30
THE BATTALION.
speaker began with a reference to Ruskin’s notice of the
ignorance of man regarding the things with which he is
most familiar, using the objects in nature as an example,
and comparing thereto the ignorance of men about the
Bible, of which the plainest truths escape attention. Life,
he said, can not be defined, but we can point out its char
acteristics. Growths are never alike, while mechanisms are
counterparts and repetitions of each other. All forms of
life proceed from the one energy of God’s son, but how
variously do they express themselves in processes. Life is
ever marked by individuality and molds all the organic
forms on earth, each growing according to its own laws
♦ and producing after its kind. The millions of lives at
work over the earth are in effect immaterial principles or
spiritual forces handling physical substances and by the
power of nature testifying to the marvelous nature of
spiritual forces bound up in the human soul. The life of
trees springing from small acorns and developing for
thousands of years, while cities, nations and empires have
flourished and decayed, was, the speaker declared, but a
suggestion of the possibilities of the life of 'the soul.
Spiritual life is a cumulative force which displays itself by
growth in intellectual power, and a doom of lasting
growth drives on the mind. The chain progresses from
the prayer lisped at mother’s knee to the science of angels
and the philosophy of the New Jerusalem.
The time will come when man’s memory will hold
more knowledge than all the libraries of the world. There
will be greater development in that other life than now
for the amount of knowledge gained here is circumscribed