Cornell Hmueraitg Hthtary Jirjaca. New $nrk WORDSWORTH COLLECTION MADE BY CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN ITHACA. N. Y. THE GIFT OF VICTOR EMANUEL CLASS OF 1919 1925 uin IAIN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. With the Rev. T. Scott's Notes, and an Introductory Essay LI by Jambs Montgomery, Esq. D ICK'S PHILOSOPHY of RELIGION; or, an Illus- tration of the Moral Laws of the Universe. MITCHELL'S PLANETARY AND STELLAR WORLDS: A Popular Exposition of the Great Discoveries and Theories of Modern Astronomy. COLLINS'S SEEIES OF VALUABLE AND POPULAR WOBKS. VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED, Price 1 s. 6d. in a handsome wrapper, or 2s. cloth lettered. pAIRD'S (Rev. De.) SKETCHES OF PROTES- - L> TANTISM in ITALY, with an ACCOUNT OF THE WALDENSES. With a Portrait. CPRING'S (Rev. Dr.) THE BIBLE NOT OF MAN, ° and SKINNER'S RELIGION OF THE BIBLE. THICK'S (Dk. Thomas) PHILOSOPHY OF A V FUTURE STATE. CPRAGUE'S (Rev. Dr.) CONTRAST BETWEEN TRUE CHRISTIANITY AND VARIOUS OTHER SYSTEMS, With a F*rtrait. TURNBULL'S PULPIT OxtATORS OF FRANCE 1 AND SWITZERLAND. yiNET'S (Professor) GOSPEL STUDIES. Trans- ' lated from the French. THE PILGRIM FATHERS; or the Journal of the -*- Pilgrims at Plymouth, New England, in 1620: with Historical and Local Illustrations by George B. Cheever, D.D. With a Frontispiece. T ECTUHES TO YOUNG MEN, on their Educational, - LJ Moral, and Religious Improvement, with Dr. Sprague's Letters to Young Men, founded on the History of Joseph. Two Volumes. RICK'S (Dr. Thomas) IMPROVEMENT of SO- V CIETY by the DIFFUSION of KNOWLEDGE. Illustrated with Engravings. pHEEVER'S WINDINGS OF THE RIVER OF ^ THE WATER OF LIFE. niCKINSON'S (Rev. Dr.) RELIGION TEACHING V BY EXAMPLE, or, Scenes from Sacred History. OPRING'S (Rev. Dr.) MERCY SEAT: or, Thoughts suggested by the Lord's Prayer. EAD'S HAND OF GOD IN HISTORY; or, Divine Providence Historically Illustrated. R I/J irdiiAjurH* \J It) > . VOICES OF NATURE fflEI 4 HER FOSTER-CHILD, THfe SOUL OF MAN A SERIES OF ANALOGIES BETWEEN THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL WORLDS. GEORGE B. CHEEYER, D.D. AUTHOR OF • WANDERINGS OF A PILGRIM IN THE SHADOW OF MONT BLANC,' ETCHES ON THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, AND ON THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BL'NXAN,' ETC. PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM COLLINS, NORTH MONTROSE STREET, GLASGOW, AND PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON. I- GLASGOW: WILLIAM COLLINS & CO., PRINTERS. PKEEACE. Mr. De Quincey has somewhere said, in one of his compo- sitions, with great beauty of expression, that Analogies are Aerial Pontoons. The phrase is one of admirable vividness and depth of meaning. By material objects, or rather by suspension at one end from such objects, analogies are bridges to spiritual truths; by things they swing the mind forward to thoughts and ideas, and sometimes to discoveries high above the point of starting. From the world that now is, we pass over upon them to the world that is to come; through Faith they even become the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. In this view we have endeavoured to trace, in the forms and processes of Nature, some of the analogies between the natural and the spiritual worlds. Beautifully has Mr. Coleridge affirmed, while declaring that his studies have been profitable and availing to him, only so far as he has endeavoured to use all his other knowledge as a glass, enabling him to receive more light, in a wider field of vision, from the Word of God; beauti- fully and truly has he said, concerning the Book of Nature, likewise a revelation from God, that not only in its obvious sense and literal interpretation, it declares the being and attributes of the Almighty Father, which none but the fool in heart ever dared gainsay; but that it has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein corre- spondencies and symbols of the spiritual world. The field is inexhaustible; we have only advanced a few steps; but those few we have endeavoured to take, as seeing Him who is Invisible, and recognising, in the fullest degree, his particular and paternal providence. May the blessing of the God of Nature and of Grace attend the lessons of the volume. New York, September, 1852. CONTENTS. PART I. INTEEPEETATION OF NATURE. CHAPTEE I. The true philosophy of Nature: Religious influence of Nature: Real language and meaning of Nature: Discipline of Mind necessary to understand it: Tintern Abbey: Natural influences mistaken for Piety, . : Page 13 CHAPTER II. Beauty, Constancy, and Repetition of the Analogies between the Natural and Spiritual Life: Practical purposes of these Lessons: The universe as the Shadow of God's Light: A faith in that which is above Nature requisite to view Nature aright, . Page 26 CHAPTER IIL The Letter and the Spirit: Processes of Pantheism and Atheism: Sym- phony of Nature prelusive to the great Religious Anthem, Page 37 CHAPTER IV. Arrangement of the Works of Nature for Man's Education and Dis- cipline: Spiritual Intuitions and Impulses in the Constitution of the Human Mind: Human Intuition compared with Animal Instinct: Influence and Effect of Procrastination, . . . Page 50 (> CONTENTS. CHAPTEE V. Powers of Intuition in the soul: Effect of neglecting them: Degree of Perfection to which they may be developed: Destructive instincts of Kant: Direction of the spiritual instinct: Euinous result of disobe- dience to it, ....... . Page 57 CHAPTEE VL Nature as a System of Types, and an Education by Types and Analo- gies: The secret of the Mysticism of Nature: Grandeur of the Science of Geography, as presented in the Manner of Arnold Guyot: The Abuses of Natural Science: The true and Heavenly Spirit and Object of Science, Page 70 PAET II. VOICES OF THE SPEOG. CHAPTEE VII. Voices of the Spring: Beginning of the Moral Teaching of Nature; Mightiness of the Change from Winter to Spring: the Time of Seeds, and the Texts taken from it: Responsibilities arising from the Light of Nature, . Page 83 CHAPTER VIIL Analogies from Nature to the Resurrection, . . Page 95 CHAPTER IX. Voices of the Spring continued; Spiritual Agriculture laborious: The Fallow Ground, and the breaking of it up, in preparation for Sowing: The process of Subsoiling in the Mind and Heart: The connection between Working and Praying: Consequences of the Skimming System, ........ Page 108 CONTENTS. 7 CHAPTEK X. Voices of the Spring continued : The Probation- Acre ; The inextri- cable Entanglement of Responsibility in Human Life: Interminable reach of Moral influence; Return of Evils to their owners: Congre- gation of Congenial Spirits in the Eternal World, . Page 124 CHAPTER XI. The Periods of Suggestion, Susceptibility, Germination, and Growth; Importance of making the most of these periods, each in their season, Page 133 CHAPTER XII. The beginning of Character: Infancy and Childhood: Parental Teaching by Character and Example: Instinctive Discernment of Character by Children: Responsibility for the influence of our character and habits upon others; How it is to be unerringly traced, . Page 142 CHAPTER XIIL Lessons from the abundance of Unproductive Seed: Duty of sowing at all seasons, in all opportunities, because of the Uncertainty in what Opportunity lies the blessing: What one week's neglect, or one Sab- bath's waste, may do: The providential Allotment, and the Spiritual Second Sight, ....... Page 155 CHAPTER XIV. Depth of meaning in the word Type: Faith must take the Impressions: The Processes of Spring as Typifying the Resurrection of the Just: The Rising of all things, by God's Requisition of that which is Past, Page 168 PART III. VOICES OF THE SUMMER. CHAPTER XV. Characteristics of the Summer Season; Compass of a Summer Land- scape: Science is simply the Observance of God at work: The secret of all Naturalism and Atheism in the world: The field of grass and lilies as a teacher of God's love, .... Page 179 b CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. Eeduplication of Character: Return of Action into the strength of prin- ciples: Restrictions on the law of seeds and of reproduction in morals: The seed-time of sensibility and passion: Necessity of living roots for the permanence of good habits, .... Page 192 CHAPTER XVII. Voices of the Summer continued: The power of habit: The difference between habit and impulse: Difference in Character while habit is forming, and when it is formed: Both the good man and the wicked satisfied from himself, by the nature of habit: Our responsibility for all our habits, of opinion, of feeling, and action, . Page .20 6 CHAPTER XVIII. Voices of the Summer Continued: Seasons of Visitation : Character of Roger Sherman, and the Lesson for Young Men: The neglect of opportunities in the sowing for a harvest of evils: The proper periods to be regarded : Roots rather than slips to be rested on, Page 220 CHAPTER XIX. Voices of the Summer continued: Evil Habit and Remorse: The fearful consequences of making the germinating and growing period, the spending period: Habits of youthful piety the insurance of a happy old age, ..... ... Page 228 CHAPTER XX. Voices of the Summer, continued: Flowers, with their Loveliness and Lessons: The Process of Ingrafting: Analogy between this Process and that of Regeneration by the Word of God: The Discipline of Severity in Nature and Providence, and its Uses, . Page 238- CHAPTER XXI. Voices of the Summer, continued; The Season of Activity and Growth; of dew, light, heat, electricity, clouds, showers: Gradualism and toil in the process; concentration and immutability in the results: The final Triumph of Holy Principle and Habit, . . Page 253 PART IV. VOICES OF THE AUTUMN. CHAPTER XXII. Voices of the Autumn: Joyous and Solemn Characteristics of the Sea- son: The Lessons of the Trees: The Scriptural Expression, Trees of Righteousness: The great Autumnal Question, . . Page 271 CHAPTER XXIIL Voices of the Autumn continued: The Tares considered, and some of the reasons for their permitted growth: The possibility of a Harvest of glory and blessedness, only in Christ: The Autumn as the explana- tion of all things, Page 285 CHAPTER XXIV. "Voices of the Autumn continued: Evil Grows and Ripens, as well as Good: The mere Negative Character Grows, as well as the Positive; The Autumn Reveals it, whether Tares or Wheat: Importance of the Previous trial of Habits, ...... Page 298 CHAPTER XXV. Voices of the Autumn continued: The circle of Divine Providence: Grace and Providence, Spiritual and Natural Law: Man's position in regard to them: Consequences of transgressing them: Safety and happiness in Faith, ..... . Page 313 PART V. VOICES OE THE WINTEE. CHAPTER XXVI. Voices of Winter and the Sea: The Wonders of the Snow-storm: The Moral and disciplining Uses of Winter: God's Way in the Sea and in Storms: The Benefits and Blessings of a state of Trial, Page 329 PART I. INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. PART I. INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. CHAPTER I. The true philosophy of Nature: Eeligious influence of Nature: Real language and meaning of Nature: Discipline of Mind necessary to understand it: Tintern Abbey: Natural influences mistaken far Piety. THE true philosophy of nature is a religious philosophy, that is, a philosophy binding us to God. Nature rightly studied, must disclose the Creator, but the sights which we. see are according to the spirit that we bring to the investigation. Standing within a cathedral, and looking through its stained and figured windows toward the light, we behold the forms and colours by the light. Standing outside, and gazing at the same windows, we see nothing but a blurred and indistinct enamelling. Thus the soul, standing within the great Cathedral of God's material world, and looking through it upward to the light, beholds the meaning of its forms and colours ; but standing without, and studying nature in detail, not with reference to the light pouring through it from God, but for itself alone, there is nothing better seen than the mere material enamelling. The meaning of a transparency can be seen only by looking at the light, or in the direction of the light, which is shining through it; not by looking upon it from without, in an external or reflected light. Nature is a transparent, figured veil: God shines behind it. By and by the veil will be raised, and the philosophy of nature will give place to the beholding of the Alpha and Omega, the 14 VOICES OF NATURE. Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, no more seen as through a glass darkly, but face to face. The glass darkly is a discipline for the infancy of our being, before we can bear the light. There is to be a world where there shall be no temple, (or rather, there is such a world, and we are training for it,) because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it; and no stained glass to look through, nor any need of sun or moon to shine, because the glory of God itself lightens that world, and the Lamb is the light thereof. But at present, as we must approach God spiritually, only through a Mediator, so we can see his light only through the transparencies around us, or by the earnest of the Spirit within us, revealing him in his word. At present, day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge, and with Day and Night we hold communion; we listen, while they tell us of our God, for every day is a new conversation, and every night a new revelation from Him. Now, if Nature be made on purpose to commune with man concerning God, to teach him the Divine majesty and glory, and as it were to look the being and attributes of the Creator into his soul, or to call into activity and life that idea of God, which in the very build of the human constitution is already there, there must be a mighty power of disclosure in nature, and a depth and richness of intelligence rendered inert and useless through the insensibility of man. What a dire necessity would such blindness be, if it were fatal, not voluntary! There must be an unfathomable wealth of instruction, a world of glorious significance, upon which the eye of the mind, in such insensi- bility, is closed. How vast and precious an influence would these scenes and elements exert in building up our being, if we were properly alive to them! There would be "transferred into the internal economy of ideas and sentiment something of a character and a colour correspondent to the beauty, vicissitude, and grandeur, which continually press upon the senses." And this internal economy of ideas and sentiment, of which John Foster so beautifully speaks, would not be intellectual merely, but full of the sense of God and heaven. There would be the home feeling of a father's house, the tracing of a father's hand, the sense of a father's presence, the enjoyment of every natural blessing by a father's kind arrangements. When God himself INTERPRETATION OP NATURE. 15 is in the soul, diffusing there the spirit of his love, how every created particle of matter, and variety of form, shines in his light ! This universe shall pass away — a frame Glorious! because the shadow of thy night, A step, or link, for intercourse with Thee ! Ah! if the time must come, in which my feet No more shall stray where Meditation leads, By flowing stream, through wood, or craggy wild, Loved haunts like these, the unimprisoned mind May yet have scope to range among her own, Her thoughts, her images, her high desires. If the dear faculty of sight should fail, Still it may be allowed me to remember What visionary powers of eye and soul In youth were mine; when stationed on the top Of some huge hill, expectant, I beheld The sun rise up, from distant climes returned Darkness to chase, and sleep, and bring the day His bounteous gift! or saw him towards the deep Sink, with a retinue of flaming clouds Attended; then my spirit was entranced With joy exalted to beatitude; The measure of my soul was filled with bliss And holiest love; as earth, sea, air, with light, With pomp, with glory, with magnificence! WoKDSWOKTH. There are scenes in nature that compel even careless minds to pause with something like a feeling of religious adoration in the soul. We look at Niagara, and we think of God; his attributes, his infinite power, his eternity, his incomprehensibility^ and the unfathomableness of divine truth. And indeed it is like coming upon the verge of those abysses in theology and morals, and in the attributes of God, down which you gaze and gaze, till the soul becomes dizzy in the effort, and almost insane in the im- possibility of comprehension. You can go no further, you can see no deeper, butjthe truth pours on, shrouded in foam and clouds of mystery. You are lost, if you attempt to advance. You may long ever so earnestly to see the depths, but impass- able barriers are there. You look over the verge., if at any 16 VOICES OF NATURE. point this is possible, but you can never see where the torrent strikes, nor how deep; for the storm, the fury, the whirlwind of conflicting elements, the spray beaten into powder, and tossed in clouds of foam, prevent you. But the cataract pours on, and the thunder roars. You do not deny the existence of the cata- ract, nor the sublimity of it, because you cannot see to the bottom of it, but you gaze, and wonder, and adore. Such a scene is analogous to the mysteries of the Divine Nature, and such a scene brings a religious mind very near to God, and impresses it with a deep and solemn awe, which, though different from the excitement of imagination merely, is in perfect harmony with all the delightful emotions produced by scenes of loveliness, and impels the soul to the exercise of prayer and praise. The vague delight of the mere poetic sensibility is quite another thing. There, an elevation may be reached by the mind where it is apparently very near to heaven: a kind of table-land among the mountains, an interval between material forms and spiritual realities, where it seems to worship some- thing, yet it knows not what, and may glide off, according to its own character, into bare, indefinable, mystical pantheism, or pass to a real and devout communion with the living God. And in some respects the two movements may look alike, though not only unlike, but antagonistical. There is a mysticism, a mystery, and an indefiniteness, that may arise from the fall of a vast body of truth into language, or into the mind, and from the commotion of great thoughts struggling for expression; just as the cataract of Niagara is attended with clouds of eternal foam and spray, through which you cannot see the bottom, and out of which, and over which, when the sun is shining, the rainbows glitter and dance. There is also a mysticism, a confusion, a transcendentalism, elaborate and artificial, produced not by the presence, concussion, or struggle of truth, but by the absence of it, and the counterfeit of falsehood. There is nothing else but the cloud, the halo, and the painted rainbow, but no cataract of Truth. Just so, there may be the semblance of religious reverence and worship, in a soul much absorbed in imaginative contemplations of nature, without any approximation to that piety of the affections, that worship of the heart, inspired by the Spirit, and described in the Word of Jehovah. INTERPRETATION OF NATURE, 17 The phrases of devotion may be used and the language of religious rapture, but, resting in any thing short of God, the apparently worshipping mind is in mere reverie or utter bewil- derment, and all the seeming religion of nature is but the trance or delirium of its own fancy. In such a trance, the mind may walk close upon the verge of the spiritual world, as a sleep- walker on the edge of a precipice, yet not enter it, nor converse with its realities. Thoughts may be uttered, which show that nature has lifted the mind above nature indeed, yet not to God; which look like the breathings of a true piety, but yet are unsubstantial fancies. A man may seem to strike fire, by strik- ing his own eyes; but the Sashes will set fire to nothing, and are in themselves nothing. Such are all the lights of pretended religious inspirations, that come not from the Divine Spirit and Word, but proceed merely from the concussions of self and nature. And as Coleridge has remarked of the imitation of the fire of imagination itself, so it may be said of the substitution of any semblance, instead of the earnest religion of the Gospel; a deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated, but the marble peach feels cold and heavy^and only children j>ui it to their mouths. At the creation, man alone became a living soul, and God is not said to have breathed into any thing else, in that sense, the breath of life. It is a wild dream of the imagination, as inca- pable of scientific investigation as it is of proof, that because the influence of nature is so powerful, so elevating, so suggestive, and at times so mysterious, therefore there must be such a thing as a soul or thinking principle in nature, apart from God, with which the human soul communes. Here is a bridge, across which a careless irreligious mind might easily pass, from the natural effect of the creation, into the gloomy gulf of atheism, or the wilderness of a pantheistic unbelief. JFhere is no meaning in nature, but that which God gives, _that which God teaches. The forms of nature are indeed beau- tiful in themselves, yet are they no more than as the silvery wick, along which the burning oil throws its light into the at- mosphere, or as the strings, from which the hand of the musician draws forth melody. Both intellectually and spiritually, as ex- citing the mind, and leading it to God, the powerful influence of nature has been experienced by multitudes, advancing as far 43 B 18 VOICES OF KATUIE. as the heart advances, stopping where the heart stops. Intent and devout observers do really find in nature, according to the language of Foster, " a scene marked all over with mystical figures, the points and traces, as it were, of the frequentation and agency of superior spirits. They find it sometimes concen- trating their faculties to curious and minute inspection, some- times dilating them to the expansion of vast and magnificent forms; sometimes beguiling them out of all precise recognition of material realities, whether small or great, into visionary mus- ings; and habitually and in all ways conveying into the mind trains and masses of ideas, of an order not to be acquired in the schools, and exerting a modifying and assimilating influence on the whole mental economy." ^'ow our acquaintance with this philosophy and influence of nature must depend upon our knowledge of ourselves and God; for we have these three terms of knowledge: nature, ourselves, and God; and ourselves being but a part of nature, we can know nothing truly of the system of nature, but as we know God ; nothing better or more truly, than as the inhabitants of Plato's Cave. Habits of meditation on the depths of our own being, and the attributes of God, to whom we are related, are requisite for those, who would read aright the lines and lessons of creation. The effulgence of sunset, in an evening of extraordinary splen- dour and beauty, may seem something, if it would stay, sufficient, by a power of its own, by the inherent abiding of some soul dike element, to detain and occupy the mind; but as an unconnected spectacle, unrelated to something infinitely higher and more . glorious, even its divine, intelligent Architect and Cause, its power would speedily cease. We see in it, not so much what is, as what can be, and what God is, of whose light inaccessible and full of glory, this transcendent vision is but the permeable curtain, adapted to the possibility of man's gaze. Moreover The silent spectacle, the gleam, The shadow, and the peace supreme, are but a language, to move the soul, if it is not prepared for such influences, to a transport, a love, and an enjoyment as par- ticipant of heaven in its spirit, as these glorious, effulgent forms and colours are typical or representative of heaven in its beauty i INTERPRETATION OP NATURE. 19 and glory. Therefore, truly has the poet, and in a right heavenly faith, in the admiration of this scene, exclaimed, Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve! But long as godlike wish or hope divine Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe That this magnificence is wholly thine! From wo rlds not quickened by the Sun A portion of the gift is won; An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread On ground which British shepherds tread! Wordsworth. Now when from such meditations on the Divine Being and le place of his abode, and upon the wonderful and fearful strue- lre and responsibilities of our own being, and upon the things rseen and eternal, we come to the investigation of nature, we near a thousand harmonies, to which otherwise the ear had been insensible, we behold a thousand depths of significance,, which otherwise the mind had passed carelessly by. Habituated to voyages of faith, every spiritual sense is quickened; we return to the objects of the land with the distant vision of the sea; we may gradually attain, from heaven and earth, to something of prophetic strain, "And from the solitude Of the vast ocean bring a watchful heart, And an eye practised like a blind man's touch," commencing with presences and meanings, of which a careless mind knows nothing. Without such discipline of faith in things unseen and eternal; without such sense of God, and meditation on worlds not quick- ened by the sun; without such thought upon realities, which men can but think upon, while angels see; without such remembrance of our immortality and personal responsibility to God, our birth, indeed, is but a sleep and a forgetting; and though heaven lies about us from infancy to manhood, yet the low intercepting clouds hang heavily and damp around the soul; a blank, opaque humour, a drear, dark cataract, passes over the eye. Nothing 20 VOICES OF NATURE. but what the touch can handle, is seen through the vision; an oppressive vapour of materialism settles upon thought, " And