The God of Nature

“Earth is crammed with Heaven,
And every common bush aflame with God.”

—Mrs. Barrett Browning.

“Only on the firm foundation of the Old Testament doctrine of Creation, can we rightly build the New Testament Doctrine of Redemption: and only he who scripturally believes and apprehends by faith the earliest words of Revelation, concerning a Creator of all things, can also apprehend, know, and scripturally worship. The Man, in whom God’s word, down to its latest canonical Revelation, gathers together all things.” — Stiers Words of the Apostles, p. 295.

“Those who have obtained the farthest insight into nature, have been in all ages firm believers in God.” — Dr. Whewell.

“Along with other and better revivals at the era of the Reformation, came the resuscitation of this doctrine of God — the God of Nature. ’ “We are in the dawn of a new Era,’ says Luther, ‘we are beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in Adam’s fall. We are learning to see all around us the greatness and glory of the Creator. “VYe can see the Almighty hand — the Infinite Goodness in the humblest flower. We praise Him, we thank Him, we glorify Him. We recognise in creation the power of His word. He spake and it was done.’ “— Quoted by Mr. Froude in his “Times of Erasmixs and Luther.”

“Listen to the fairy tales of science,

Solemn, and stupendous, and sublime; Nature’s voice springs out a proud defiance

To the puny sceptics of our time:
Age to age speaks out, each generation

Finds new wisdom coming at its call, While men, be sure, of each and every nation

Recognise the First Great Cause of all.”

The Apostle’s opening theme was one, in which — though bearing an interpretation very different from his, he was in close touch and sympathy with his audience —” God, that made the world and

ALL THINGS THEREIN, SEEING THAT He IS LORD OF

Heaven and Earth” (v. 24).

To the Greek, Religion was nothing without Nature: or rather, to him. Religion and Nature were convertible terms. In a truer sense than what has been said of the stones and frescoes of Venice, Nature to the children of Hellas was their Bible — their “illuminated missal.” Every page had its brilliant initial and borderings. Not only so, but each of these pages had some religious association or identification with god or demigod. Though to the Athenian the Acropolis was the

isible Temple “made with hands,” where sacred thoughts had their embodiment in marble, or bronze, or gold; his true Shrine and Sanctuary after all, was some court in the outer material world which imagination consecrated to a separate and appropriate deity. With all their purely mythical character, beautiful dreams assuredly they were. Was it the olive woods, and pine forest, and pastoral solitudes? there the rural Pan sat piping his rustic reed, or lay stretched in dreamy slumbers under his fir-tree. Was it the stream or secluded fountain in the depth of primeval forests or rocky dells and glades? the wood nymphs were there, investing the spot with religious awe, and converting the clump of woodland into a ’ sacred grove.’ Was it the bays and creeks of that sea of azure-blue, which bathed the Attic shores or ^gean Isles? They saw among these, ever and anon, Poseidon the * Shaker of the Earth,’ with his Trident; who in the partition of divine rule by Saturn among his sons, got as his, chiefly the realm of the ocean. They conjured up thoughts of his palace in its depths of pearl and sea-weed. They imagined they would behold, alike in calm and storm, the Sea-god driving his golden-maned steeds through the briny highway; — the sportive monsters of the ocean doing him homage; his immediate retainers blowing conchs, and securing, amid environing tempests which they bridled, a calm path for their king. While Amphitrite, his queen, and Queen of Beauty, bearing a similar trident in her hand, had her own sea-car of pearly shells drawn by Tritons, through a track of iridescent foam. Was it the beautiful sunshine? — that Attic sky with its wealth of heavenly light — dazzling in its meridian, and golden in its setting suns? that sun, ages before the birth of Greece, had been adored and worshipped in Egyptian Thebes and Karnac as Amun-Ea: — by Chaldean and Persian, by Assyrian and Phoenician, in their Baal-shrines. But the Greek, in Phcebus Apollo, the Lord of the Cithara and the unerring bow, had a fairer incarnation: — Apollo — the god of Light: light being the highest expression of beauty; also investing him with insight into futurity as the god of Oracles. Was it when the dews of early morning fell, — or at eventide when the shepherds were folding their flocks in the Thessalian Vale of Tempo or on the slopes of Hymettus, Ossa, or Helicon? Hermes the god-Messenger would be seen with winged feet and the twisted caducous, bearing the telephonic message of its day from the court of the gods to the abodes of men.^ Was it the fields of

1 The myth of the birth of Hermes on the mountains of Southern Greece is thus beautifully told by Mr. Euskin. On the Mountain of Cyllene he was” born of the eldest of those stars of spring — that Maia, from whom your own month of May has its name; bringing to you, in the green of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, the unrecognised symbols of the pastures and the wreathed snows of Arcadia, where long ago she was Queen no ST. PAUL IN ATHENS,

early green or the valleys of golden grain? Gaia, the sedate mother of agriculture, would be seen listening to the tinkle of the harvest sickles and the strains of the harvest song. While, dominating all, was their picture of the Mount of Olympus vrreathed in inapproachable cloud: the abode of the great Zeus, Father of gods and men. Seated on its highest summit in perpetual festival and banquet, he was pictured sending forth from time to time his varied subjects on their missions, whether of favour or retribution, to the wide realms of the earth below. His favourite daughter — our now familiar Athene, — goddess of Light, Understanding, and Wisdom, who was said to have sprung full-panoplied from his head, was recognised and worshipped as presiding also over the processes of Nature.

We thus see, from these brief references to a fascinating mythology, how first of all, the love of nature was incorporated in the very soul of Greece. Hers was a beautiful child-life: recalling the words of a true child-poet: —

“Skies are light above you: Trees bend down to kiss yon, breeze and blossom love you.”

of Stars; there, first cradled and wrapt in swaddling-clothes; then is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and deceiving, — blinding the eyes of Argus, — escaping from the grasp of Apollo — restless messenger between the highest sky and topmost earth — ’ the herald Mercury, new lighted on a hearan-kissing hill.’” — The Queen of the Air, p. 29.

THE GOD OF NATURE. iii

But there was, as we have just seen, more in the Hellenic than this mere child-love of the inanimate world. It was linked with the loftier sentiments and aspirations, however inadequate these, at the best, were. The Greek was in one sense a Pantheist, — all Nature was to him full of God. In his own erroneous way, however, he was better and more advanced than Pantheist: for through the mist of these mythic dreams, we see how he clung to the belief of divine personalities. The Deity was with him no abstraction — the Being of a spirit-world. The belief did not resolve itself into the “unknown and unknowable” of later phases and times. Each member of their Pantheon was clothed with attributes alike human and divine. So vivid was their conception of each, that, as we have more than once noted in former chapters, they could fashion their ideals not only in noble sculpture, but in definite, recognised shape: from the fantastic, semi-human Pan — to the exquisite embodiment of beauty in the bright-eyed Apollo. Each niche in this great Nature-Temple was filled with a distinct Individuality. Phidias and Parrhasius were to them what Raphael and Michael Angelo were in future Christian art: Eleusis and Delphi what the Holy Sepulchre and Loretto were in the Middle Ages.

But the polytheism of the Greek was as unsatisfactory from the human side as it was erroneous from the divine. Let a discerning writer explain in his own lucid words: — “Polytheism divided the contemplation over many objects: and as the outward objects were manifold, so was there a want of unity in the inward life. The Grecian mind was distracted by variety. He was to obtain wisdom from one Deity: eloquence from that Mercurius for whom Paul was taken: purity from Diana for whom Ephesus was zealous: protection for his family or country from the respective tutelary deities: success by a prayer to Fortune. Hence dissipation of mind: that fickleness for which the Greeks were famous: and the restless love of novelty which made Athens a place of literary and social gossip — * some new thing.’ All stability of character rests on the contemplation of changeless unity. ... If you view the world as the Greek did, all is so various that you must either refer it to various deities, or to different moods of the same deity. To-day you are happy — God is pleased: to-morrow miserable — God is angry. St. John referred these all to unity of character — * God is love.’... Hence came deep calm — the repose which we are toiling all our lives to find and which the Greek never found.” We cannot

1 Robertson’s Sermons, vol. i., pp. 185-8.

wonder that it was with them as with the Romans. Paul’s subsequent indictment included both. “They became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise they became fools: and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man” (Rom. i. 21, 22, 23).’

