unknown to us, and the mysteries with which we deal every day warn me that faith is as necessary as sight.  Who would have credited a century ago the stories that are now told of the wonder-working electricity?  For ages man had known the lightning, but only to fear it; now, this invisible current is generated by a man-made machine, imprisoned in a man-made wire and made to do the bidding of man.  We are even able to dispense with the wire and hurl words through space, and the X-ray has enabled us to look through substances which were supposed, until recently, to exclude all light.  The miracle is not more mysterious than many of the things with which man now deals—­it is simply different.  The miraculous birth of Christ is not more mysterious than any other conception—­it is simply unlike it; nor is the resurrection of Christ more mysterious than the myriad resurrections which mark each annual seed-time.

It is sometimes said that God could not suspend one of His laws without stopping the universe, but do we not suspend or overcome the law of gravitation every day?  Every time we move a foot or lift a weight we temporarily overcome one of the most universal of natural laws and yet the world is not disturbed.

Science has taught us so many things that we are tempted to conclude that we know everything, but there is really a great unknown which is still unexplored and that which we have learned ought to increase our reverence rather than our egotism.  Science has disclosed some of the machinery of the universe, but science has not yet revealed to us the great secret—­the secret of life.  It is to be found in every blade of grass, in every insect, in every bird and in every animal, as well as in man.  Six thousand years of recorded history and yet we know no more about the secret of life than they knew in the beginning.  We live, we plan; we have our hopes, our fears; and yet in a moment a change may come over anyone of us and this body will become a mass of lifeless clay.  What is it that, having, we live, and having not, we are as the clod?  The progress of the race and the civilization which we now behold are the work of men and women who have not yet solved the mystery of their own lives.

And our food, must we understand it before we eat it?  If we refused to eat anything until we could understand the mystery of its growth, we would die of starvation.  But mystery does not bother us in the dining-room; it is only in the church that it is a stumbling block.

I was eating a piece of watermelon some months ago and was struck with its beauty.  I took some of the seeds and dried them and weighed them, and found that it would require some five thousand seeds to weigh a pound; and then I applied mathematics to that forty-pound melon.  One of these seeds, put into the ground, when warmed by the sun and moistened by the rain, takes off its coat and goes to work; it gathers from somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight,