Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Breathing, according to the physiologists, is a genuine burning, and consumes organic substance in us, as fire does in our stoves. It takes the same oxygen from the air, combines it with the same elements, with the same evolution of heat, and gives off the same products in our breath as in smoke. Respiration is a real fire. Still, may we not find under this destructive process some beneficent spiritual law? We ought to, for it is also a most vital process. "Breath of life," the Bible calls it, in a phrase I take for text; and life seems more closely connected with breath than with anything else, beginning on earth with it, ever depending on it, ever advancing with its increase. So the lesson of respiration seems to be that destruction does not destroy, that consuming does not kill, that even burning brings life. This is the lesson I wish to illustrate. But respiration is not limited to animals. It begins in a much lower and rises into a much higher field. I. We notice it in the VEGETABLE world. For even plants, besides that taking of food for growth, take true breath to burn out their growth. We are wont to speak of Moses' burning bush as a miracle unique in nature. But botanists say that every bush on earth is burning. Through its every living cell that fiery oxygen works all summer. In autumn, too, the colours come from oxidation of the chlorophyll, so that Whittier put good science in his poem when he called "yon maple wood the burning bush." And in certain processes the breath and fire become active enough to show their heat. Such is the ease in sprouting seeds. Such is the ease in flowers. In the sight of chemistry, flowers are all fires; and one great genus is well named phlox — flame. There was fact enough in Hafiz's fancy that roses were the flames of a burning bush; and botany adds that every blooming plant is another, whether blazing in the cardinal flower or only smoking in the gray grass blossoms. And, just as in that bush of old story, this burning does not harm. Rather, it is so helpful that the plant dies without it as surely as a man without air, and quickly, too. And not only does it not consume the life, but with still greater miracle creates new. Out of that burning seed it brings a new plant. It brings new energies, too. In each cell the fire creates force, just as in the boiler of a boat; and, as a result, the celiac of some algae lash the water like oars, the diatom moves across the field of the microscope like a propeller across the lake, and the beautiful volvox goes rolling through the water like the wheel of a steamer. And out of that warmer fire in the flower how many new creations come! One is beauty. The leaves are refined to softer petals and grow radiant with gold and purple, and proclaim to us that spiritual law that the highest beauty is reached only through the burning out of our substance. The same process brings sweetness, too — oxidizes starch to sugar, and loads the flower with honey and perfume. It even brings something like love; and the corolla becomes a real marriage bower, and stamen and pistil join in the genuine wedding, and give themselves for each other and their offspring. And so the flower is consumed only to rise again from its ashes, and extend its life to distant lands and ages. II. But we see this law clearer in its revelation in the ANIMAL world. Here breath is more active, and grows evermore so through the rising animal scale. And this deeper breathing always means faster burning. Analysis shows, for instance, that the breath of an average healthy man consumes carbon at the rate of one hundred and seventy pounds a year — literally burns up within him every month the substance of over a bushel of charcoal. With this increasing fire comes increasing warmth. And here, too, the fire does not consume. It does, indeed, waste our substance, so that the animal, unlike the tree, soon gets his growth. Some poor-lunged creatures are said to lengthen as long as they live, like an elm; but better breathers burn up their accumulations, and men and birds keep but little body. Nor do they keep even that; but it is continually consumed — several times during our lives, the doctor says: muscles, nerves, lungs, heart, brain, bones, and all. But this consumption is always restored, and does not harm us in the least. Rather, it is just the thing that keeps us alive. If we were not thus perpetually destroyed we should get sick, and die; and the only way we can keep alive and well is by being annihilated every few years. And the curious thing to notice is that this destructive process is just the one which cannot be suspended at all. Other functions may be stopped for a season, even the nutritive ones. The really important thing is burning up. When the fire goes out, we die; but so long as it is consuming us we thrive. Such is the paradox and first principle of this mysterious thing called life. Burning saves and increases it. Increases all its energies, too. The faster this breath burns, the greater the activity. Such a breath of life is this fire in the animal world. III. But this breath rises to a third stage in HUMAN ARTS. For man breathes more largely than with lungs; and, learning how to burn that carbon anywhere, he adds to nature's slow fire within him a much faster one without. So he heats his hut and home; and, instead of having to migrate like an animal, he brings Florida to his own fireside, and makes the tropics anywhere to order. And, learning how to make this artificial breathing faster and fire fiercer, he gains new forces that far outdo those of animals. Instead of crawling through the country, like that quadruped, he makes this fire carry him and all his family and furniture further and faster. Instead of flying fifty miles for his breakfast, like a bird, he sits still like a lord and orders it, beefsteak from Texas, rolls from Dakota, an orange from Italy, and coffee from Asia. And, by this breath under a boiler, he gets them brought so easily that Mr. Atkinson says a good mechanic in Massachusetts can get his whole