A SCIENTIST WITH A SONG

Many years ago, I taught at a small Christian college in Florida. The school was small and the faculty was young and inexperienced. It was a great inspiration, therefore, when the distinguished Christian scientist, Dr. A. W. Dicus joined our number to serve as academic dean and give intellectual leadership to our faculty.

Dr. Dicus had already had an impressive career as the head of the department of physics at Tennessee Tech University. He was a distinguished scientist and renowned physics teacher. During the dark days of World War II, when the developmental work was being done on the atomic bomb, Dr. Dicus is said to have sent more physicists into the Oak Ridge Laboratories than any other physics teacher in America.

However, Dr. Dicus did not find complete satisfaction in his work in the state university and decided to devote part of his life to Christian education. Though he had not yet reached the normal retirement age, he took an early retirement from Tennessee Tech and came to Florida on a modest salary to serve as academic dean at the small, struggling Christian college.

Through the years that I worked under Dr. Dicus, he was a great source of strength and inspiration. As a young teacher, I could go to him for counsel and encouragement. But I remember brother Dicus as more than a distinguished physicist turned college dean. I remember him as a disciple of Christ, a man of deep faith, and a man that expressed that faith in song. For it was brother Dicus who wrote both the words and music for the song that is so popular in churches:

There is beyond the azure blue, a God concealed from human sight,

He tinted skies with heavenly hue, and framed the worlds with His great might.

There was a long, long time ago, a God whose voice the prophets heard,

He is the God that we should know, who speaks from His inspired word.

Our God whose Son upon a tree, a life was willing there to give,

That He from sin might set man free, and evermore with Him could live.

Whenever I hear a congregation singing these words today, and especially a group of young people, I think of brother Dicus and a lump comes in my throat. It is a source of spiritual strength to me to know that these great words of faith were written by a distinguished scientist. It is also a gentle reminder of the great debt of gratitude that every generation owes to those who have gone before. Brother Dicus died at about ninety years of age. But even though he is gone, he still lives on when we sing, “There is a God.”

**This was originally printed in the Parkview Proclaimer from Odessa, Texas. The author is unknown.