Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/145

Letter 12] best men" do manifest "a tendency to approximate in creative power to the co-eternal Word," so far as concerns this, the highest kind of creation. It is hard, very hard, for us to realize—in spite of the teaching of the prophets in old times and of the great English poets in our own days—that the creation of the heaven and the earth is "a very little thing, a drop of a bucket," as compared with the creation of righteousness. It is a desperate struggle, this battle of the spirit against matter, of the invisible against the visible, before we can believe, with all our being—with our minds as well as our hearts—that the creation described in the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel was more divine than that described in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. But it was so. The first creation of orderly matter was but a shadowy, unsubstantial metaphor, predicting the second creation of orderly spirit. "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made:" so writes the Evangelist, describing the first, and proceeding to describe the second, creation: and he continues thus, "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." To the same effect writes St. Paul: "The first Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit." Is it not possible, on the testimony of one's own conscience, and on the testimony of history present and past, and on the testimony of the Apostles and Evangelists—even when critically reviewed and disencumbered of the miraculous element—to acknowledge that Jesus has been indeed "a life-giving Spirit" to mankind, and to worship Him as representing the Creative Word who has moved on the face of the material and of the spiritual waters, creating order alike in the matter of the Universe and in the minds and consciences of men?

And now to deal with your second objection (directed against my definition of worship) which I will repeat in