But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly welcome man’s aid.  Has he?  Yes.  Obviously he wants things done he cannot do alone.  Worlds are dead.  Trees do not think.  Morning stars may sing together, but they cannot love.  None of them have character.  None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power and love that flush the universe.  None of them are permanent, or worth keeping forever.  They are only scaffolding.  He wants something greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels together can make.  He wants not mere matter acted upon from without, but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting, and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away.  God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.

Are there proofs that God’s forces are cooperating with ours?  Many.  Gravitation holds us to the earth.  We do not drift, all sides up successively, in space or chaos.  We never want a breath but there are oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.

But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a full expectation of the aid of the forces without us.  Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin.  He expects all its energies to cooperate with him.  He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans.  Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being.  If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling.

There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and hand of mastery.  They all work for and with him.  Does he want his burdens carried?  The river will convey the Indian on a log or the armaments of the greatest nations.  The wind fits itself into the shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land than all the human race together.  Does he want swiftness?  The lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, “Here am I.”  Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work into man’s plans.