custom lies upon us with a weight Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life." Every day we go further from the East, further from the Cherubim, further from the guiding Shechinah, further from the light of Paradise, and the types of heaven. Deeper in the vales of earth we go, and earlier falls the sunset, and the splendour of the celestial vision is diminishing, and the light and reality of the supernatural are forgotten or hidden in the natural. "At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day." There may be worshippers of nature, who are not worshippers of God; but there is no true natural religion, without a devout heart towards God, a heart renewed by grace. Nor are the influences of nature such as can ever supply the work of grace, or approximate to it. The poet Wordsworth expresses the wish to have his days bound each to each by natural piety, an unaf- fected love of nature such as when the child's heart first leaped up at sight of the rainbow. And pleasant would this be, pre- served, as in Wordsworth's own soul, even into old age. But if that were all, though the stream of such piety might be sweetly serene and poetical, yet it could never be truly religious; it might leave the heart wholly unchanged, never rising above nature, and in nothing participant of God. For no man cometh to the Father by nature only, nor except through Christ; and he who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, in all genuine piety, is the Master of all this world of loveliness, these forms of sub- limity and beauty, which in nature address themselves to the mind through the senses. In the exquisite poem on Tintern Abbey, we are presented with one of the loftiest and most serenely beautiful descriptions of the physical and intellectual effect of nature on the character, without any definite reference to the Author of Nature. The Poet speaks of the sensations in heart and mind produced bv uatural forms of beauty, and passing as elements of existence INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 21 into his being. He describes another gift of aspect more sublime : That blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened; that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with aneye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. Passing over the emotions of youth, when the sounding cata- ract haunted him like a passion, and the deep and gloomy woods, mountains, and rocks, with their colours and forms, were the food of an appetite, and entering upon another and later period of life, the poet gives the mood of his riper and deeper experience of the elevating, chastening, and subduing power of nature. And J have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows, and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the muse, The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul Of all my mortal being. A & VOICES OF NATURE. This i3 a record of the natural experience of every sensitive and poetical mind. But quietly indeed must the world have gone with a man, in whom this serene religion of poetry continues an undisturbed empire. A calm and philosophic temperament like Wordsworth's, with the passions lulled to sleep, or occasions of disturbance cut off by a mountain solitude, and sweet thoughts only nursed in leafy retreats, may abide in such experience, and continue the accordant language: Knowing that nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life to lead From joy to joy; for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress "With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. But if this be mistaken for religion, it is a disastrous mistake indeed. If there be no other nor higher element than that which these experiences develop, a worshipper of nature, even with such feelings, would remain for ever in the porch of the great temple, nor ever enter the inmost sanctuary. How different is the language of the soul, when coloured by the religious affec- tions, when nature is viewed through a heart filled with the inspiration of love to God, and in communion with him. Nature becomes not less beautiful, but God is more clearly seen. The intellectual and poetical atmosphere is not discsteemed or neglected, but is not dwelt in exclusively or alone; the element of spiritual devotion, of prayer, praise, and heavenly love, mingles with it, diffuses a warmer glow and sweeter tints, through which the lines of the works of God disclose something of the Divine face of their author, and produce not only a deeper power of joy and a harmony of soul, as natural as the serene and quiet beauty of an Autumn noon, in which we seem to see into the life of things, but a still more blessed mood, as on the verge of INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 23 the unseen and eternal, participating of the Earnest of the Spirit, and approximating to the life of heaven. The more the principle of the law breaks forth in nature, Mr. Coleridge has remarked, "the more does the husk drop off, and the phenomena themselves become more spiritual." But it can only be, where the principle of law, and because the principle of law, in a well constituted and believing mind, leads directly to the lawgiver: otherwise, the discovery and declaration of law itself becomes but a more transcendental materialism. The eye and ear inust be quickened and guided by that inward love, that heavenly sympathy in the soul, which is the secret of true and living knowledge, and then "the heavens and the earth shall declare, not only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the mount, in the skirts of his divinity." 1 "At last the scene shall change," exclaims the heavenly minded Henry Martyn, towards the close of his life in Persia, " and I shall find myself in a world, where all is love ! We have a city, whose builder and maker is God. The least of His works it is refreshing to look at. A dried leaf or a straw makes me feel myself in good company." He was drawing near to that world, where he would see God, no more through the leaves or light of nature, so dear to him as speaking of God, but in vision and enjoyment incomprehensible here, without cloud, without veil, and according to the wondrous announcement in God's Word, face to face. And how sadly, yet serenely beautiful are the last recorded aspirations in his diary, penned amidst the sleepless fever of his mortal frame ! "I sat in the orchard, and thought, with sweet comfort and peace, of my God; in solitude, my company, my friend, and comforter. Oh! when shall time give place to eternity! When shall appear that new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness! There, there shall in no wise enter in any thing that defileth: none of that wickedness, which has made men worse than wild beasts; none of those corruptions which add still more to the miseries of mortality, shall be seen or heard of any more!" 1 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark, that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best, And from the sun, and from the breezy air Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame: And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of nature ! And so, his senses gradually rapt In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, singing lark ! That singest like an angel in the clouds. Coleridge. — Fears in Solitude. It was the season sweet, of budding leaves, ' Of days advancing towards their utmost length, And small birds singing to their happy mates. Wild is the music of the autumnal wind Among the faded woods; but these blithe notes Strike the deserted to the heart; I speak Of what I know, and what we feel wdthin. Wordsworth's Mountain Churchyard. e^ Yet, the light of Love Not failing, perseverance from their steps Departing not, they shall at length obtain The glorious habit by which sense is made Subservient still to moral purposes, Auxiliar to divine. . Despondency Corrected. And if the solemn nightingale be mute, And the soft woodlark here did never chaunt Her vespers, Nature fails not to provide Impulse and utterance. The whispering air Sends inspiration from the shadowy heights And blind recesses of the caverned rocks; The little rills and waters numberless, Inaudible by daylight, blend their notes With the loud streams; and at the quiet hour, When issue forth the first pale stars, there breathes A voice of spiritual presence to the souls, A voiceful presence o'er the listening soul. The Excursion. CHAPTER II. Beauty, Constancy, and Eepetition of the Analogies between the [Natural and Spiritual Life: Practical purposes of these Lessons; The Universe as the Shadow of God's Light : A faith in that which is above Nature requi'site # to view Nature aright. How many, how beautiful, how constant are the analogies drawn between the processes of nature and the goings on of spiritual life! The relation of the seasons to one another, and to the object and end of the whole year, is full of instruction as the symbol of spiritual reality, and the suggestion of spiritual thought. The relation of seed-time . to harvest, and of harvest to seed-time, the spring as the parent of the autumn, and the autumn as the child of spring, are frequently and solemnly dwelt upon. And the perpetual recurrence of these seasons, the familiar sight and knowledge of these relations, never make the lesson trite ; on the contrary, there is a beauty and solemnity in it, which no frequency of return can diminish, a power of freshness, and a depth of power, in the appeal to our immortality, which no familiarity can wear out. listen, Man ! It is the language of the serenest, most gradual, fixed, and quiet pro- cesses of nature, with an appeal as much deeper than that of the cataract, as the still, small voice was more penetrating to the soul of Elijah than the noise of the rushing, rending whirlwind. But why do I speak of the frequency and familiarity of the lesson? Is it so, that the processes of nature are so very fami- liar and so often witnessed, so perpetually observed that they can become trite and disregarded? Why! the years in a man's lifetime number them all. Few men ever see more than fifty summers' suns, fifty winters' snows and tempests. Few men ever behold more than fifty times, in passing through this world of nature, the indescribably beautiful and solemn imagery of INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 27 spring and autumn, the goings on of seed-time, and the ripening and gathering of harvest. Of the multitudes pent up in cities, how few there are that ever behold these scenes at all; that ever know any thing of nature, save the cares, the passions, the anxieties, the depravities and conflicts of human nature ! How few there are that ever even see the sun rise and set ! How still fewer that ever watch the opening of spring, or the passage of spring into summer, or of summer into autumn, or of autumn into winter ! What study of these scenes it requires to gain a familiarity with them! The mere passage of life, from year to year, no more of necessity opens up to a man's soul the loveli- ness of nature, or gives him knowledge and command of the imagery and teachings of nature, or makes him familiar even with the commonest sights of nature, than to be whirled round the earth in a rail-car would make a man acquainted with the landscapes, climates, and geography of our globe. Now if a man could have leisurely and serenely watched, with the eye of a painter, the imagination of a poet, and the heart of a Christian, the varied seasons of the year, spring, summer, autumn, whiter, fifty times in succession, what is that to the inexhaustible magnificence and beauty each year poured out anew! What is that to the infinite variety and freshness of night and day, morning and evening, cloud and sky, sea and land, mountain and dale, sunshine and rain, brooks and banks, running streams and mighty rivers, plain and valley, springing herbage, and opening and falling flowers; trees budding, blossoming, clustering with fruits and foliage; a wilderness of leaves changing with the months, in hues that speak to the soul in their evanescent yet perpetual beauty; a wilderness of plants, that from the seed, or from the root of man's planting, or of nature's wild, unsought, unstudied abundance and abandonment, first break the earth and open to the sunlight in the green blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear; growing, changing, from shape to shape, from colour to colour, from the freshness of spring to the ripeness of autumn ! All this combined with the renewal, diversity, and gaiety of animal life, in forms and habits almost as countless as the leaves, fruits, and flowers; all in one grand, mighty, ever- changing panorama under the cope of heaven, in every season entirely new, and yet the same ! What, to the knowledge of all this, or for an adequate command of such knowledge, or for the 28 VOICES OF NATURE. exhausting, or even the enumerating of its lessons, or the full understanding of the teachings of nature by the soul, would be fifty times beholding of