New Church Life November/December 2017 | Page 12

new church life: november/december 2017 the increase of the earth (This Thanksgiving editorial by the late Rev. W. Cairns Henderson is from the November 1955 New Church Life. It is also part of the published collection, Selected Editorials.) The sons of Israel lived under a peculiar operation of spiritual law into the natural world. When they turned away from the Lord, pestilence and drought ravaged the land, famine wasted them, and they were enslaved by their enemies. But when they were faithful to the Lord’s precepts – when they praised Him by observing the sacrifices, keeping the feasts, and obeying the statutes and the judgments – the earth yielded her increase in the form of bounteous harvests. No foe invaded their land, and every man sat at peace under his vine and his fig tree. And because the Israelites regarded earthly peace and material plenty as Divine blessings, they felt that their God had indeed blessed them. Men no longer live under such an operation of spiritual law. The yearly harvest of the earth is not now manifestly determined by the extent to which men have praised the Lord. Yet the material increase of the earth is not the true blessing which the Lord seeks to bestow. We live in the most wonderful age of applied science this world has ever known. Never before have men been able to compel nature to yield her secrets and her resources as they have today. The average man can enjoy more goods and services than were ever available in the past. And yet men are no happier, no more contented, no kinder to one another, no less selfish, no more free from fear and mistrust. The earth has been made to yield her increase, but no blessing has followed. To the New Church man the answer is obvious. It is that men have not first praised the Lord. Truly to praise the Lord is to go to His Word from love to Him. It is to seek out there the Lord’s purposes in all His creations in nature, to perceive the uses the Lord made them to perform, and then use them as the Lord intended – to promote the true happiness and eternal welfare of others. This is what it is to praise the Lord spiritually, to show forth His praises by showing the works of His hands as His works, performing the tasks He made them to do. And when men learn to praise the Lord in this way the earth will indeed yield its increase. The secrets and resources of nature will be used, not merely to build up a material civilization, but to promote civil, moral and spiritual wisdom; and to the extent that this is done the Lord will pour out His blessings of mutual love and charity, of intelligence and spiritual peace. We mention these things as Thanksgiving draws near because, deep in the thought of Thanksgiving, are two ideas. The first is that all the Lord’s gifts, like His productions in nature, are proffered in such form that men must work as if of themselves to enjoy their fruits; the second is the true gratitude goes far beyond formal expressions of thanks, showing itself in support of the use for 478