ALL down the ages of time, many have raised the question, Is there really a God? It is perhaps the oldest question that has ever been asked.
We suggest our young reader takes any common flower—for example, a sprig of London Pride—and looks at it closely. Observe the design of the tiny flower, its color scheme worked out so beautifully, and the detail, as far as the eye can see, is perfect in every way. Now borrow a magnifying glass and look at the same flower through this. The effect is amazing! It now looks like a huge blossom made of wax! And still it appears perfect even to the smallest details. You exclaim, "Why, I always looked on London Pride as little more than a weed! You have opened my eyes to a new world! “Who is the designer? And how was it made? Obviously no hand of man has had any part in this. "But," you say, "it grows, doesn't it?” Yes, indeed, but who makes it grow? From an apparently ugly root away beneath the earth, it comes up regularly year after year as the springtime sun warms the surface of the ground in which it is planted. But then, this is only one kind of flower and there are hundreds and hundreds of others far more beautiful.
I buy a penny packet of seeds and plant them in early March or April. Within six weeks or so, I see coming up green shoots. As time goes on, these expand, grow taller, and then develop small buds which eventually burst into flowers. Who made them grow? Did I, or did anyone else? Who caused that tiny brown seed when sown to produce a flower and leaves hundreds of times its own size?
Do you think it is reasonable to say that this happened by itself without any hidden power behind it? Nothing happens of itself without a cause, nor do such exquisitely beautiful results come without any guiding hand from so small and insignificant a beginning.
Now if you take a thin portion of the stem of this same flower, and look at it under a powerful microscope, you will see that it is composed of thousands of tiny cells. Each one of these is perfect in itself and yet all forming part of the whole stem. This is very different from the things which men make.
Let us take, for example, the edge of a razor blade and look at this under the microscope. Why! Instead of a beautifully finished shining piece of steel, you see a jagged outline like an irregular saw. Such imperfections cannot be seen by the naked eye, but when magnified, they appear in all their roughness. This is something you will never find in God's works.
But now, I am going to take you from the very small to the very large. We will suppose that it is a clear starry night and we will go out into the garden and look up into the heavens. How many stars are there? Can you count them? "Oh!” you say,” there are millions and millions! some larger than others, some brighter than others; some twinkling, whilst others are shining with a clear, steady light."
Now, I will suppose that we have a telescope and you can look through this. What a sight there is now! Stars you could not see before, you can now see clearly, and the "milky way" is just a huge sea of stars. What are these stars? They are worlds Each one is a world, in many cases much larger than the one in which we live.
Now look again, and as you look, think! Millions and millions of worlds, millions of miles away, and I just one out of two thousand million people in one of those worlds Oh! how small I seem I I am nothing Indeed, a whole world is nothing, for where is the person who would miss one of those stars out of the billions that there are? The stars were there long before I was born, and they will be there, too, after I die. Who made them? Who holds them in their places? O foolish man who proclaims that such worlds made themselves and still more foolish that they hold themselves in their perfect order in space without the power of an unseen hand I Did not David speak the truth when he wrote, The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork I Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, yet their voice is heard.
To any mind, but that of a fool, God's works in creation speak so loudly, so plainly, that it leaves us in no doubt, that " GOD created the heavens and the earth."
H. P. W.