It was to a very different Nature-worship, not seen through the distorted medium of * gods many and lords many,* to which St. Paul now directs the thoughts of the throng on the Areopagus. His opening theme is one on Natural Religion: only redeemed and rescued from that bewildering polytheism, with its “complexity of impersonal laws,” and asserting the unity and undivided Personality of the true God and Great Creator —” God, that made the world and all

1 Though we reserve, for a final chapter, reference to the modern religion of Greece, we may here, in a note, give the passing observation of a cultured traveller in the earlier part of the present century, showing how the old nature-myths and superstitions still survive. *’’We entered a real forest. Here our Greeks were startled by a bird which flew across the road, and which they called ‘Kira.’ That bird they said had once been a woman, who, deprived of all her kindred by some great calamity, retired to some solitary mountain to bewail her loss, and continued on the summit forty days repeating in the sad monotony of grief the lamentation of the country, — ‘Ah me! ah me! ’ — till, at the expiration of that period, she was changed, by pitying Providence, into a bird. So strangely live on, in modern tradition, the fables of heathen Greece, mingled though they may be with the inoongruoua accompaniments of Christian legend,” — Lord Carnarvon’s Athena and Morea p. 111.

H things therein, seeing that He is Lord of heaven and earth’’ No Epicurean deity dwelling isolated and apart from human interests and sympathies, in a state of listless repose. All the material organism of the world (KoV/io?) — the Universe — “under law and reduced to order” — is under His supervision. He regards Him as the Appointer of the seasons. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, are His own four Evangelists in the great ‘Gospel of Creation.’ As it has been well remarked — “He speaks to the human heart through Nature if men will but hearken. This is the truth of which Pantheism is the caricature.” “For, of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen” (Rom. xi. 36).

The Volume then, the Apostle thus opens, was one which he and his hearers read together with delighted community of interest. It was a volume whose pages he himself had never been so foolish — we use the word advisedly — had never been so impious, as to undervalue or repudiate. In his first missionary journey, amid Nature-scenes as fascinating in their way as those of Attica, — how beautifully does he discourse to the Lystrians of “the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea,

1 Professor Lumby on the Acts, in loc.

and all things that are therein” (Acts xiv. 15)! In writing, at a subsequent time, that same priceless Letter to the Romans to which we have just referred, in what glowing terms does he speak of “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. i. 20). Though he knew too well the inadequacy of the study of Nature to solve deeper problems, he would never think of eliminating from his creed this “proem of Redemption:” the bright setting to a yet brighter and costlier jewel. If we can venture on a comparison which suggests itself in passing, — the allusion to this nature-religion was to St. Paul like the opening overture or prologue to a great Oratorio, — a quiet passage, introductory to the after theme; — and giving value to the latter by contrast. The subdued ’ pastoral symphony ’ of the greatest of our tone-poets may be recalled, in which we seem to be in the hush of solitude, under the pale light of moon and stars. But this is only a prelude and preparation, effective by its soft, tender, dreamy melody, to give power and pathos to the subsequent magnificent scenes and passages culminating in the Hallelujah Chorus.

