside force, and who made it ? That which is must for ever have a cause. When you push farther and say, wrho made the Maker, you are met with the yuestion, who made two and two four? And at once you will see it was always four.

And so the theist leaves the limited platform of the atheist, and goes out into the realm of mind and &ays, I exist, I ani* and therefore the cause for mc exists as the tmseen fact which must for ever have existed; and out of the bosom of that unseen, back-into the bosom of that unseen I go, until I see the origin, the cause, and the explanation of all that is presented to mc in my environment. Surrounded by the material world, with its matchless combinations of order, we say that this material universe is great, bub associated with it there is a greater—that of conscious life in myriad form ; and beyond that again a religion, a love, a faith, that is greatest. Greater than the material world, greater than coflsciou3 or unconscious life, is this rational quality of thought that is the greatest. The Lord is great, and the works of the Lord are great; the works of Christ are greater, the works of God are greatest; but great only to that consciousness that delights in them, the Psalmist says. And what does that mean ? It means that they are only great in their associated relations -.as a part of the equation that makes up the unit that is the universe. When you have correlated all that universe, and associated with it all the life that belongs to it, all the facts of reason, of consciousness, of hope, of love, of faith, of worship, of trust; when •11 these are put together they make the unit of the good, and nothing else. Patiently, earnestly, persistently mankind has been waiting, and knocking at the gates of knowledge, through all the centuries, looking into # the face of God with lip tremulous with intensity of feeling, asking the questions What? Whence? and Whither? Greatness and littleness are found to be comparative facts ; the grain of sand, the blade of grass, are as great as aught that is. A drop of water, the eye of an insect, are seen to be full of the mystery of God when touched by the genius of that power that searches and knows how to search. Man has left*no corner of the universe xrnsearched in his thirst for knowledge. Everywhere he has looked, penetrated iuto every depth, climbed every height, and is willing to walk in great darkness, if so he may find the light, life, God. Nothing too small, nothing too great to challenge his patient, unfaltering search and study; nothing can move him aside from his great purpose —to reach the highest rung on the ladder of knowledge. The web of the spider and the foot of the frog are laid under tribute to this insatiable thirst. Mitchel, the astronomer, could find nothing sufficiently delicate to connect the pendulum of his astronomical chronometer , with his electric regulating apparatus, until he thought of the spider web. When the miuds of our physiologists xere directed to thegreat fact of the circulation of the blood they found its evidence in the foot of the frog, and at the same time were able to note the changes of the blood in inflammation. Galvani was led to his great discovery of magnetism, a discovery that transformed mechanics, by observing the twitching of the leg of a dead frog. In our days we find the telescope, the spectroscope and astral photography witnessing to the fact that it is within the reach and touch and power of man to unveil this mystery. And as we study God the universe, Mc the wonder of solid planets and mind emerging into the great field of swinging through space, held in their orderly relation by force of the unseen law of -worlds wheeling into line with mathematical precision and rythmical order. Man, sees the world on which he lives moving through space at the rate of 1000 miles a minute; he discovers that Saturn is 80,000 miles in diameter, that Uranus is one billion eight hundred million miles from the sun, that Neptune is two billion eight hundred million miles beyond that, that the sun itself is ninety-live millions of miles from the earth, and* has a diameter of eight hundred and eighty-five thousand miles, and he stands sanaze-.l at the magnitude and sublimity of truths almost too great for the mind to grapple. But after he has mastered these facts he learns that there are still greater facts; that great as is our system, it is small in comparison with others that have been discovered. Among other things, he learns that more than 6000 fixed stars, and over 100 double or binary stars —that is, stars revolving one around the other—have been found. Again, that the distance of the nearest of these fixed stars can only be shown in miles by multiplying one hundred thousand by one hundred and ninety million. Then he is told that light, travelling at the rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles a second, requires three years to reach this sartli from yon distant star; that Polaris, the great North star, is one million five hundred thousand times one hundred and ninety million miles distant from this earth, and that, though this star is to the naked eye a singJe point of light, seen through the glas3 it resolves itself into two stars, separated by a space in which we might range, side by side, three hundred and sixty solar systems as large as ours. He learns that this Polaris i≤ ten times larger than our sun ; that Vega, the beautiful blue lighted Vega, ia three hundred and