it ! Oh no! Our human lifetime is not enough to make nature familiar to us, not enough to take the charm of novelty and wonder, even childlike wonder, from any of God's works. Enough to lay up God's sermons in the soul, enough to learn the syllables of wisdom from the lilies of the field as they grow, but not enough to make one lesson trite or wearisome. Before the solemnity, the richness and the beauty of the lesson can possibly become familiar, or lose its power, we pass away from it, into that advanced world of which it is the prelude and the warning. Before we can fully realize the greatness of the pre- diction, we are borne past it into the reality. After passing- through this world of nature, these forms of teaching and in- structive loveliness, one would think a happy soul might wish to come back and survey them again from the serenity of a higher, yet nearer post of observation, in a holier existence, with a heart entirely in unison with God, entirely free from human care and passion, in angelic leisure to drink in the spirit of love, harmony, and happiness, and to understand the lessons, both sweet and sad, and the influences, both warning and animating, which God has given to nature in a fallen world. But they are linked now with nature for practical purposes. They are not given for our amusement or enjoyment merely, but for our education and instruction; ours is a disciplinary world, and the lessons of nature are a part of God's own discipline with us. The poets have often used the forms and materials of nature merely as rich fuel to feed the fires of an intellectual imagination; but the diviner lessons they have disregarded. It is as if a Hottentot should take a richly bound snd ornamented copy of the Gospels, and fasten the gold clasps and illuminated pages as ornaments to his person, but throw the writing awav. Not thus to be used, did God write the book of nature for us, nor for our earthly life, but for our immortality. In the recesses of a thick wood it seems as if nature were meditating upon man, or for him, as deeply as man upon nature. In the sacred stillness of a summer's noon, or in the forest by moonlight, there is an almost audible breathing of nature, and the momentary droppings of the buds, or of the falling leaves, or of the unevaporated dew- INTERPRETATION OP NATURE. 29 drops, are as pauses in the mood of thought; and the mind realizes the feeling described by John Foster, " That there is through all nature some mysterious element like soul, which comes, with a deep significance, to mingle itself with the conscious being of the intent and devout observer." Indeed, there are times when the trees themselves, in a still and quiet landscape of secluded beauty, seem conscious beings, capable of sensitive enjoyment, if not of thought. And ever, over all nature, there is the air of our own immortality, a sympathy with our immortal being; and from all the dominion of nature, yea, from the figured picturesque walls of this transitory tabernacle, through which, generation after generation, we are passing to the world of spirits, from the flammantia mcenia mundi, from Time and space itself outward, is reverberated back the inward utterance of a never-ending life. The poet Dana has enshrined this utter- ance in a form of language for the hymn of nature, which constitutes one of the grandest passages in English poetry. listen, man! A voice within us speaks that startling word, Man ! thou shalt never die ! Celestial voices Hymn it unto our souls; according harps By angel fingers touched, when the mild stars I Of morning sang together, sound forth still The song of our great immortality. Thick clusterings orbs, and this our fair domain, The tall dark mountains and the deep-toned seas, Join in this solemn universal song. listen, ye, our spirits! drink it in From all this air! 'Tis in the gentle moonlight; 'Tis floating midst Day's setting glories; Night, Wrapt in her sable robe, with silent step, Comes to our bed, and breathes it in our ears. Night and the Dawn, bright Day and thoughtful Eve: All time, all bounds, the limitless expanse, As one vast mystic instrument, are touched By an unseen living hand, and conscious chords Quiver -with joy in this great jubilee. The dying hear it, and as sounds of earth Grow dull and distant, wake their passing souls To mingle in this heavenly harmony. 30 VOICES OF tfATUT.E. A heavenly harmony indeed it is, yet not unmingled with some sadder strains. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now, and all the universe is waiting in earnest expectation for the manifestation of the sons of God, in their immortality of life and blessedness. Sin in the human world has had a consequence and an avowal in the natural; our own earthly habitation is not all as it came in original loveliness and goodness from the hand of God; but God himself has altered it for our discipline, and has put some chords into the natural Harp of Immortality, that were not there when the angels of God first heard it, and shouted in responsive halleluias of rapturous gratitude and praise. Yet then or now, Nature is a book of God for our instruction. And what are all the forms of nature, animate or inanimate, but a series of diagrams, which God has given us for the beginning of our education, for the development, working, and discipline of our thoughts in the learning of His. For His eternal power and divine nature, the ideas and things invisible, of Him the invisible God, are clearly demonstrated, clearly seen, by the things made and visible. The material and temporal itself is the shadmo of the spiritual and eternal ; the created is the shadow of the uncreated, or rather produces a shadow of the uncreated light. The whole of creation, in this world and in all worlds, cm be but as a series of glorious steps, fit for angels themselves to use, as symbolized in Jacob's dream; a ladder from earth to heaven, by which, not in dreams only, but in sober waking certainty, we may hold communion with heavenly realities; may do this sacredly in Nature, if in the Word and by the Spin* -wo have learned through Christ, the Maker and Governor of Nature, a living communion with the Father of our spirits. Whatever we do with Nature, without this spiritual and heavenly light and guidance, is but an atheistic idolatry or amusement, a railroad construction of profit and loss, from one grain of sand to another, in this ant-hill of our humanity. For it is the light of life, in which alone we can rightly observe nature, and read her lessons; and that light of life the author and giver of it himself has said, is enjoyed, is known, is realised only by those who follow Christ; all others are in darkness. "He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." INTERPRETATION OP NATURE. 31 A divine expression is this, that light of life. If it had been i found in Plato instead of John, the world's philosophers would have written whole commentaries upon it; and Plato himself would have been almost deified as the revealer of light. But philosophy must come to God for it, and to his Spirit. And this expression, the light of life, is to be taken in connection and comparison with that in the Old Testament, With thee is the fountain of life; in thy light, ive shall see light. The light that we see is as the shadow of God's light; the light that we feel, inward, spiritual, lifegiving, is from the fountain of God's life. When we get it there, when it streams into our souls from God's fountain, the forms and fixtures of nature may be as the atmo- sphere through which it is transmitted, or as the orbs, from which, as from a central sun, it is reflected. Nor is it the less living because reflected; not less the light of life, because between it and us the shadows of things without intelligent life fall upon the soul. God is light; and all the shadows of the universe shall warm and gladden the heart, where God's light falls. Now again we recall another sweet passage from the Book of Grace, by the light of which we are patiently to study the Book of Nature. Light is soivnfor the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart. What land is that, which is sown with this seed? What fields are those susceptible of such planting, and such a harvest? It is better to turn up furrows there, and gather the sheaves there, than if you had mountains of gold- mingled rock, and machines to crush them, and rivers at your will to wash the grains of gold into tanks waiting at your har- bours. Light is sown for the righteous. It is sown of God, but man must co-operate in the tillage. It is sown in nature, but only the righteous are at the Harvest Home; only they are the reapers. It is sown just like all other seed, in weakness, to be raised in power. The land and the fields are all the processes and forms of nature, all this created world, ourselves, God's dis- cipline with us, God's providences upon, over, and around us; in all things light is sown; in all things the gems of light are hidden for discovery, for cherishing, for growth, for a future and glorious harvest. God's word itself is hidden in the heart, to break forth into glory, to constitute now, while beneath the fur- row, as it were, the life of God in the soul of man, the life hidden with Christ in God, and to constitute, when all these 32 VOICES OF NATURE. preparatory and growing processes are finished, the suddenly revealed harvest of eternal light and blessedness in Christ, according to the rule that when he who is our life shall appear, then shall we also appear with him in glory. In Nature and in Grace fight is sown. It does not blaze forth at once, but for a time is beneath the furrow, out of sight in the bosom of the soil; sometimes there must be patient waiting for it, and much waiting upon God in prayer. If there be any thing for which we have to wait upon him, it is light, and when we get that from him, as his gift, whether we get it through the medium of nature or his word, we get it by his spirit, and not by our intellect alone; and it is the light of life, and not of the under- standing merely. It is a gift worth waiting for patiently, worth labouring after exceedingly in prayer. But nature will not teach a prayerless mind, nor become the inspiration of religion, nor the fight of life, where faith in that which is above nature is weak or wanting. I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland-ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell; To which in silence hushed, his very soul Listened intently; and his countenance soon Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within Were heard, sonorous cadences! whereby To his belief, the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea. Even such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of Faith. The Excursion. Faith there must be, or even the sound of the spiritual lessons will be absent ; there may be the shell, but it will converse of no mysterious sea ; there is no religion in nature, if the author of nature be excluded from the soul ; there must be a ministry above nature to interpret to the soul the altar of nature and teach it how to present a sacrifice in the great temple. Thus, how beautiful, side by side with Wordsworth's descriptions of the in- spirations of nature, is that Sonnet translated by him from Michael Angelo : INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 33 The prayers I make will then be sweet indeed If thou the Spirit give, by which I pray : My unassisted heart is barren clay, Which of its native self can nothing feed. Of good and pious works Thou art the seed, "Which quickens only where Thou sayest it may. Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way, No man can find it. Father ! Thou must lead. Do Thou, then, breathe those thoughts into my mind By which such virtue may in me be bred, That in Thy holy footsteps I may tread. The fetters of my tongue do Thou unbind, That I may have the power to sing of Thee, And sound thy praises everlastingly ! la this connection, as to the heavenly lessons to be drawn from the contemplation and study of nature, we may apply religiously, within the domain of truths revealed in God's Word, but foreshadowed in nature, what Coleridge applies philosophi- cally. " The first range of hills that encircles the scanty vale of human life is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. The multitude below these vapours appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity, and now all a-glow, with colours not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that the sources must be far higher and far inward ; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale itself, nor the surrounding mountains, contained, or could supply." l The prevailing habits of association in the mind will greatly modify the manner in which a man communes with nature. Not only the temper of the affections, but the daily objects and sphere of habitual thought exercise a mighty influence. The 1 Biographia Literaria. 