320 
KIRTLEY F. MATHER 
crisis without long antecedent training which paved the way to 
their success. In the stream of life, the cataracts and rapids 
are but spectacular manifestations of the fundamental forces 
which gain their ends effectively in the slowly moving reaches 
where the quiet waters irresistibly flow. 
There is a wide-spread opinion ‘That the idea of the con- 
tinuous development of the life of man* on the earth was some- 
thing foreign to the mind of Jesus; the idea of catastrophe, it is 
contended, was ever present to him. On the wreck of the world 
his Messianic kingdom was to be established.^’ It is the view 
held, consciously or unconsciously, by the' great majority of 
churchmen throughout all Christendom. Opposed to it is the con- 
cept, rapidly gaining adherents in the present generation, that the 
Man of Galilee put no trust in destructive revolutions, but had 
a firm and sure faith in the evolutionary forces quietly operating 
within the lives of men. The issue is sharply defined. Did 
the Great Teacher instruct his hearers in the dogma of revolu- 
tion or in the doctrine of evolution, in the necessity of world- 
destroying upheavals or in the efficacy of quietly progressive 
growth, in the purification of the world by fire and sword or in the 
attainment of man’s high destiny along the less spectacular 
roadway of spiritual and mental development? 
Consider for a moment the remarkable assemblage of the 
“Parables of the Kingdom” in the thirteenth chapter of 
Matthew’s gospel. Here are intermingled the evolutionary 
parables of The Sower, The Mustard Seed, The Leaven, each 
with its unmistakable emphasis on growth, development, prog- 
ress from within, and the revolutionary parables of The Tares 
and The Net with their references to the harvest time of reward 
and destruction, to the end of the world in catastrophe and up- 
heaval. The Founder of Christianity was a master in the art of 
finding and clinging to the happy medium of carefully balanced 
judgment. Never was he guilty, as have been so many of his 
followers, of pushing a great truth to a ridiculous extreme. And 
upon this greatest of Christian themes he has carefully chosen 
