Clear Crystals
OTHER TORCHBEARER CHAPBOOKS by CLARA M. BEEDE 45: Brown Plumes 51: More Brown Plumes 63: Sunshine and Rain 73: Clear Crystals (Second Printing) 88: Only Pebbles 94: Golden Leaves 98: Sail High Above MOTHER'S PRAYER For this new day, our Father, we give thee thanks.
the fact (if it be a fact) that nobody sees angels in the twentieth
century is due to some other cause than the non-existence of the angels.
After all, in any century you see what you are prepared to see, what in
other words, you are looking for. It is a common enough phenomenon that
the man who lives in the country misses most of the beauty of it. In his
search for the potato bug he misses the sunset, and disposes of the
primrose on the river's brim as a common weed. It is true that in order
to see we need something beside eyes, and to hear we need something
beside ears. When on an occasion the Father spoke from heaven to the Son
many heard the sound, and some said, "It thundered"; others got so far
as to say, "An Angel spake to him."
Let us then in the presence of narratives of supernatural happenings ask
our _how_ with a good deal of reverence and a good deal of modesty, not
as implying a sceptical doubt on our part, but as a wish that we may be
admitted deeper into the meaning of the event. Scepticism simply closes
the door through which we might pass to fuller knowledge. The
questioning of faith holds the door open. To those who have not closed
the door upon the supernatural it is evident that it is permeated with
forces and influences which are not material in their origin or their
effects; that God acts upon the world now as He has ever acted upon it.
If we cannot believe this I do not see that we can believe in God at all
in any intelligible sense. There is to me one attitude toward the
supernatural that is even more hopeless than the attitude of
materialistic scepticism which says, "Miracles do not happen"; and that
is the attitude which says, "Miracles happened in Bible times, but have
OTHER TORCHBEARER CHAPBOOKS by CLARA M. BEEDE 45: Brown Plumes 51: More Brown Plumes 63: Sunshine and Rain 73: Clear Crystals (Second Printing) 88: Only Pebbles 94: Golden Leaves 98: Sail High Above MOTHER'S PRAYER For this new day, our Father, we give thee thanks.