because there was such recognition of the presence of God in His Universe.

Take God from Nature and what would this universe be but conglomerations of matter, accidentally thrown together, exhibiting its highest forms of life as fighting, snarling, struggling creatures soon to pass into their original dust; blind worlds flying from the origin of an unknown past to the sure destruction of an unknown future.

With God there, how Nature is glorified! And He is there. Wherever is beauty or power or the working forward to a common end, there is God. "Conscience and law," says Dr. G. A. Gordon, "are not the whole of God; God is power, thought, beauty, the terrestrial and cosmic disposition that on the whole favours life in this world." Every infinitesimal and tremendous exhibition of power in nature, every delicate tinting of an autumn is the echo of God's footsteps and the tracing of His brush. Every upward pointing leaf spells God. He is in the blowing of the winds and the light of the setting suns. In the flower, in the tree, in the bird, in the beast of the field, and the fish of the sea there seems to be the persistent struggle upward toward completeness. All individuals, all groups of individuals, seem to be pursuing ends, and these ends seem to be bedded in the order and structure of their being. "There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will.”

Not only is God stamped on everything in nature, but how constantly His unseen purposes reveal

themselves on later pages as we read the book of Nature. The countless billions of little animals secreting the shells that shall be their homes and clinging together only to die eventually, find their dwelling-place, later their tombs, rising above the bosom of the ocean as the very foundation of the coral islands; when birds in their unthinking flight and the winds in their thoughtless sweep have deposited rubbish and seeds, these become the fit dwelling-place for man. We have heard much in recent years of the necessity of guarding the coal deposits of Alaska. In prehistoric ages, the frigid north basked in the sunshine of torrid heat and trees grew in tropic luxury where now only is found the icy dwelling of glaciers. What but the omniscience of a good God could have preserved all the stored up heat of the sun in the vegetable matter of those fat ages for the blessing of man in the far distant time of the future, when the face of the sun should not be so genial? Gold and silver and lead and iron, in the fiery days of earth's formation, little knew of their service in the generation of man in the distant ages of the future. But the great God girded them, though they knew Him not. Herodotus said: "Egypt is the gift of the Nile to man." Livingstone and Stanley found that the melting of the snows on the glorious mountains hidden in the depths of Africa, were girded of God for the purpose of transforming Egypt into a garden spot. Did you ever take that picturesque trip by boat down the San Joaquin River from Stockton

to San Francisco? Do you remember the multitude of Tuli Islands that produce such marvellous crops of celery and potatoes? That fertility comes from the gathering of the flotsam and the jetsam in the reeds of the tuli plants. Who would have thought that worthless trash could serve such mighty purpose?

Once the lightning and thunder-bolts were but the playthings of cruel gods, according to man's imagination. But in the twinkling light of the great cities, in the whirr of machinery, and in the rapid transit of vast multitudes, is evidenced the long unsuspected purpose of the lightning, as it is to bring a thousand blessings to man under the guise of electricity. In that terrible wreck of the North Atlantic last year, how wonderfully the unsuspected purpose of God was evidenced in the mysterious using of the very currents of air for the transmission of messages over the far distance! Thus do countless forces and phases of the material universe testify how the things of earth are thrilling with the unthought-of things of heaven.

2. Not less are the unsuspected purposes of God interwoven with the records of human history.

All industrial life, all social organizations, all political systems, ethical movements, all intellectual achievements are pulsing witnesses to the struggle of mankind to the one far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves. Time and again trivial events, lone men turn the destiny of nations, the movements of society. The deeply pondering

men have seen in these events the guiding hand of God. That was the daring conception of the old Hebrew prophet in the time of Israel's exile. Seeing the all-powerful Cyrus establish a new kingdom, he saw in him the unwitting instrument of God in restoring his people to their native land. So a little later might the same prophet tongue have greeted the conquering Alexander as the chosen of God, decreeing that not oriental despotism and sluggishness, but western individualism and alertness, should settle the destiny of Europe.

Again and again the same principle illustrates itself in the unrolling of the centuries. At critical moments in unsuspected manner is God seen girding the affairs of men. We cannot wonder that Charles Kingsley said, when contemplating the remarkable movement of the wild tribes of Europe against Rome," And now, gentlemen, was this vast campaign fought without a general? If Trafalgar could not be won without the mind of a Nelson, or Waterloo without the mind of a Wellington, was there no one to lead these invisible armies on whose success depended the future of the whole human race? Did no one marshal them in that impregnable convex form from the Euxine to the North Sea? No one guide them to the great strategic centres of the Black Forest and Trieste? No one cause them-blind barbarians without maps or science-to follow those rules of war without which victory in protracted struggle is impossible; and by the pressure of the Huns behind, force on

their flagging myriads, which their simplicity once fancied beyond the power of mortal man? Believe it who will, I cannot.

"But while I believe that not a stone nor a handful of mud gravitates to its place without the will of God; that it was ordained ages since, into what particular spot each grain of gold should be washed down from an Australian quartz reef, that a certain man might find it at a certain moment and crisis of his life-if I be superstitious enough (as I thank God I am) to hold to that creed, shall I not believe that though this great war had no general upon earth, it may have had a general in heaven, and that in spite of all their sins, the hosts of our forefathers were the hosts of God."

The capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks seemed the death-knell of Europe, but rather was it its new birth; for the scholars fleeing thence, carried seeds of culture that soon made all Italy and France and Spain and England alive with the Renaissance and the Reformation. For his own gratification and love of power Henry VIII defied the Pope, but he was none the less an agent in freeing England from Romish dictation. The fathers came to Plymouth Rock for their own way of worship, and to Jamestown for opportunity of better living; both were inseparably bound up with the forming of a new nation, but they knew it not. A generation ago a great war was fought for the preservation of the union, incidentally, under God, it was the means of freeing millions of human