It is surely altogether a misconception, which would represent the Jew as devoid of love for the beautiful in the outer world. Who dare make such an assertion with the Old Testament Scriptures in their hands? Commence if you will with the birth, or as it may be rather called the second birth of the Hebrew people, on their way from Egypt to Canaan: the farewell addresses of Moses are full of vivid Nature -touches. The opening strain of his Psalm (xc.) — the oldest in the Psalter — is inspired by Creation’s noblest monuments: as if the memories of his desert sojourn and its Mountain-Sanctuaries were more enduring far than even the colossal temples and pyramids of the Pharaohs among which he had been reared. It is a lofty ascription to the world’s Creator and His handiwork: — ^’ Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God.” The Book of Job, whatever be its precise antiquity and chronological place in the sacred writings — though undoubtedly ancient it must be — is, throughout, a wondrous naturepoem — instinct with reverence for the works of the Mighty Pramer: from the brooks fretting in their channels, or the great Behemoth in the waters.

to Pleiades and Orion, Arcturus and his sons, in the firmament of night.

If we pass to David, the sweet Psalmist of Israel; an ^olian harp swept by the winds of heaven, seems constantly to join in pathetic accompaniment with his varied spiritual songs. He seems to have drank in this native inspiration ever since the time when, as a boy, he fed his father’s flocks in the valleys of Bethlehem. Now he is under the starry canopy, giving forth from his “Kinnor” * the Heavens are telling.’ Now he is under the spell of a thunderstorm (Ps. xxix.) bursting forth in all its magnificence and grandeur in the passes of the Lebanon: crashing the cedars, and discovering the forests, and gleaming in the waves of the Great Sea. Now he is amid the oaks and water-brooks of Gilead (Ps. xlii.). Now, it is a Vision of Palestine in its autumn beauty — the valleys studded thick with the golden corn, amid bleat of flocks and the song of reapers — the little hills rejoicing on every side (Ps. lxv.). Who but the intensest observer of Nature and most loving votary at her shrine, could have composed, as the monarch of Israel did, that 104th Psalm? — Creation’s noblest anthem and Benedicite. Then, comes the close of the life of the Poet-King. It is touching and remarkable to see how this ii3 ST. PAUL IN ATHENS.

Minstrel of Minstrels imported, so to speak, his intense sympathy with Nature to his very death-bed: how he,

“Whose daily te;icliers were the woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills,” —

who had sung so sweetly, in life’s early morn, of “the sun as a bridegroom going forth from his chamber, and rejoicing as a strong man to run his race;” — how he loved to revert to the old symbol at the supreme hour of all; as if his admiration of the external world only expired with his expiring breath. “Now these be the last words of David:... ‘He shall be as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.’” (2 Sam. xxiii. 1-4.)

Were there any need of prolonging these references or accumulating proof, — look how often the hallowed fire of Isaiah is kindled at Natureshrines! Mountains and forests, rivers and valleys; — the wilderness and the solitary place becoming glad — the mountains — in the loftiest strain of poetic hyperbole — breaking out into singing, the trees of the field clapping their hands. Or, delighting thus to draw his Nature-teaching from the noblest of all Oriental ’ picture-galleries: ’ — “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: He calleth them all by names by the greatness of His might, for that He is strong in power; not one faileth” (Isa. xl. 26). Nor, in these rapid references to passages of Old Testament story, can we omit Habakkuk’s sublime psean of Nature -worship, which, perhaps, we are not wrong in saying stands alone, unequalled among its inspired compeers: (iii. 3) —

“God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise.

*’ He stood, and measured the earth: He beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow: His ways are everlasting.

“The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of Thine arrows they went, and at the shining of Thy glittering spear.

“Thou didst walk through the sea with Thine horses, through the heap of great waters,” &c.

All Palestine travellers are struck with the majesty of Mount Hermon. It forms the colossal barrier of the north, and mingles its snow-crowned peak with many memorable views in the Holy

Land. It is supposed that its name means ’ the Great Sanctuary;’ as if the God of Israel had reared this vast Nature-Temple or Nature-Altar to keep Him, as Creator, in everlasting remembrance, dwai-fing in its proportions all * Temples made with hands.’

