CHAPTER IV. SOUL GROWTH: ITS SCOPE, ITS LAWS, AND ITS DIVINE MEASUREMENTS. In general, we know that growth means life. Dead things never grow, neither stones nor Living things grow seeds, birds, pearls. The capacity for growth also ranks the living thing in the scale of plant or animal life. We rank vegetables low, because in six weeks the lettuce seed has come to its full enlargement. But not so the giant trees of California. Full two hundred years separate the seed of the redwood from the vast tree, into which woodsmen have hollowed the tunnel, through which the stage-coach drives. The capacity for growth also ranks the animals. Soon we shall find the young robin in its nest. When four months have passed over that nest the bird has come to the full power of flight and song. But if the lark be born close to its maturity, twenty summers and winters stand between the infant and its full stature. It is the extension of the period of growth, therefore, that separates man from all the rest of the animal creation. Just because the period of infancy and youth was prolonged for full twenty years, it became necessary for the father and mother to unite for the protection of the child, so that out of that capacity for growth grew monogamy, the foundation of the home, the school, and all civil institutions. But it is not the body that has marked capacity for growth so much as it is the intellect, the heart, and the conscience. The child grows most rapidly at about twelve years of age, shooting up several inches in a single summer, while the mind can grow by leaps and bounds at seventy. This is the test of a strong man, that when you meet him after an absence of two months you marvel at the transformation of his views. Now and then a child's body is overtaken by a strange disease, when the growth of the bone is arrested, and the world is full of men and women whose intellectual and spiritual growth was arrested at a certain stage. This appears in the persons who have lost the power to like a new author, who can no longer accept a new philosophy. However, all this is contra-natural. We know that Walter Scott had reached the summit of his physical maturity and had gone five years down the western slope before he wrote his first novel, yet after that he mastered the laws of fiction, and became the world's supreme artist in historical narrative. Ignorant men sometimes suppose that the capacity for growth in memory is soon reached. When used and developed, however, memory grows more plastic with the growing years. The Roman scholar mastered the Greek alphabet, and learned to write and speak in Greek, after he had passed seventy; and Sir William Jones tells us when he was at the beginning of his old age, that if the ordinary man would only keep up his study of languages, he could learn a new language as a pastime in the evenings of a single winter, after he was threescore years of age. But the capacity for growth appears chiefly in things that are spiritual. It is in the higher gifts and graces that there is such capacity for enlargement. Witness Saulambitious, selfish, cruel, at thirty, and then reversing his life and becoming the embodiment of self-sacrifice, and toleration, and charity. Witness Africanus, the South African chief, in middle age a cannibal, bloodthirsty, cruel to the last degree, but who fifteen years later stood forth in the presence of Queen Victoria, a scholar, eloquent, the founder of a new state, a Christian thinker whose place in history is as sure as that of Toussaint L'Ouverture. The fact is, the soul, made in the image of God, is crowded with latent forces, stored with germinal faculties, every crack and crevice big with possibilities. This is the great argument for immortality, the capacity for infinite growth in man. Dying, the soul is like a ship that disappears beyond the horizon, but in disappearing is like the Mayflower, with its cabin filled with roots and vines and bags of grain, living growths that were destined to cover a continent with vineyards, orchards, and harvests, from Maine to Oregon. Having confessed the soul's unique capacity for growth, what is this enlargement of the soul? It has been said that "the manufacture of souls of a good quality is the first business of a great republic." Now, souls of a good quality are not manufactured, but grown. If we should distinguish between souls of bad quality and souls of good quality, we would say that these latter are wise, just, happy, self-sufficing, and Christian. The man is wise toward all truth in books, in nature, and in life. The man is just-his feet run along those highways of law that God has set up for the soul's progress. He is happythat is, he is in harmony with his own record, his conscience, and his God. He is selfsufficing—that is, he is equal to all the emergencies of life, and with a surplus of strength he thrusts his broad shoulders under another's burden, and carries that in addition to his own. But all these signal qualities are growths; they are not suddenly thrust upon men. Indeed, Christ's every parable regarding the Christian life is one that interprets it as a growth. The kingdom of character is a seed. But the wild grass grows into the rich barley. The wild thorn becomes the red rose, that is doubled. The wild orange, bitter and acid, becomes the orange that is seedless and full of sugar. And the kingdom of heaven is planted in the soul as a seed, and slowly grows and expands to its full size and fruitage. Another figure that was used to interpret the growth of character is architectural. Character is a noble building; it is based on the body, indeed, as a marble palace has foundations that rest in the mud and go down to the |