"THE OPEN DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY."

  World building is not so interesting as man building. Some
men hold that tasks are interesting in proportion as they are
difficult to perform; if this be good logic, then swinging worlds
into space must take secondary consideration to building a
man in time. We have no intimation that God had any trouble
stringing planets along the path of his power; yet the centuries
unite in the verdict that God has had much trouble in produc-
ing the divine style of manhood.  Therefore it is safe to conclude
that God never undertook a vaster plan than to build a man.
Worlds play out His purposes in the harmony of gravitation.
They spell out His plans in the law of obedience; but man
ofttimes thwarts those purposes and destroys those plans by
setting his own will over against the will of God. Thus he
wanders, a kind of lost human pleiad through the space called
time, always and ever coming to himself, but never wholly ar-
riving.  Yet man is God's world--greater than any star world
twinkling in space, because he feels, he loves, he thinks, he
wills.
  "What a piece of work is man! in form how like an angel; in
comprehension how like a God!" When God wanted to make
the highest of his creation, he did not make a flower, though
beautiful, nor a mountain, though sublime; he did not hang a
sunset on the evening sky nor gild the dawn with morning glory.
At the top of creation God made a man and crowned him with
the empire of the world. God sets no light to man's progress.
He calls us up to the sublime heights where he, himself doth
dwell.
    This is an age of thought.  Thought rules the world; the
thinking mind is the growing mind, the growing mind is the
active mind, the active mind moves the man, and the man
                       (582)




			

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 2

"The Open Door of Opportunity."

C.

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  02
Page Number:  582
Date:  10/1911