4.3 C 34: VOICES OF NATUKE. air of the mind, not of the seasons, is the real atmosphere through which the scenes of the natural world, the dawning and the twilight, the sunrise and the sunset, the trees and the stars, are viewed. The mind reduplicates itself. 1 One man sees the loveliness ahroad, another sees it not ; they both behold a world veiled by their own habits of thought and feeling. In this sense, the eye looks through the mind, not the mind through the eye. The sense of vision puts on the spectacles of character, and looks through several mental lenses, and the creation is seen, not as it is, but as the man is. Early communion with nature, from childhood on into life, is therefore the truest, the most genuine ; and such communion, together with the habit of tracing analogies, will enrich the mind's associative stores, and give to the law of association a nobleness of sweep, a paradisiacal power, and a gorgeousness of train like a Roman triumph. And of God in nature, as well as in his Word, it may be said, They that seek me early shall find me. Let me add to these thoughts a proof, in the personal experi- ence of a great mind, how strong and lasting are the associations, whatever they may be, which link the soul to the natural scenes and objects that have been watched with an early and heartfelt interest : " Sweet nature !" says John Foster, " I have conversed with her with inexpressible luxury; I have almost worshipped her. A flower, a tree, a bird, a fly, has been enough to kindle a delightful train of ideas and emotions, and sometimes to ele- vate the mind to sublime conceptions. When the autumn stole on, I observed it with the most vigilant attention, and felt a pensive regret to see those forms of beauty which tell that all the beauty is soon going to depart. One autumnal flower, the white convolvulus, excited very great interest, by recalling the season I spent at Chichester, where I happened to be very attentive to this flower, and once or twice, if you recollect, endeavoured to draw it with the pencil. I have at this moment the most lively image of my doing this, and of the delight I used to feel in looking at this beautiful flower in the hedges of those patha and fields, with which both you and I are so well acquainted." 1 Dana's Poem on the Soul. — <$i How beautiful this dome of sky, And the vast hills in fluctuation fixed At thy command, how awful! Shall the soul, Human and rational, report of Thee Even less than these? Be mute who will, who can, Yet I will praise Thee with impassioned voice. My lips, that may foi'get Thee in the crowd, Cannot forget Thee here, where Thou hast built For thine own glory, in the wilderness! Wordsworth. ! Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, Portentous sight! the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, . Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, J And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, 1 Cries out, Where is it? Coleiudqe's Fears in Solitude.. K __ _ — gs It cannot be denied, without wilful blindness, that the so- called system of nature (that is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of communi- ties, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. Satyr une's Letters — Coleridge. I can never think that man a Christian who has blotted out of his 'scheme the very powers by which only the great func- tions of Christianity can be sustained; neither can I think that any man, though he may make himself a marvellously clever disputant, ever could tower upwards into a very great philosopher, unless he should begin or should end with Chris- tianity But Kant had no instincts of creation or restora- tion within his Apollyon mind; for he had no love, no faith, no self-distrust, no humility, no childlike docility; all which qualities belonged essentially to Coleridge's mind, and wait- ed only for manhood and for sorrow to bring them forward. Though a great man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel, yet an intellect of the highest order must build upon Christianity. A very clever architect may choose to show his power by building with insufficient materials, but tbe supreme architect must require the very best; because the perfection of the forms cannot be shown but in the perfec- tion of the matter. De Quinct. OS" CHAPTEB III. The Letter and the Spirit: Processes of Pantheism and Atheism: Symphony of Nature prelusive to the great Eeligious Anthem. Isr the teachings of Nature there is a distinction, as in those of Scripture, between the letter and the Spirit; and while the Spirit giveth life, the letter, if you stop there, and rest in it, killeth. Materialism, Atheism, Pantheism, have all been found in conjunction with much apparent study of nature. Just so ; a man may be an eminent philologist, and yet run through whole pages of eloquence and poetry in a dead language, understand- ing the words but heedless of the thought, unable to appreciate it. The forms of speech in the New Testament in Greek, may be the subject of profound investigation and knowledge, where all belief, consciousness, and living experience of the meaning of the text are excluded from the soul. Just so it may be with the study of the forms of nature. There may be neither glimpse of God, nor any vision or faith of spiritual realities. A man that looks at glass, May on it stay his eye, Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And so the heavens espy. His windows may be covered with cobwebs and dirt so thick, that he can see nothing through them, and he may never throw them open to let in the fresh air and uninterrupted light. A great many minds, that have windows made for use, see little else but the cobwebs and the sashes. As to the darkening process in Nature, there is little or no difference in the end between Atheism and Pantheism. The •3D VOICES OF NATURE. two things might seem to be the extreme opposites and antag- onisms of one another; but the truth of the existence and attributes of God is equally distant from both. The none and the all lead here to the same fool's paradise. The fooi that hath said in his heart, No God! is the corporal of one platoon, one regiment, one wing of the body of under-fools. The fool that hath said in his intellect, All God! is the recruiting ser- geant of the other. The a privative and the pan collective, amount to the same thing; although the blasphemy of the a is more condensed and explicit, less reputable, and therefore less dangerous; while the Atheism of the pan is rarefied, transcen- dental, supportive of balloons, wearing sometimes a reverential nature-worshipping form of mystic piety; mist-piety, we would rather say, shrouding you with a kind of wet, that penetrates to the very bones, if long enough continued, while a strong, drenching rain would have done its work upon the skin and clothes, and left a possibility of drying in the next sunshine. The pan is the drunkenness and pride of the intellect, All God, no creatures! The a has been less in reputation, as savouring rather of the coarseness of the appetites, a pettifogger for the animal passions; All creatures, no God! The pan has had some of its supporters among the philosophers and poets, and is in general too subtle and refined for a pot-house religion; the a, the no God, is an easier, more tangible, more intelligible creed. " But as to religion," said John Howe, "it is all one whether we make nothing to be God, or every thing; whether we allow of no God to worship, or leave none to worship him." It is the fool who thus blinks at nature, but the folly begins in the heart, and is native only there; the intellect by itself never was so debased. " Religion," as Coleridge has profoundly remarked, "as both the corner-stone and the key-stone of moral- ity, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be ex- pected that fundamental truth* would be such as might be denied, though only by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the heart alone." 1 But how can there be such a thing as an Atheist? What is that process, by which, if there be such a thing, the soul of man Biographia Literaria, vol. I, page 124. INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 39 can have come to the conclusion that there is no such reality as soul in the universe, and no such Being as God ? A process more singular than that by which human flesh is converted into stone, more anomalous than the change of all animated existences into fossils. If a man were to deny the evidence of his own father, though protected and educated by him for years, though conversing with him every day of his own life, or if he were to assert that what seems to be a man communing with him, is nothing in the world but the fabric composing his dress, the stuff denominated clothes; this would be no greater insanity or impudence of intellect, than the denial of a God, or the asser- tion, by what is termed Pantheism, that there is no other God than the forms and dress of Nature, and that this universe is but an accidental clothes-horse. In all the operations of Nature God manifests himself as really to our senses, by as direct mate- rial evidence, as we ever ourselves can use, in the manifestation of ourselves to one another by sight and conversation. WJience then came that overwhelming, startling, supernatural intelligence to the soul of the Atheist, that there is no God? From what part of Nature, in himself or in the world around him, came the amazing announcement ? " Tell/' says John Foster, " of the mysterious voices which have spoken to you from the deeps of the creation, falsifying the expressions marked on its face. Tell of the new ideas, which, like meteors passing over the solitary wanderer, gave you the first glimpses of truth, while benighted in the common belief of the Divine existence." The process by which a man becomes divested of that belief, conducts him to the highest climax of that character marked in Scripture by the name Fool. It is the most utter and infinite debasement of the human reason, though it should even come upon him in the form of an angel takiug him, and in the sensa- tion of being taken, to the summit of a high mountain, there to be shown all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. But if he knows that there is no God, if this be not a conjecture, a wild, melancholy wish, cr ajh_adowJfrom__thewings of Satan dar kening the soul as he flies with it , " the wondeFthenturns," remarks John Foster, in one of the most striking passages in his Essays, " on the great process by which a man could grow to the immense intelligence that can know that there is no God. What ages and what lights are requisite for this attainment ! This 40 VOICES OF NATURE. intelligence involves the very attributes of Divinity, while a God is denied. For unless this man is omnipresent, unless he is at this moment in every place in the universe, he cannot know but there may be in some place manifestations of a Deity by which even he would be overpowered. If he does not know absolutely every agent in the universe, the one that he does not know may be God. If he is not himself the chief agent in the universe, and does not know what is so, that which is so may be God. If he is not in absolute possession of all the propositions that constitute universal truth, the one which he wants may be, that there is a God. If he cannot with certainty assign the cause of all that he perceives to exist, that cause may be a God. If he does not know every thing that has been done in the immeasur- able ages that are past, some things may have been done by a God. Thus, unless he knows all things, that is, precludes an- other Deity, by being one himself, he cannot know that the Being whose existence he rejects does not exist. But he must know that he does not exist, else he deserves equal contempt and compassion for the temerity with which he firmly avows his rejection, and acts accordingly." Having no hope, and without God in tlie world. Such is the description of practical Atheism in the Word of God. And what a melancholy, dreary, desolate announcement! Without God, in the world ! The conception of an intelligent being in such a state is even more terrible, than the thought of a world without a God. The latter is an impossibility; but if it were not, the condition of intelligent beings in a world without a God would be, indeed, infinitely to be preferred to that of an intelli- gent accountable being without God in the world. Hence it is that the fool hath said in his heart, No God! It is a wish, a mere corrupt, depraved wish, and not an opinion. It is the smoke of the bottomless pit, not the flame, nor the logic. Hath said in his heart, not in his intellect; for the intellect and the conscience never can say that. If there were a world without a God, there could be no help for it, and the inhabitants of such a world could never have even the conception of a God. But to be without God in the world is a voluntary depravity, a chosen diabolism of existence, an enthronement of self instead of God, as the present worshipped Deity, even while the intellect and conscience are fully aware of the being of a God. INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 