Signs of the Times

with contributions from Charles R. Brown

[The Congregationalist and Advance ]

The world of growing things is a witness just now to the power of quiet and hidden forces. Yesterday—or it seems but yesterday—the fields were gray and sodden, the trees gaunt and bare; to-day the grasses are quickened into green, and a misty wonder of verdure clothes every tree with gracious beauty which will soon have deepened into the full foliage of early summer. The meadows are gemmed with gold, and shy and sleeping things have awakened to their all too brief season of blossoming. Winter wheat is tall enough to bend to passing winds and the corn has begun to draw faint emerald lines across new-planted fields. All this has been done in silence and by forces which, though we may work with them and be thereby tremendously reinfored, nevertheless go about their business with a kind of elemental certainty, unhastened by our restlessness, unchecked by our hesitations.

This steadfastness of quiet things is a great comfort in a world like ours, so divided in its counsels, so doubtful of its purposes. If spring had been left to us, quite likely we should never have had any spring at all. The Senate would have debated it, the Supreme Court adjudicated it, and the Administration would have considered it in the light of the next election. The Labor Unions would probably have voted to strike over it and Capital, doubtful of its dividends, would have been unwilling to have made any investments in anything so unsubstantial as leaves and blossoms and grass. We should probably have called meetings and passed resolutions and appointed committees. The committees would not have met until July and meanwhile we should have lived through a springless world.

As we contemplate the failures of the reputed wise and great into whose hands the issues of history are just now entrusted, it is a great comfort to know that there are still forces which really get something done. Spring after all is a tremendous achievement. Sun and rain and life and mother earth have done their blessed part and remade our world, even as we watched it. Perhaps it is after all the quiet, hidden forces which we need to cultivate and to trust.

The great things of life do not depend upon machinery, least of all such a creaking machinery as ours. They depend upon labor and faith and friendship and quiet openness to the ways of God, the use of His forces and obedience to His laws.

So much more need, then, that we strengthen the quiet forces, making much of education and religion and the shaping of character and the realizing amongst us of the spirit of Jesus Christ. Our machinery has outrun our moral and spiritual force. We have sought to secure a League of Nations when we have as yet no really international mind. We are anxious for socialized organization, while we lack the socialized soul. We have wanted all the fruits of the Tree of Life whose very leaves are for the healing of the nations, when it has hardly so much as been planted in our human soil. We ought not to be discouraged, but we do need to go about our work with a larger patience and a clearer vision.

Only as we create the international mind can we hope for a true international organization. Only as we create the love of peace and the willingness to pay for it, can we hope for peace in our troubled world. Only as we are rich in the spirit of Jesus Christ, can we secure the fruits of Christianity in the manifold complexities of our lives. And we shall secure these deep and necessary things only through an utter hospitality to those quiet forces of the Divine, which are waiting to change our lives and our world as the God of growing things has remade our fields and our forests.

[Charles R. Brown, D. D., LL. D., in The Biblical World ] The hour is coming swiftly when it will be seen that all any man is worth is to be found in the good he has done and in the character he has won.

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