So far, indeed, from being the case that the Jew was indifferent in his observation of the outer world, and neglectful of his homage to Nature and her laws, — it is enough to remark that in all the three greatest national festivals. Nature, and that too by distinct and specific divine authority, had significant recognition. In the directions regarding the celebration of the Passover as detailed in the 23rd of Leviticus — along with the foreshadowing of diviner truths and realities, it was expressly ordained that “the first of the first fruits” were to be gathered and brought as an offering into the Holy courts. We know, moreover, with what pomp of ceremony and ecstatic gladness, in later times, the appointed

1 At the base of this same mountain, at Banias (Panias — Pan), the Greek had his temple and cave sacred to Pan, his rural deity — one of the chiefs as we have seen in his Pantheon. The writer can j)ersonally subscribe to the accuracy of this colour-picture: — “We went a second time early in the morning to Pan’s cave, through the willows, and poplars, and great olives, and all sorts of verdure under the shrine of El-Khidr above — the God of green or animating power in Nature.” — {Bacchante, vol. ii., p. 703.) The whole mountain is studded with relics of Natui-e- worship: which worship is continued to this day by the Druses.

ceremony was observed. A similarly ordained celebration took place at the Feast of Pentecost. The first fruits of the wheat harvest (at the conclusion of corn harvest and before the vintage) were then borne, with similar festive joy, to the Sanctuary While at the Feast of Tabernacles — the crowning festival of the Jewish year and the most jubilant one — we know how Nature was ransacked to stimulate the spiritual ardour of the worshipping throngs. How Jerusalem and its environs were resolved into a vast congeries of booths and tabernacles. It was the * Feast of ingathering,’ after all the fruits of the ground were reaped or plucked: — the Harvest-home, the Harvest thanksgiving; when gladness was so exuberant, that when the Great Prophet seeks for a figure descriptive of intensest delight, — it is, “they joy before Thee, according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil” (Isa. ix. 3).

If we pass for a moment from the Old to the New Testament times and dispensation, it is enough for us to note, how all that we have already advanced is enforced and illustrated in the words of the Great Master, — from the flowers He plucked in the fields of Galilee outvying the grandeur of Solomon, — to the teachings of the sky, morning and evening (Matt. vi. 29 and xvi. 2, 3).

If from Apostolic times we go to the early centuries, we are impressed with the same. Indeed we do not think it is sufficiently noted what lovers of material objects the early Christians were; at all events if this can be gathered from the variety of symbolism which they have still left engraven on the walls of the Roman Catacombs, or on slabs which have been removed from these strangest of burial-grounds. Among many other natural objects which it would be out of place here to give in detail, we have the sun and moon, the mountain, the rock, the rainbow, the gushing stream. We have, from the olive and the palm — the date, the cedar tree and the vine with its grape-clusters, to the ear of corn, the lily of the valley, and the rose of Sharon. In the words of a distinguished writer on sacred art, in whose pages these references will be found in more extended form, the believers of the first ages “touched nothing that they did not Christianise; they consecrated this visible world into a Temple to God, of which the heavens were the dome, the mountains the altars, the forests the pillared aisles, the breath of spring the incense, and the running streams the music — while in every tree they sheltered under, in every flower they looked upon and loved, they recognised a virtue or a spell; a token of Christ’s love for man, or a memorial of His martyrs’ sufferings.”

To come down to the Middle Ages, — who is not familiar with the story of St. Francis of Assisi’s strong love of Nature and his enthusiastic admiration of all her works, animate and inanimate? To borrow words better than my own, — ‘* ‘Laudato sia Dio meo Signore con tute le creature.” Praise be to the Lord my God from every creature.’ And with this cry on his lips, he ran through the country like some angelic spirit, his head touched with a star of light, and his feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace, calling on his Brother the Sun, his Sister the Moon, his brothers the Winds, his sister Water, his brother Fire, his mother Earth, to join him in singing the Lord’s Song; and thus he became the Priest, not only of men but of all creation.”

