Notes of a Sermon Preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, on Sunday Evening, October 1.
Text: Isaiah XXXV, 1 and 2.
"Lhe desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.
It shall blossom. abundantly."
The greatest of all the sciences is surely biology, the science of life. _ANl the others, however great they may be, are only ancillary to that. They are its humble servants. A moment's consideration proves that clearly enough. There is chemistry. It is, of course, a great thing to have found out colours in coal-tar, and to have discovered poison gases. It is a great thing to have made indigo, for all practical purposes, as well as the plant makes it. But it would be an infinitely greater thing if chemists were able to make life synthetically. Try as they like, they will never do that. Then there are the stars and planets. Astronomers have found out that there are the same chemicals in them as in the earth. That is a great discovery, but, after all, iron is iron, whether in Arcturus, or in the earth. That is all "there is to it." There is the planet Mars. If they could find that there are living creatures on Mars, as some of the loamed expect, that would be an infinitely more important discovery than that of the metals on Mars. Life is the thing. We all agree in that. An audience prefers a lantern lecture with pictures of a busy street to pictures of all the Alps and Rockies, put together. Life in all its branches is the great mystery and the great fascination.
Now this is why the Bible strikes us as such a modern book, and explains why it is that it never gets obsolete, why it is abreast of the most recent science. It is the book of life. It always speaks of religion in terms of life, not of dry "windy doctrines. Here is Isaiah telling of the good time coming when Messiah shall appear, and he does it in terms of life: "The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abun-dautly." The glory of the coming Messiah shall be that life shall abound, and overflow. Death shall be destroyed.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.