Refreshing Candor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 20, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 41.

Refreshing Candor

When Thomas A. Edison was asked the cause of a recent wide-spread magnetic disturbance, he frankly confessed that he was ignorant. “If I only knew,” he repeated again and again. Professor Larkin of Mt. Lowe Observatory, in a recent note in a daily paper, remarked: “I have no conception of the real meaning of the title of this note, ‘Cosmic Expression.’ Really there is more pleasure in writing up subjects of which one is totally ignorant, than upon familiar things imagined to be known. I do not know what cosmic manifestation is. I asked a man two years ago what ‘cosmic manifestation’ is, and he told me that man is the highest manifestation yet made. This has kept me satisfied until now.” And so normal man ought to be the highest manifestation, in this world, of the work of God. Sad to say, he is often the lowest. But the candor is refreshing, and recalls the words of the apostle Paul: “If any man thinketh that he knoweth anything, he knoweth not yet as he ought to know.”