Has the Church of modern days refused to join this choir of Nature-worshippers? We are glad to say. No. Her Easter and Pentecost, even in churches where the authority of such days is not

1 Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art. 2 Contemporary Revieio, 1884, p. 843.

ecclesiastically recognised, are very generally commemorated in spirit: sometimes in glad song, — sometimes in literal offering, from field and garden, by fruit and sheaf; while (to take one among many attestations that amid diviner ascriptions to God as Redeemer, God the Almighty Creator is not forgotten) the most familiar Psalm in the Service of the Anglican Church, sung or chanted each Sabbath morning, not only throughout England but among all English-speaking races, is an anthem of Nature, Here are the well-known strains which on each recurring Lord’s day are echoed throughout Christendom —

Venite, Exultemus Domino.

“0 come let us sing unto the Lord: Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving: And show ourselves glad in Him with Psalms. For the Lord is a great God: And a great King above all gods. In His hand are all the corners of the earth: And the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His and He made it: And His hands prepared the dry land. 0 come, let us worship, and fall down: And kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is the Lord our God:

And we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand” (Ps. xcv.)

Our best modern poets drink their inspiration from the same Fount. The leader — the * Precentor’ of these Nature-choristers is undoubtedly Wordsworth. His motto and keynote, responded to by many kindred and congenial minds and harps, is —

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears; To me the meanest flower that blows, can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Tennyson’s love of outer Nature is interlaced with his finest poetry. It cannot even sleep or be hushed to rest in the “In Memoriam” It breaks out elsewhere, from the iridescence of the pearly shell to the murmur of doves amid “immemorial elms.” He reminds us, in one of his latest utterances, that so long as we have a poor child in an hospital- ward, and a flower in the meadow or by the hedgerow to take to it, we shall be recognised as one of the Creator’s ministering Priests. His words, sung regarding those who are almoners of Nature’s lowliest floral gifts, may be applied to many other of her kindred delights: —

“They that can wander at will where the works of the Lord are revealed. Little guess what joy can be got from a cowslip out of the field.

Flowers to those ‘spirits in prison’ are all they can know

of the spring: They freshen and sweeten the wards, like the waft of an

angel’s wing.”i

We might quote indefinitely from prose poets. “We speak of the Volume of Nature,” says Carlyle: “and truly a Volume it is, — whose Author and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou — does man, so much as know the Alphabet thereof? With its Words, Sentences, and grand descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through solar systems and thousands of years 1 It is a Volume in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred- writing; of which even Prophets are happy that they can read here a line and there a line.... Nature is the Time-^vesture of God.”

‘’We must,” says Charles Kingsley, “go up into the forest in the evenings, and pray there with nothing but God’s cloud-temple between us and His heaven, and His choir of small birds, and all happy things who praise Him all night long. And in the still summer noon too, with the lazypaced clouds above, and the distant sheep-bell, and the bees humming in the beds of thyme, and one bird making the hollies ring a moment, and then all is still, hushed, awe-bound, as the great

1 Lord Tennyson’s Ballads, 1880, p. 91.
2 Sartor Resartus, p. 178-183.

thunder-clouds slide up from the far south! Then there to praise God! Aye, even when the heaven is black with the wind, and the thunder crackling over our heads, then to join in the paean of the storm- spirits to Him, whose pageant of power passes over the earth and harms us not in its mercy.”

Or, to give one more extract from the most conspicuous of prose-minstrels. Mr. Euskin — in one of the most beautiful of his passages, remarks — “There are few so utterly lost but that they receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments, strength of some kind, or rebuke from the appealings of outward things; and that it is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf, or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky.... The sky is for all. It is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart; for soothing and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful — never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in

* Life and Letters.

its tenderness, almost divine in its affinity.... God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. ... It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty — the deep and the calm and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it can be seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the Angels work out for us daily, and yet vary externally — it is through these that her lesson of devotion is chiefly taught and the blessing of beauty given.” Then, in another place, he records and protests with regret, that the love of Nature is not imported more generally into the pulpit, not as a substitute for higher and more needed teaching, but to make up a full message from God to man: —” Much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in recommending the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and most immediately shown: though they insist much on His giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which He gives to all inferior creatures) they require us not to thank Him for that glory of His works which He has permitted us alone to perceive. They tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not like Isaac into the fields at even. ... I think, that of the weaknesses, distresses, vanities, schisms, and sins.

