the heart also, of its builder; and the whole atmosphere of a festive occasion is full of the spirit of him who prepares it; and a picture shows the very soul of the artist, in its lights and shades, so is it easy to see and to feel, wherever we look, that he who framed this world enjoyed his own work, and that the presence, with which he surrounds man in his sin and shame is a loving presence, joying in his joy. A warm hand is everywhere extended to man; a bright eye beams everywhere upon him; the world is garlanded and festooned with beauty; nature is in a universal frolic of gladness, around and over him. 1st. What a royal redundancy of life abounds everywhere! The real inhabitants of the world, for number beyond all number, are too small, even when aggregated in masses, for the human eye to discover. What elegance often in their microscopic forms, or what exquisite beauty of attire; all for the joy of art to the divine mind in their construction, although no other eye should behold the tracery of skill and kindness on their tiny forms and wings. 2d. What an unstinted supply of resources exists everywhere for all the wants of every creature. Every creature has its well-adapted food placed, in all needful abundance, where it can be readily obtained, with its feeble powers of appropriation and locomotion. "The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of every living thing." For man, especially, how abundant the provision. The two hundred generations that have come and gone, in such swift succession hitherto, have but touched the outer surface of the abundant store of good, still in reserve for the full and ever-expanding use of as many generations more, if God shall indulge the human race with so protracted a term of existence. If by the sweat of our brow we must each get our bread; that involves no more effort than is necessary to draw after it the mingled joy of action, aim, and attainment, as the brow is the first and easiest place of all to perspire. Who is not glad, when he sees what perverted uses men generally make of the means that they gather, that the accumu lation of gain has been made no easier. Surely he who fitted up the world with such infinite liberality for the inhabi tation of his earthly children, took great pleasure in all the acts of his own bounteousness in their behalf, and felt also a deep interest in their prosperity and pleasure. 3d. How ever-present, and ever-pressing upon every open sense of our being, has he made the demonstration of his love of beauty. Beauty of form and color, beauty in detail, and beauty in grouping, beauty of individual presentation, and beauty of natural association and of touching suggestion: beauty in various degrees, outer and inner, for all, from those most rude to those whose inner sense is full of the soft, sweet light of eternity, he has scattered with an unsparing wealth of good will, and with evidently equal inward satisfaction, over all the earth. True and tender, indeed, is the language of flowers; not that sickly, sentimental language which poetasters or foolish lovers are fond of ascribing to them; but language redolent of God. As we adorn our grounds and persons, our houses and festive halls, with them, and lay them, alike, in wreaths of unforgetful affection on the altar to which we lead our loved ones in marriage, and the bier, where we gaze for the last time on the forms of the dear departed, so God places flowers by the wayside of life, to cheer us as we toil in the dust and heat of daily duty ever upwards towards himself. He bids us to "consider" them, as well as to get the passing good that we can from them; and this is the argument that we are to draw to ourselves, as we consider, that, if God so carefully etches and embroiders the leaf of a passing flower, and guards its tender life so securely through all successions of time and of outward circumstance and change, he will, much more, think of us and bless us with his bounty and himself, if our hearts only open their golden leaves to his heart shining upon them, as the flower lifts up its face towards his on high. - 4th. Even thorns and briars, reptiles and vermin, have their moral uses, and bear a benediction in-them. In a depraved world, repellent influences from evil are as potent, and precious sometimes, as those which are attractive to good. Hope draws and fear drives; and they can be readily combined in unity of action and of issue. The same God that rewards diligence, scourges also laziness; and those who will not be of their own accord cleanly, must be driven, when other means fail, even by vermin, to decent self-treatment. Many baneful, hideous, and disgusting objects in nature, that have no other palpable profit to our eyes, answer a high moral end, in their natural use for purposes of moral symbolism. Our feelings run much more in the channels of real or fancied analogies than we at first imagine; and as God communicated to the Jewish mind, and through it, in the end, to all mankind, by a long course of many and minute ceremonial observances the moral ideas which they imaged, and therefore "abolished" them when Christ came, as the result intended by their use had been gained, — so there is a grand moral use in many of the