41 These groans and flickerings of unbelief can no more cast an element of darkness, or a cloud, or a shadow, between U3 and the Divine light, which God causes to be poured as a flood over all nature, than the croaking raven as he flies hooting over a i corn-field, can darken ' the sun. These things are but night- mares, contortions, grimaces, like the babblings and mumblings of an idiot. As movements of the mind, they are but the diseased workings of a darkened and poisoned understanding, in which the habit of alienation from God produces results like the dread creations of delirium tremens in the nervous system of a drunkard. Dogs, wolves, snakes, and hissing demons appear, where there is nothing but the clear, sweet air, the bright sun- light, and the musical voices of nature, speaking of God. Never- theless, there is now and then an attempt, in some of the popular literature of the day, to give currency to the Atheistic and Pantheistic element. And mingled with fine thought and poetic imagery, where is the opening mind that may not be fatally injured by its influence? There may be qualities in admired literary essays, like the sentiments of those chance-started friends, of whom Coleridge speaks, False, and fair-foliaged as the Manchineel, And tempting me to slumber in their shade E'en mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps, Mixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven, And I woke poisoned. The droppings from such branches, whether in poetry or prose, turn into viper-thoughts that coil around the mind, and leave their poison in it, before it is aware of their meaning. It is sometimes intimated that the unbelieving dreams of Pantheism, being unintelligible to most of youthful mind, are harmless; but they would be less harmless, if they were clearer, if expressed with a more startling and blaspheming boldness. It would be as if putting forth your hand to pluck what seemed a violet in a bank of flowers, you grasped a cold slimy toad, or adder. A gentle boy or girl, on a Maying expedition, would be terrified almost to death with such an encounter; and an innocent believ- ing mind, if you presented the realities of an irreligious philosophy in their native hideousness, would start back with like horror. 42 VOICES OF NATURE. Would that by the side of every young and dreaming soul there might be a Guardian Ithuriel, with his sacred spear, to touch the reptile, " squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve," and develop the form from whence come those insinuating whispers. Avaunt, thou lying shape, with wings coloured as from Paradise, but faded in the atmosphere of Hell: Who in this month of showers, Of dark brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, Mak'st devils' yule, with worse than wintry song, The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among. A man whose heart is not in communion with God can no more read the higher lessons of Nature, than a man by the road- side can tell what message is flitting through the air, by gazing on the parallel wires of a telegraph. He must put himself in connection with the communicating mind. There is, indeed, a softening, gentle, meditative mood, to which the sights and sounds of Nature win the thoughtful mind; and oh, how grate- ful, how healing, how redeeming, from fretfulness and care, how preparatory for better things, are the sweet natural influences of a morning or evening landscape even on our mortal frame! It is a power prelusive to the great harmony, and awakening atten- tion; many analogies will be suggested, many thoughts excited, many fancies and feelings stirred. But the grand meaning, the utterance of Deity, the inward sense of his eternal power and Godhead, the perception of the Omnipresent, yet personal In- telligence, the sight and sense of all that God unquestionably means his creatures to behold in nature ! the soul must be awake, indeed, for that, alive to God for that, and then how blessed! Is there any thing so desirable as such communion? Is there any power of genius, any faculty of intellect, any art or creative grandeur of imagination, to be compared with that? The man who can really, not with mere sentimentalise, but in livino- union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, pos- sesses, in material forms around him, a source of power and hap- piness inexhaustible and like the life of angels. We suppose the difference between the highest and the lowest orders of angelic intelligences themselves is simply this, that the first are capable of a nearer view of God, endowed with a more glorious power INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 43 of understanding and of sensibility in regard to the infinite, un- fathomable, incomprehensible glory of his attributes; and in pro- portion to the greatness of their sensibilities, and the grandeur of their conceptions, is the ardour and fire of their devotion. So the highest fife and glory of man is to be alive unto God ; and when this grandeur of sensibility to Him, and this power of com- munion with Him, is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of Nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of Heaven. Earth is no more a prison, but a province of freedom, loveliness, and light, as one of the mansions of our Father's House, where we may walk with God, and prepare to be trans- lated. How near we are to Him, in every part of His creation, when alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord! One Spirit, His, Who wore the platted crown with bleeding brows, Eules universal nature. Not a flower, But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, Of his unrivalled pencil. He inspires Their balmy odours, and imparts their hues, And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes, In grains as countless as the sea-side sands, The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth. Happy, who walks with Him ! whom what he finds Of flavour or of scent in fruit or flower, Or what he views of beautiful, or grand In nature, from the broad majestic oak, To the green blade that twinkles in the sun, Prompts with remembrance of a present God. Cowper's Task. Now in contrast with the glory and blessedness of this sublime and intelligent communion with God in Nature, what shall be said of the moral and mental imprisonment and insensibility, which sees nothing in Nature but lovely forms and colours ; the yellow primrose by the river's brink, and nothing more; or merely a reduplication of man himself and his fancies, as a love- sick Narcissus before a mirror? Or what shall be said of that more degraded moral and mental idiocy, which can worship the 14 VOICES OF NATURE. forms of Nature as themselves the God, and man himself a part of the pantisocracy, as a leaf upon the tree, as a wave upon the ocean? What can be so brutish as by intellectual effort to con- found the instrument and conveyancer of thought, with the soul from which it issued? If a man should stand beside a printing- press, and seriously teach you that the press itself was part of your own brain, and that all its revolutions and heavings were but the ebb and flow of your consciousness, you would deem him a fit subject for a lunatic asylum. A man shall utter the same phrensies concerning God and the Created Universe, which as a press unfolds His thoughts to created mind, and straightway the man shall be himself semi-deified by fools, as a transcendental poet and philosopher. There are no depths of madness in this line into which men have not descended. In that beautiful Poem on the music of the Eolian Harp, the poet Coleridge traces the transition, by which an imaginative mind, floating in indolent and passive mood upon the clouds of random phantasies, might pass into that phrensy; and then with great beauty, and by an appeal to his own experience, reproves it. He is sitting with his beloved wife, in their lovely cottage at Clevedon, where the myrtles blossomed in the open air, and the white-flowered jasmins twined across the porch, and the tallest rose peeped in at the chamber window. They could hear the faint murmur of the sea, evening and morning, and at silent noon. The little landscape round was green and woody. How exquisite the scents, Snatch'd from yon bean-field! and the world so hush'd! The stilly murmur of the distant sea Tells us of silence. There was a simple Lute, placed lengthwise in the clasping casement. The desultory breathings of the air, now low and sweet, now loud and rising, made music as natural and lovely as the scene; and now and then Such a soft floating witchery of sound, As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-land, Where melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 45 Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing! the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion, and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought; and joyance every where! Methinks it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled; When the breeze warbles, and the mute, still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. And thus, wild and various as the strains breathed through the lute by the random breathings of the wind, are the idle flitting phantasies across the indolent brain of the poet, reclining on the mid-way slope of the green hill at noon, and with half-closed eyes watching the sunbeams on the sea. And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all! Oh yes! here is the very devil's bridge, by which the thought- ful mind, not guarded nor enlightened in the understanding by a living Faith in the heart, may pass from poet ry mtojpantheism . But a believing Friend without, and a sense of sin within, arrest these fancies. And thy more serious eye, a mild reproof Darts, beloved woman! nor such thoughts, Dim and unhallowed, dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God, Meek daughter in the family of Christ! Well hast thou said, and holily dispraised These shapenings of the unregenerate mind, Bubbles, that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring: For never guiltless may I speak of Him, The Incomprehensible ! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; Who with his saving mercies healed me, A sinful and most miserable man! 46 VOICES OF NATURE. The bats of pantheism and philosophic unbelief can have no clinging place in a soul sensible of sin and fleeing to a Saviour. The spiritual revelation that discloses guilt, dissipates also the dancing marsh-lights that assume the colouring of truth and heaven. The darkness and deception being in the darkened mind, and not in the telescope through which we see God, the film must be removed from the mental eye; for otherwise, though reason and religion are their own evidence, yet the mind discerns the truth in neither. Hence the direction given towards the Saviour, and the application requisite to Him, that He may give thee light, may prepare thee for the heavenly vision. u The j natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he I is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its jl own purification; not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception. For religion passes I out of the ken of reason only where the eye of reason has reached its own horizon; and then faith is but its continuation: even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight, and ' twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry \ heaven, which manifests itself alone; and the outward behold- ing is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I am, j and to the filial Word, that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe." 1 The great mind that gave utterance to these sentences, learned this wisdom from a deep spiritual experience, after passing through a vast circle of intellectual and speculative delusions. De Quincy has related of Coleridge as affirming in conversation an experience which Coleridge himself once appended, if we remember right, in a foot note to the very poem referred to. <■' On my first introduction to Coleridge," remarks De Quincy,' " he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said: 1 Biographia Literaria. INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 47 Of whose all-seeing eye Aught to demand were impotence of mind. This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that on the con- tary he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and absolutely learned men he pronounced incapable of prayer." Thou who art Life and Light, I see thee spread Thy glories through these regions of the dead, I hear thee call the sleeper. Up ! Behold The earth unveiled to thee, the heavens unrolled ! On thy transformed soul celestial light Bursts; and the earth, transfigured, on thy sight Breaks a new sphere! Ay, stand in glad amaze, While all its figures opening on thy gaze, Unfold new meanings. Thou shalt understand Its mystic hierograph, thy God's own hand. Ah! man shall read aright when he shall part With human schemes, and in the new-born heart Feel coursing new-born life; when from above Shall flow throughout his soul, joy, light, and love, And he shall follow up these streams, and find In One the source of nature, grace, and mind. There, he in God, and God in him, his soul Shall look abroad, and fed the world a whole. From nature up to nature's God no more Grope out his way through parts, nor place before The Former, the things formed. Man yet shall learn The outward by the inward to discern, The inward by the Spirit. E. H. Dana. 3V) Science is the rival of imagination, and by teaching that these stars are suns, has given a new interest to the antici- pations of eternity, which can supply such inexhaustible materials of intelligence and wonder. Yet these stars seem to confess that there must be still sublimer regions for the recep- tion of spirits, refined beyond the intercourse of all material lights; and even leave us to imagine that the whole material universe itself is only a place where beings are appointed to originate, and to he educated through successive scenes, till, passing over its utmost bounds to the immensity beyond, they there at length find themselves in the immediate presence of the Divinity. John Foster. 