I am making an arbitrary comparison.  I do not claim that the scriptures make it, but for the subject which I am here discussing, it does no violence to scripture.  Canaan was the place where "religious people" lived, if I may use a common phrase.  Egypt was in darkness.  In this article I am comparing Canaan to "religious" circles, and Egypt to those that are regarded as "non-religious."  The time came when there was no corn in Canaan, but the sons of Jacob found corn in Egypt. 

Today, if you want to learn how weak God is, how dependent He is on the programs of man, and how helpless He is to move unless man moves first, you will find plenty of information in denominational papers.  On the other hand, we can find "corn," (that which is satisfying to the spirit), in some of the secular magazines and papers. 

Recently the Savannah Morning News printed an editorial showing that the Greek word, "agape," should have been translated "love," instead of "charity," in I Cor. 13.  The article shows how cold charity is, as compared with love.  I have yet to see one denominational paper that has called attention to this mistranslation. 

In a recent issue of Everybody's Digest is an article by Rev. Alson J. Smith, which, I dare say, no denominational paper would have printed.  Yet it is just what is needed for this day.  The title is, "Faith to Overcome Pessimism."  He says, "The faith to overcome the deep pessimism of our day is faith in God—in His existence, in His creativity, in His purposefulness, in His intelligence.  And it is the humbled scientist today who most effectively proclaims to distraught mankind that there IS a God, that there IS a divine purpose and plan, that this IS His world and subject to His will, that His will WILL be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Yes, as these scientists even talk about immortality!"  He wrote this after first telling us that formerly scientists tried to convince us that there is no God.  

He refers to the book, MAN DOES NOT STAND ALONE, by A. C. Morrison, former president of the New York Academy of Science, and says: "Dr. Morrison holds that by unwavering mathematical law we can prove that our universe was designed and executed by divine Intelligence.  The exacting conditions necessary for life on earth could not possibly exist in proper relationship by chance."  

In regard to the book, HUMAN DESTINY, by Dr. Lacomte du Nouy, French physicist, he says, "Dr. du Nouy denies that the universe and everything in it is a colossal, unthinking machine.  Like Dr. Morrison, he is willing to gamble on God, when the odds are ten billion to one.  He concludes that the time needed to form, BY CHANCE, an imaginary protein molecule, the fundamental stuff of life, is a number of years designed by the digit, one, followed by 243 zeros."  He then says, "It was as intentional a creation as a skyscraper."  

Commenting on "WHAT IS LIFE?" by Schroedinger, he says, "This is not the Old Testament primitive talking about rewards and punishment, nor is it the New Testament mystic yearning for Jerusalem....It is the man of science talking about the indestructibility of that unique combination of mind, matter and spirit which is man.  What he is saying is: nothing is lost."  He declares further, that the satisfying answer to pessimism is God, Purpose, Intelligence.  "Truly God made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him," he says.  

He quotes William Cullen Bryant's poem on the flight of the waterfowl:  

"He Who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless skies thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright."

and concludes, "As with the water fowl, so with us.  So take heart!  This IS our Father's world."

In "The Journal of Lining," I find these words, by James Gordon Bilkey: "God's love, God's purpose surround each human life....God leads man to the place He wants him to fill, the work He wants him to do, and to the people He wants him to help....The divine power is forever at work, sometimes accelerating and sometimes resisting the developments already initiated in human lives.  Like the tide, the divine purpose sometimes moves with us and sometimes against us, but, silent and unobserved, it is always flowing below the surface of life....When we find our plans blocked and our hopes frustrated, we can ask if, perhaps, God is in the experience.  What if He is holding us away from one career in order to bring us later to a better one?  What if He is using us in a small place, to set loose in our hearts other forces for good that will never die?  The silent and unseen tides of God—how the sting goes out of failure when we begin to think of them!!  

"Here in the clammy dark,

We dig as dwarfs for coal,

Yet one Mind fashioned it

And us, a luminous whole;

Thou, Oh, my soul!"

One of the finest treatises on how to act when insulted, that I have ever seen outside the scripture, is found in a recent issue of "Your Life," another secular publication.  I quote it here:

"It happened last week.  A friend of mine gave me a raw deal.  She let me down, hard.....for one whole shocked day I thought about it.  I thought of the things she had said.  I thought of the look in her eyes, as they slid from mine.  'I don't think I ever want to see her again,' I told myself.  At the end of the day in my prayer, I cried, 'Please, God, let this friendship stay broken.  I don't want it mended—ever.'  

But the good God has ways of His own.  And my prayer changed to, 'Help me to forget this hurt.'  And forgetting came.  It came through remembering.  And through remembering came peace.  

Back through the years I went in memory.  I remembered my friend as she had been when I had first known her.  I remembered the good, simple, kindly things she had done.  I remembered the summer day when she had come to my door, hot and tired, lugging a half dozen cans of pineapple juice—'Because I knew you couldn't get out to get it, and it would have been gone.'  And the time when I had been so ill, and she had said, shyly, 'I prayed for you.'  I kept remembering and remembering, all the lovely little highlights of our years of friendship.  And lastly I thought back to something my grandmother had once said, 'Mind, dear, we are all human. We all fail some time or other.  Love God, and do not bank too greatly in anyone.'  

And so, remembering, I closed the door of my heart on the bitterness of the day, and turned on my pillow and slept."  

Is not that a real gem?  Or, to follow up the figure employed in this article, is not this real corn?  does it not satisfy our spirit?  I believe that each reader will want to emulate the writer of that article, when he or she has been hurt my a friend, or any person.  We had to go to Egypt for it, but it satisfies. 

Here is a satisfying expression, found in a secular magazine. Dale Carnegie quotes Dequincy, who says that the grandest of all human sentiments is that a man should for get his anger before he lies down to sleep, and adds, "But isn't it an even grander sentiment to refuse to get angry in the first place?  Life is flashing by with a rapidity that will take our breath away!  Literally!  So for God's sake, and for our own sakes, let us not waste an hour of our lives harboring grudges.  Harboring grudges is just about like harboring snakes....Such a man hasn't anything in the world to offer what you and I want.  He is to be pitied."  

Now back to the writer first quoted: "Have you not been impressed with the restlessness of humanity?  Have you not noticed that they are tossed like the waves?  Had you ever thought that the reason is, that our hearts will never rest until they rest in God, Who made us for Himself?"  No finer sentiment have I ever read.  This is what that writer says—"God made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him."  This is in accord with the scripture. 

And is it not true that "nothing is lost," eventually?  This is what the scripture says.