If among my readers any one has been presumptuous enough to attempt to confine the power and purpose of God by man’s puny understanding, let me persuade him to abandon this absurd position by the use of an illustration which I once found in a watermelon.  I was passing through Columbus, Ohio, some years ago and stopped to eat in the restaurant in the depot.  My attention was called to a slice of watermelon, and I ordered it and ate it.  I was so pleased with the melon that I asked the waiter to dry some of the seeds that I might take them home and plant them in my garden.  That night a thought came into my mind—­I would use that watermelon as an illustration.  So, the next morning when I reached Chicago, I had enough seeds weighed to learn that it would take about five thousand watermelon seeds to weigh a pound, and I estimated that the watermelon weighed about forty pounds.  Then I applied mathematics to the watermelon.  A few weeks before some one, I knew not who, had planted a little watermelon seed in the ground.  Under the influence of sunshine and shower that little seed had taken off its coat and gone to work; it had gathered from somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight, and forced that enormous weight through a tiny stem and built a watermelon.  On the outside it had put a covering of green, within that a rind of white and within the white a core of red, and then it had scattered through the red core little seeds, each one capable of doing the same work over again.  What architect drew the plan?  Where did that little watermelon seed get its tremendous strength?  Where did it find its flavouring extract and its colouring matter?  How did it build a watermelon?  Until you can explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty, or tell just what He would do, or how He would do it.  The most learned man in the world cannot explain a watermelon, but the most ignorant man can eat a watermelon, and enjoy it.  God has given us the things that we need, and He has given us the knowledge necessary to use those things:  the truth that He has revealed to us is infinitely more important for our welfare than it would be to understand the mysteries that He has seen fit to conceal from us.  So it is with religion.  If you ask me whether I understand everything in the Bible, I frankly answer, No.  I understand some things to-day that I did not understand ten years ago and, if I live ten years longer, I trust that some things will be clear that are now obscure.  But there is something more important than understanding everything in the Bible; it is this:  If we will embody in our lives that which we do understand we will be kept so busy doing good that we will not have time to worry about the things that we do not understand.

In “The Grave Digger,” written by Fred Emerson Brooks, there is one stanza which is in point here: 

  “If chance could fashion but a little flower,
    With perfume for each tiny thief,
  And furnish it with sunshine and with shower,
    Then chance would be creator, with the power
  To build a world for unbelief.”