year's meat and flour fetched from beyond the Mississippi for one day's work; and Sir Lyon Playfair said this summer that a ton of freight can be carried on land a mile by two ounces of carbon, and on water two miles by a little cube of coal that would pass through a ring the size of a shilling. Nor does man stop with moving nature's products, but works better by this same principle. In his manufactures and his varied arts, he learns to consume not merely a little in the form of food, like an animal, but enormously in other forms — not only acorns, but oaks; not only fruits, but whole forests; not only a few acres, but long ages of them condensed in coal; and not only coal and other organic products, but ores and rocks and the original elements themselves. Human art becomes a boundless burning, destroying about everything on earth. Yet this burning, too, only helps. It turns the forests into force, and the whole carboniferous era into energy — turns ores and everything into something better. It consumes only to create. Indeed, strictly speaking, it does not consume at all. Not an atom of carbon or anything else has ever been destroyed. Burning only sets it free from old forms to enter into life again: and nature is always waiting to start it into life, and is all the summer turning our smoke and ashes back into new trees and corn. IV. But above these material fields we trace the same principle through a fourth phase, in SPIRITUAL LIFE. Thought is a breathing, ever inhaling fresh truth, which consumes old ideas in society, just as oxygen does old cells in the body. Indeed, those arts we have just noticed have all come from this mental breathing. How many established opinions had to be consumed to bring that ease of travel! Once, even science argued that no steamer could ever cross the Atlantic; and there was a time when everybody knew that steam could not carry anything on land, either. The first modern who suggested such a thing is said to have been shut up in the Bicetre for it as a lunatic. Afterward, the Englishman who first advocated passenger railways was called by the Quarterly Review, "beneath our contempt," while the wise old Edinburgh Review said, "Put him in a straitjacket." So many and so firmly established ideas have been consumed this century in this mere matter of travel. And this is only an illustration of the consumption of old theories that has been going on through the arts and sciences and philosophies and all fields. Yet here, too, it has consumed only to create, and been in still higher degree the "breath of life." It has aided all those arts and sciences. It has advanced society, too — just as breathing has advanced the animal kingdom — and has brought to mankind a progress about as great as from mollusks to mammals. It has burned out social wrongs only to bring rights. What an advance history shows, from savages eating each other to modern society feeding its hungry and founding hospitals and charities of a hundred kinds! What an advance in morality, even since the praised days of our pious ancestors last century, when Parton says the best Christian in New England saw nothing wrong in buying slaves for rum and selling them for West India molasses to make rum to buy more! What a moral progress from even the boasted Bible days — when David could slay a man to steal his wife, and still be revered as most sacred Psalmist; and Solomon, with a whole regiment of wives, could be sainted for wisdom and thought worthy to make the longest prayer in the Bible — today, when such saints would be thought hardly so fit for writing sacred poetry as for working in the penitentiary! For religion, too, has felt the effects of this spiritual breathing, and been advancing by it. Here, too, ancient ideas have been burning out to bring better; and Samuel's Jehovah, ordering innocent men to be slain like mice, gave way to Isaiah's God of justice and Jesus' of love. Here, too, the burning has been a very "breath of life"; and religion ought to have learned ere this to breathe fearlessly, and let its old forms be consumed as fast as they will. All that is really alive and worth living, in our beliefs and bodies alike, will not be harmed. Only the effete and hurtful will be burned out, and will bring new warmth and life in the process, and be replaced by better. Let religion, then, breathe away, and continue to enlarge its lungs and elevate its life. But breath brings its best lessons to private life. It rebukes our greed, and bids us burn out our gains generously. Gain is good, but must be followed by giving, as eating by breathing, if we would rise above vegetables. Indeed, our gains have to be given away, to get the good of them. Miserliness is very near to misery, as even etymology teaches. The wise preacher advocated foreign missionary contributions, since, he said, if they were of no help to the heathen, they greatly helped the Christian contributors at home; and giving does enrich the giver, whether it does anyone else or not. Beneficence is the bank that pays the best interest on deposits, and pays back in better coin than was put in; and our proverbs have well declared that the best way to keep what we get is by giving it away to some good cause. But this truth of external possessions is still truer of ourselves. They, too, must be given away in order to be kept, or even to be found at first. "The life of life is when for another we're living," says a poet; and another tells of one to whom love was the first waking, — "The past was a sleep, and her life began." Love, whether of a person or a cause, is indeed the highest form of the breath of life. It consumes as nothing else can, wastes with self-sacrifice and sorrows, yet only to lift to larger life, to bless with new powers and higher happiness. Selfishness is as fatal to the soul as holding the breath to the body; and burning ourselves out in sacrifice for something is the only way to keep the heart warm and the soul alive. (H. M. Simmons.) Parallel Verses KJV: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. |
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