PSALM XCI.

I He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

3 Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

4 He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust:

5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

7 A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

9 Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation;

10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

II For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honor him.

16 With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.

CHRIST'S RELATION TO THE
UNIVERSE

BISHOP THOMAS F. GAILOR, MEMPHIS, TENN.

"Giving thanks unto the Father,

who hath trans

lated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, in whom we have

the invisible God; all things were created by Him; and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist." (Col. i. 12-17.)

This is the great Christian statement of Christ's relation to the universe; and it was written, not by St. John, the mystic, the contemplative; but by St. Paul, the practical worker, the far-seeing statesman, the man of affairs. This is the gospel-the Good News-which interprets the order of the world, satisfying human reason and ennobling human life.

There is universe, There is

For God-the fountain source and author of lifeis not a diffused, characterless force, but free, personal, self-determining, self-revealing, and His utterance of Himself; His "utterance" and activity, is the Word, the Christ. Or, as St. John puts it, God in utterance is the Logos, the Word, the Christ; not another God, but the utterance of the one God, as my word is the utterance of my thought. All things were created by Christ, the Son; and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. one Reason operating in and through the and it is the thought of God uttering itself. one Force pulsing, throbbing through all, and it is the love of God. In mountains and forests and shining streams; in the blooming flowers and ripening corn and singing birds; in the movement and progress of human society and government; in the interests and organization of common life; in every stage of the evolution, through which the primeval chaos has grown and travailed through pain into order and beauty and law; everywhere and always there is the

Utterance, the Logos, the Word, the Christ of God, who is before all things and by whom all things consist.

"A fire-mist and a planet;

A crystal and a cell;

A jelly-fish and a saurian,

And the caves where the cave men dwell;
Then the sense of law and beauty,

And the face lifted up from the clod;
Some call it evolution,

And others call it God.

The whole purpose of creation is that it may be the manifestation and fulfilment of the mind and purpose of God, a manifestation and fulfilment which is to be accomplished in God's way, by the means and through the stages which God sees fit to use.

And the ideal, the purpose of God for mankind, is clear before us in the character and personality of Jesus, the Incarnate Christ, whose life and words and deeds, imperfectly, perhaps inadequately, because of the limitations of those who tried to record them for us, but yet with sufficient definiteness and consistency to carry their own truth with them, are plain before us in the written gospels. Surely, as there presented to us, even to the most critical, He stands out in history as a unique personality, a matchless figure, an unexampled life, wholly and fearlessly conscious of His union with God; infallibly certain; supremely poised, prescient, prepared. "Let not your hearts be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me." "I am the resurrection and the life; whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die."

Nay, more; He says, "I am the vine; ye are the

branches." And we know that if the branches share the life of the vine, the vine shares the life of the branches. Christ in us and we in Christ. And, thus fulfilling the plan of God for His world, He had to share our sorrows, as we were to share His joy; He had to be assailed by the power of our sin, tempted and hard pressed, as we were to become perfect in the power of His perfection. As a great modern teacher has said, "When I have discovered that by the very constitution of my nature I am to achieve perfection in the power of the life of another-who is yet not another, but the very ground of my own being-it ceases to be incredible to me that anotherwho is yet not another should be the atonement for my sin, and that His relations to God should determine mine."

So, in that beautiful phrase of St. Paul's, you and I, my brethren, we, men and women, "We are God's workmanship-God's poems, created in Christ Jesus to good works," or, as Browning translates it:

"God is the Perfect Poet,

Who, in creation, acts out His own conceptions."

Is life worth living? Is the strain and struggle worth while? Is the toil and sacrifice; is the thought and effort; is this higher education and unwearied search for truth; is the whole experience from infancy, childhood, to weak, infirm and lonely old age— the product of a mere dream, an illusion, a mockery, a jest of evil powers, which, Agnosticism declares, are making sport of our human love, our human aspiration, our human life? They tell us that death ends it all.

"Drink," says Omar Khayyam,

"Drink; for we know not whence we come nor why;
Drink; for we know not when we go, nor where."

Is that the whole of it? Is that the climax and culmination of the evolutionary process of which we hear so much from men who are filling our jails and penitentiaries with people who have been taught to trust in moral standards based upon expediency without the fear of God, and who are filling the cemeteries with the bodies of suicides that have accepted the dictum of some American writers and scientists who deny our personal immortality?

Surely we cannot help recognizing this attitude of mind which accepts the theory that the culmination of the age-long process of evolution is a grotesque and tragic anti-climax in which its highest result lives as a madman exalted and tortured at once by wild dreams, and then becomes extinct, destroyed, annihilated. Surely we know this to be an irrational egotism which has lost sight of the whole and drowned itself in the study of the parts. Yes, we recognize it is that spirit of anti-Christ which loveth and maketh a lie.

Life is justified; work is justified; education is justified; because we are God's workmanship, participating with God through the redemption wrought by Christ, in God's great plan for the spiritual and eternal manifestation of God's essential nature in and through His world. "Until we all come, in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto the perfect man; unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." For