life
itself. There is a natural environment, and in it have been, real and
mighty from the beginning, the laws and forces which science has but
recently discovered. Copernicus discovered the true order of the solar
system; but the order itself has been there from the morning of time.
Newton discovered the force of gravity, but that force has been in the
natural situation since creation. Chemists have been able to make out
sixty-five or sixty-six irreducible elements; but while chemistry is
young, the elements are everlasting. Electricity is the discovery of
yesterday, and yet it has been at play in man's environment from the
foundation of the world. The continuity of life, from the lowest forms
of it up to man, has been a fact from the first; but not until
this century has the fact meant anything. Few things impress the
imagination more powerfully than the sense of the forces that have
surrounded man from his first appearance on the earth, and that
have been noted and utilized only in recent times. There stands the
immemorial force, and men have had no eyes for it till yesterday.
Thoughtful men begin to look upon the environment in a new spirit.
They begin to walk within it in amazement and hope. All the forces of
the material universe are here, and only a few things about them
have been discovered. The natural environment is rich beyond all
calculation or dream; it is exhaustless. Here in the field of man's
life is the alluring object of science. Here in the natural situation
are the everlasting and benign energies that wait to be discovered and
prest into human service. There is a human environment, and all the
fundamental truth about man has been present in it from the start.
Moses gave his nomadic brethren the ten words; but they were written
in the human heart ages before they were inscribed upon stone. The
great Hebrew prophets gave to the world the vision of one God, His
righteous government of the world, and His election of a single race
for the service of all the races; but God and His government and His
method in the education of man were real and mighty before Amos, and
Hosea, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah beheld them. Christ revealed the
Father through His own divine Sonhood; but the Fatherhood of God is an
eternal truth. Nowhere is the divineness of Christ more obvious than
in the ease and adequacy with which He, and He alone, is able to read
the meaning of the human situation. Christ as Prophet, as Seer and
Di