unsightly and fearful forms of nature, animate and inanimate, that help, by easy suggestion, both the imagination and the reason to a more quick and positive sense of the intrinsic odiousness of moral evil; and in positive aversion from sin is one of the strongest possible safeguards to virtue. But for serpents and dragons, how different would be the quality of our conceptions of "the serpent," the devil, whose "head the heel of the seed of the woman was to crush." But for devouring lions, how little would we appreciate the fury of his heart against mankind, who "goeth about, as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." With no knowledge of a wolf, how feebly should we think of a hypocrite who had not harmed us, whom now we remember "as a wolf in sheep's clothing." The greatest Bible truths lie couched in figures, intended quite as much to sway the feelings of all men in right directions as to enlighten their conceptions of their significance. But the noisome animals of the world, as we deem them, are, în actual fact, among its most special and needful benefactors. God has not only made nature full of mutual checks to over growth and over action, and so, by counterbalancing one thing with another, established a grand universal harmony of mutual antagonisms; but, by a general as well as most minutely ramified system of scavenger-action ever busily employed by myriads of animals of all sorts, and of animalculae, keeps the world, with all its multitudinous forms of ever newly beginning decay, clean, bright, and beautiful, like a carefully swept palace. Although, therefore, countless hosts of creatures of every varied size, as well as vegetable products of all kinds, are everywhere dissolving back again into their elemental dust, nature seldom, even in her forest wilds, reeks with offensive odors. He who has been sickened by the pestilential vapors of a single narrow battlefield, notwithstanding the quick burial of the dead, can easily guess what a scene of general desolation and corruption the universal decay of nature would everywhere present, and what a vast charnel-house earth, now so "gay with life and eloquent with bliss," would become to the wearied heart of every one of its inhabitants. Flies, gnats, musquitoes, wasps, ants, beetles, worms, snakes and scorpions, are all busy, happy, indispensable laborers for man. By the drainage wrought through hills and dales by bountiful showers from above, together with the purifying power of frost and lightning, and the ever busy industry of God's great host of appointed workers, large and small, for cleansing, by day and by night, the air, the earth, and the sea, in connection with the grand daily awakening of the world's agencies to action by the sun, as the mighty magnetic source of all its light and life, the physical world is kept, at all times, in a state as near like that of Eden as with man's depravity is possible for his good. The earth contains nothing which has not been placed in it by direct design for some specific end, tributary to the highest ultimate good of all: as we purposely put each article of furni ture into our houses, or each item of wearing apparel upon our persons. In the smallest or meanest specimens of vegetable or animal life there are more skill and adaptation of various parts and offices one to the other than in the most elaborate contrivances of human ingenuity. Everywhere is there perfection of workmanship, and everywhere beauty of inward structure as of outward aspect. 5th. Diseases too, of which many think only as unmitigated calamities, or even curses, are needful lessons to us of the evils of breaking or ignoring necessary laws. We are made, though finite, with faculties capable of boundless expansion. In order that we should achieve any purposed personal culture, we must not only think and intend and labor and pray, but we must also conform in our work to the nature of things and their legitimate tendencies, influences, and issues; we must follow rules, and be wise in the selection of our means and processes. And how does God educate us to this true sense of our real inward interests by the palpable and speedy visitation of physical evils upon us, from the transgression, whether heedlessly or designedly, by us of physical laws. His mode of training us, each and all, to right mental and moral action is as decisive and inexorable, as it is manifold. Our eyes could have been made to gaze, like the eagle's, unshrinking at the sun; our stomachs might have received swinish strength to digest food at all hours and of all kinds; our sensual appetites might have been fleshed with greater endurance, as well as desire, by indulgence; we might have been made capable of standing unharmed, like the beasts of the field, in midnight dews and winter rains; but how then should we ever have learned to be cautious and thoughtful? how, ever have learned to live for ends out of sight? to adopt wise principles of action? to wait patiently for desired results, trustful in truth and time and God? How should we have ever come to feel that it is noble to sacrifice present to future good, and to struggle continually upwards, out of the physical into the spiritual," using this world as not abusing it"? |