which often even in the holiest of men, diminish their usefulness, and mar their happiness, there would be fewer if, in their struggle with Nature fallen, they sought for more aid from Nature undestroyed.” Mr. Froude in his “Oceana,” if we may add a yet later testimony, too truthfully draws this disparaging contrast between the old Koman peasant — he might have included the Greek, — and their modern English successor: — “The sky to him was a dial-plate on which the stars were pointers; and he read the hour of the night from their position on its face. The constellations were his monthly almanack, and as the sun moved from one into another, he learned when to plough and when to sow, when to prune his vines and clip the wool from his sheep. The planets watched over the birth of his children. The star of the morning, rising as the herald of Aurora, called him to the work of the day. The star of the evening, glimmering pale through the expiring tints of sunset, sent him home to supper and to rest; and to his ignorant mind these glorious sons of heaven were gods or the abode of gods. It is all changed now. The Pleiades and Orion and Sirius still pass nightly over our heads in splendid procession; but they are to us no more than bodies in space, important only for purposes of science. We have fixed their longitudes, we can gauge in the spectroscope their chemical composition: we have found a parallax for the Dog-star, and know in how many years the light which flows from it will reach us. But the shepherd and the husbandman no longer look to them to measure their times and seasons.... The visible divinities who were once so near to our daily lives are gone for ever.”

Thus have we sought to enforce and illustrate, in a very general way, — the first thesis in St. Paul’s great Sermon. Already has allusion been made to the inadequacy of the Volume of Nature to throw * light and leading ’ on higher spiritual verities. Though hers be sacred ground, tremulous with divine music, and all worthy of being approached with reverent feet, there are messages — profoundest secrets and problems which her oracle cannot solve or interpret, lacunae in her manuscripts and cryptographs which cannot be supplied. AVe can gaze on the endless glories of fresco and mosaic in the outer courts: but we look in vain for the burning altar — the revelations of the inner Shekinah — the Most Holy Place. Nevertheless, we bow before her teachings: — we recognise the glory and majesty of her spell. Nay more, in the

J Oceana, p. 27.

quaint words of the oldest of English poets, in his “Canterbury Tales,” we own her to be

The Vicar of the Almiglitie Lord.”

With the limitations already expressed, we can adopt, in closing, the verses, however well known, of a congenial interpreter and lay-preacher, a devout votary at Nature’s shrine. He speaks of flowers; but these are only the representatives of whatever is lovely and * worshipful ’ in ’ the wide, wide world ’ of the great Creator, —

“Day stars! that ope your eyes with morn to twinkle From rainbow galaxies of earth’s creation, And dewdrops on her lonely altars sprinkle As a libation!

“Ye matin worshippers! who bending lowly Before the risen sun — God’s lidless eye — Throw from your chalices a sweet and holy Incense on high!

“‘Neath cloister’d boughs, each floral bell that swingeth And tolls its perfume on the passing air. Makes Sabbath in the fields, and ever ringeth A call to prayer.

“To that Cathedral, boundless as our wonder. Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply. Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder, Its dome the sky.

“Your voiceless lips, 0 Flowers, are living preachers,
Each, cup a pulpit, and each leaf a book,
Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers
From lonely nook.

“Ephemeral Sages! what instructors hoary For such a world of thought could furnish scope ] Each fading calyx a memento mori,

Yet fount of hope.

“Were I, 0 God, in churchless lands remaining, Far from all voice of teachers or divines. My soul would find in flowers of Thy ordaining Priests, sermons, shrines!”

—Horace Smith,

“We praise Thee, 0 God:
We acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!

Heaven and Earth are full

op the

Majesty of Thy Glory!”