43 i) on) 9Qi CHAPTER IV. Arrangement of the Works of Nature for Man's Education and Dis- cipline: Spiritual Intuitions and Impulses in the Constitution of the Human Mind: Human Intuition compared with Animal Instinct: Influence and Effect of Procrastination. In the book of Ecclesiastes a very peculiar passage comes to view, which we are inclined to refer to the sacred lessons which God has written or illustrated for us in the natural world. "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time; also, he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh, from the beginning to the end." No man can behold the face of nature in the lovely month in which I am now waiting, and not feel the force and beauty of the opening expression in this passage. God hath indeed made every thing beautiful in his time. In its proper season, and in its relations with man and the system of creation, Winter is beautiful, the Spring is beautiful, Summer is beautiful, and the Autumn is beautiful; and every circling month, be it participant of the qualities of November or of June, is beautiful in its time. Moreover, God has connected moral lessons with all the changes of the seasons, all the laws that regulate our globe, all the fixtures, phenomena, and scenery of our earthly abode. The world is God's cradle and nursery for a race of intelligent beings. He has made all its arrangements with reference to the development of our faculties, and the education of our minds and hearts. There is a counterpart in our moral being and destiny to the system of nature, by which we are surrounded. Nature looks into the heart, as into a mirror, and finds a reflection there; and the heart, as a self-conscious mirror, receives the reflection of INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 51 nature into its depths, and reveals those spiritual lines, which, without the reflecting heart, are never visible to sense. The system of nature is so arranged, that we may draw analo- gies and instructive lessons from it, or suggestions, in regard even to our eternal destiny; while in the study of God's works, by which we are surrounded, we have some of the noblest and most perfect means, both of moral and mental discipline. Thus God hath set the world in our hearts; in our own moral frame and destiny we have the purposes for which the world was framed, and the meanings which it was intended to sustain and illustrate; and which, as connected with our responsibilities and destinies for eternity, are so vast, so boundless, and the pheno- mena and laws of the physical globe are at the same time in themselves so wonderful and infinitely varied, that indeed on both accounts, on account both of the letter and the spirit, the frame-work and the lesson, it is impossible for any man to find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever; it hath a glorious, everlasting meaning; nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it; and God doeth it, that men should fear before him. We have perhaps in this announcement the great reason why the forms of nature, her grand and varied aspects of sublimity and beauty, the sunrise and the sunset, the sky by day, and this glorious light around us, night and the stars, the fountains, brooks, and rivers, the forests and the flowers, the cloud-capped mountain, the verdant plain, and the sublime and solemn ocean; why all these phenomena and forms, whether in storm or calm, exert so powerful an influence over the sensitive mind, and are to all our race objects of contemplation so full of interest and delight. It is not merely because the sense or requirement of sublimity and beauty in our intellectual constitution finds the elements of nourishment and satisfaction in these objects; but because we are moral beings, because this world, these forms, this natural life and light were intended to promote and sustain our education for God and a higher spiritual existence, and be- cause God has made every thing, if rightly viewed, full of a divine, celestial meaning. Here, too, is the great ground of obligation for the study of God's works, the study of them in a spiritual and religious light, the observance and application of 52 VOICES OF NATURE. their religious meanings, and not merely for artificial and econo- mic purposes. The soul of man His face designed to see, W ho gave these wonders to be seen by man, Has here a previous scene of objects great, On which to dwell; to stretch to that expanse Of thought, to rise to that exalted height Of admiration, to contract that awe, And give her whole capacities that strength, Which best may qualify for final joy. The more our spirits are enlarged on earth, The deeper draught they shall receive of Heaven. Young. This being the object and design of Nature, her forms are invested with a deeper meaning than can be seen at a glance, and God has certainly given to Nature a power over the mind, which, though in many respects plain and intelligible, is some- times, and in some things quite inscrutable. '-Twant to extract and absorb into my soul," remarked John Foster on one occasion, "the sublime mysticism that pervades all nature, but I cannot. I look on all the vast scene as I should on a column sculptured with ancient hieroglyphics, saying, there is significance there, but despairing to read. At every time, it is as if I met a ghost of solemn, mysterious, and indefinable aspect, but while I at- tempt to arrest it, to ask it the veiled secrets of the world, it vanishes." This makes us recur to the passage of Scripture before quoted, that no man can find out the work that God maketh, from the beginning to the end. We are to remember that the same Being made the world, who by himself carries on and executes the plan of its redemp- tion. Can there, then, be the least doubt, that in the pre- arrangemcnt of that plan, the world itself, which was to be its theatre, was created and arranged as it is, with special reference to the accomplishment of the purpose for which it was spoken into existence? All the laws and changes of this habitable globe are but as the loom, into which God puts the web of his provi- dence, to be unrolled. The stuff is immortality. Redemption takes it up, gives it form and colouring for eternity; and when th8 work is done, the loom itself, grand, and costly, and glorious INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 53 as its frame may seem to us, will be laid aside, as having sub- served its mighty end; will give place to some manifestation of the Divine Wisdom, some shadowing forth of the Divine attri- butes, through material agencies, still more transcendently sublime. None will regret the wreck, or rubbish, or burning of one world, passing into the glory of another. In the grand generalizations of Humboldt there are some admirable disclosures of the nature of the connection between the physical phenomena of sublimity and beauty, and their ex- citing effect upon the soul. The following passage from the Cosmos goes far towards the spiritual light going and returning between God's two revelations of the Scriptures and the worlds. " In the uniform plain, bounded only by the distant horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waving grasses deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves, softly rippling over the beach, leave a track, green with the weeds of the sea; every where the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a myste- rious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing, yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths. Every where. in every region of the globe, in every stage of intellectual cul- ture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouchsafed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and from the con- trast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side, whether we look upward to the starry vault of heaven, or scan the far- stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim homon across the vast expanse of ocean." But this is not all. There are particular lessons, and the habit of discovering analogies is inestimable. It may be so formed, gradually, as to arm the vision of the soul towards nature with a moral telescopic power. Thus nature may be read habitually as a revelation, and all the while an unobserved process of simplicity and refinement in the mind and heart may be going on, as the result of uninterrupted communion with so 54 VOICES OF NATURE. many lovely scenes in God's beautiful world. An interesting reflection occurs in Foster's memoranda of intervals of thought. "Looking at these objects is reading" said he to himself, while beholding various rural scenes, meadows, sheep, the river, and the landscape; " is not this more than reading descriptions of these things?" He had been regretting how little he had read respecting some things that can be seen. The truth is, both the reading and the looking are important; but even the looking should be reading, or the reading can be of little account as to practical knowledge and reflection. Now when Humboldt speaks of the earnest and solemn thoughts that intuitively arise from a presentiment within us, connected with the image of infinity around us, he refers to an innate power of discovery and appreciation of great spiritual truths, that, as it were, lie slumbering in our own souls, till external realities furnish awakening occasions and excitements. There is a correspondence between the instinctive and intuitive discernment and knowledges of the soul, and the frame and goings on of the world, in which it is confined for a season as in a school-house. What we see, carries us beyond what is seen by an intuitive necessity in our own being. And the intuitive faculties of the mind, as they are sometimes seen judging of nature, reading what the forms of nature mean, or rising to what they indicate, are most surprising; nay, they excite our solemn reverence and awe, and make us think of David's excla- mation, " I am fearfully and wonderfully made ! " Sin clouds the mind's clear vision; man, not earth, Around the self-starv'd Soul has spread a dearth, The earth is full of life: the living Hand Touched it with life; and all its forms expand With principles of being made to suit Man's varied powers, and raise him from the brute. And shall the earth of higher ends be full? Earth, which thou tread'st; and thy poor mind be dull ? Thou talk of life, with half thy soul asleep? Thou living dead man, let thy spirits leap Forth to the day; and let the fresh air blow Through thy soul's shut up mansion. Would'st thou know Something of what is life? Shake off this death! Have thy soul feel the universal breath With which all nature's quick; and learn to be Sharer in all that thou dost touch or see. Break from thy body's grasp, thy spirit's trance; Give thy soul air, thy faculties expanse, Knock off the shackles which thy spirit bind To dust and sense, and set at large thy mind ! Then move in sympathy with God's great whole, And be like man at first, A Living Soul! Dana. ' Tlioughts on the Soul.' X.C K9- It is because man oseth so amiss Her dearest blessings, Nature seemelh sad; Else why should she, in such fresh hour as this, Not lift the veil, in revelation glad, From her fair face 1 ? It is that man is mad! Then chide me not, clear Star, tbat I repine, When nature grieves; nor deem this heart is bad. Thou lookest towards earth; bnt yet the heavens are thine, While I to earth am bound. When will the heavens be mine? If man would but his finer nature learn, And not in life fantastic lose the sense Of simple things; could nature's features stern Teach him be thoughtful, then, with soul intense, I should not yearn for God to take me hence, But bear my lot, albeit in spirit bowed, Remembering humbly why it is, and whence: But when I see cold man of reason proud, My solitude is sad, I'm lonely in the crowd. Dana's 'Daybreak.' CHAPTEE V. Powers of Intuition in the soul: Effect of neglecting them: Degree of Perfection to 'which they may be developed: Destructive instincts of Kant: Direction of the spiritual instinct: Ruinous result of disobe- dience to it. There is a native power of spiritual judgment in man, if he had been habituated to exercise it, before which the universe might be almost as full of light as the pages of Divine Revelation. On one occasion, our Blessed Lord, in reasoning with the Jews, puts their ability to judge and decide concerning spiritual things on the same level with their ability to judge, from the appear- ances in the sky, the nature of the weather. It is a most striking appeal, which is thus made: "When ye see a cloud rise out of the West, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the South wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites! Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why even op yourselves, JUDGE YE NOT WHAT IS EIGHT?" This is a great and important argument ; full of meaning more than meets the eye; appealing to the mysterious depths of our own nature, depths out of which we not only judge, but shall be judged, and in which God hath not only set a counter- part of the world that now is, but an image of that which is to come. The world of nature is as a series of signals to a prisoner, signals arranged for his deliverance; for the soul of man is in a dungeon, until a communion is established with God, and a man becomes "the Lord's freeman." In order to rescue the prisoner, 58 VOICES OF NATURE. the deliverer must first gain his attention, must make him con- sider the meaning of the signs and sounds around him. He hears a familiar harp-melody, like King Richard sleeping in his prison, and awakened by the minstrelsy of his faithful follower. The Spirit breathes upon the Word, or some providence of solemn power awakes him, and he begins to listen to his God. Nature herself speaks, now no longer unheeded. Now he watches and interprets. Now what vast, infinite, glorious meanings, what grand awakening lessons shine and speak around him! "Enough of science and of art! Close up these barren leaves, Come forth, and bring with you a heart, That watches and receives." The poet and the painter see a world of their own in nature. They see what is reflected in the depths of their own being, what is wakened into life in an intelligent sensibility by the presenta- tion of nature, or formed by the power of a creative imagination. A great English landscape painter is said to have been engaged on one of his works, while a lady of rank and taste, looking on, remarked, "But, Mr. Turner, I do not see in nature all that you describe there." "Ah, Madam," answered the painter, "do you not wish you could?" This inward and intuitive sight is indeed a great possession. And there is vast power in that which is instinctive and spon- taneous. The greatest proof of genius is perhaps its spontaneous, irrepressible, natural activity. It is rather intuitive impulse than conscious power. A soul richly endowed, is alive to all elements of beauty, to all the things that God has made to act upon the mind, and they produce their full effect upon a sensitive nature, and set the life of genius in motion, even as the wind breathes upon an Eolian Harp, as the sun quickens the leaves, the trees, the flowers. It is an enviable thing to be so constituted; such a mind enjoys creation; such a mind works spontaneously, not because its path of action or of feeling, or its object of attain- ment, or its work in hand, has been pronounced by critical philosophy in accordance with the nature of the beautiful; but because it is the instinctive impulse and spontaneous activity of the individual mind, seeking to give expression, realization, to its INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 59 original imaginings and impressions. But this excessively susceptible constitution of mind is given to few; and of those who do partake of the power of genius, the greater part have debased it, dimmed its clearness, destroyed its purity and simplicity, blunted its susceptibility, and put out its light. And how universally do men strive, by the putrid joys of sense and passion, to keep themselves ever from the knowledge of the fineness of the sensibilities which God has given them ! This mind, which might behold a world of glory in created things, and look through them as through a transparent veil to things infinitely more glorious, signified or contained within the covering, is as dull and heavy as a piece of anthracite coal. Who made it so? Alas, habits of sense and sin have done this. If from childhood the soul had been educated for God, in habits accordant with its spiritual nature, it would be full of life, love, and sensibility, in harmony with all lovely things in the natural world, beholding the spiritual world through the natural, alive to all excitement from natural and intellectual beauty, and as ready to its duty as a child to its play. What a dreadful destruction of the mind's nicer sensibilities results from a sensual life! What a decline, decay, and paralysis of its intuitive powers, so that the very existence of such a thing as spiritual intuition, in reference to a spiritual world, may be questioned, if not denied! A man may be frightfully successful in such a process of destruction if long enough continued, upon his own nature. "Who can read without indignation of Kant," remarks De Quincy, "that at his own table, in social sincerity and confiden- tial talk, let him say what he would in his books, he exulted in the prospect of absolute and ultimate annihilation; that he planted his glory in the grave, and was ambitious of rotting for ever! The king of Prussia, though a personal friend of Kant's, found himself obliged to level his State thunders at some of his doctrines, and terrified him in his advance; else I am persuaded that Kant would have formally delivered Atheism from the Professor's chair, and would have enthroned the horrid ghoulish creed, which privately he professed, in the University of Konigs- berg. It required the artillery of a great king to make him pause. The fact is, that as the stomach has been known by means of its natural secretion, to attack not only whatsoever alien body 60 VOICES OF KATURE. is introduced within it, but also (as John Hunter first showed) sometimes to attack itself and its own organic structure; so, and with the same preternatural extension of instinct, did Kant carry forward his destroying functions, until he turned them upon his own hopes., and the pledges of his own superiority to the dog, the ape ; the worm." This is exceedingly striking and illustrative. But according to the argument and train of thought we are now pursuing, it was not Kant's instinct thus working for destruction, and labour- ing downwards to the brute, but his habit of materialism and Atheism, working against instinct, and at length overcoming it, and deadening it in a paralytic silence. De Quincy in this pas- sage uses the word instinct for a personal and peculiar perver- sion and depravity of instinct, contrary to the immortal and heaven-created instinct of mankind. It is impossible to say what would be, what might not be, the power of spiritual discernment in man, if it were carefully culti- vated from the beginning. For it is a power sometimes exer- cised even in the midst of the ruin and obtuseness produced by depravity, and in spite of the supreme prevalence of a selfish will. Poetical minds have recognized this power, and described it as exercised within the ruins of our nature, in striking, though highly figurative language. They tell us, That in a season of calm "weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea "Which brought us hither; Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore! Yes! we do hear them! They roll, and dash, and roar, sublime in their infinity, and we cannot but hear them; it is difficult to believe that there is ever a period in which the human soul is utterly unconscious in regard to the sounds from the eternal world. If it be regenerate, eternal truths are the scenery and the atmosphere, amidst which it lives and breathes; and it loves to recognise a near, dear, and powerful relationship as to an eternal home. It "walks thoughtful on the solemn, silent shore of that vast ocean it must sail so soon!" 1NTEKPRETATI0N OF NATURE. 61 But if men be unregenerate, then, from the existence of the same great realities, and their indestructible relationship to them, they cannot remain unconscious of what is before them. A dreadful sound is in their ears. Human nature itself, in the agitation of its constituent elements, is restless and audible. The great Ideas of God, Spirit, Immortality, Eternity, Duty, Responsibility, Retribution, wrestle together. Warning voices rise from the unfathomed spiritual depths of the soul, instinctive shudderings shake its spiritual frame, and moanings may be heard, like the low wail of the elements before the rushing storm. And when the last hour comes, and the being is to be left for ever to the dreadful elemental war, " In that dread moment, how the frantic soul Eaves round the walls of her clay tenement, And shrieking, cries for help!" Not only from this constitution of our immortal nature, formed for spiritual realities, and not for temporal shadows, for an eternal spiritual abode, and not a mere tent in the desert, pitched to-day, and struck to-morrow for the passage; not only from this immortal constitution, linking us to things to come, and forewarning us of them; but from the manner in which this subject is spoken of in the Word of God, we have reason to be- lieve that there is a native, instinctive, spiritual intelligence in man, in reference to the eternal world, answering to the power of instinct in animals; an organization like that of the animal instinct, though incomparably superior to it, combining the in- tuition both of the material and immortal parts of our nature; a perpetual appeal to conscience and pressure upon it, from intuitive convictions, to which, as well as to conscience, the appeal from God in his Word, and from external nature, ad- dresses itself. In the development of body and soul together, this intuitive power is developed, and is susceptible of cultivation to an amazing degree of perfection and of certainty. An instance of this kind of instinct in animals is given in the wonderful power and certainty of the migratory impulse in birds, and their obedience to it, and God refers his own neglectful people to its development, for a lesson. "Yea," says the Pro- phet Jeremiah, "the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed 62 VOICES OF NATURE. times; and the turtle, and the crane, and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judg- ment of the Lord. They have rejected the Word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?" There is a spiritual instinct working in man with just as unerring certainty as that which guides the turtle, the crane, and the swallow on their pathless way to climes and seasons at the distance of near half the globe; but man disobeys it, and disregards the revelation which appeals to it, and which was given for its cultivation and its guidance. Of course, the longer it is neglected and disobeyed, the less perceptible and the weaker it becomes. Still, it never goes out of existence; there always remains the consciousness of im- mortality, the instinctive feeling of the necessity of preparing for the future world, and an instinctive warning and prediction of evil to come, if there be not this preparation. The direction in which this instinct impels the soul, is always towards God, and to the exercise of prayer; and men experience it and disobey it, countless millions of times in their habitual existence; experience it and disobey it, almost unconsciously. If they yielded to the instinctive warning impulse and obeyed it, under guidance of God's Word, it would become a power of discernment and of knowledge in reference to the spiritual world, infinitely more wonderful in precision and far-reaching insight, even prophetic insight, than the instinct of animals in regard to the sphere of their existence in this world. The instinct of animals is always the same, admitting of neither cultivation nor increase. If a blackbird could live long enough to have migrated a thousand seasons, it would have a power of instinct no keener in discernment, no more intense in impulse, the thousandth year than the first. So the beavers for a thou- sand generations would build their dams exactly as the first beaver built them; and the bees, if they could live a thousand years, would construct their cells unvaryingly the thousandth year as they did the first, and would gain nothing from experience, and add nothing to the power of instinct. But with man it is different. Every act of obedience to his spiritual instincts strengthens their power. If he always obeyed their impulses under guidance of the Word of Gocl, there is no saying to what amazing knowledge of the future world, instinc- tively, he might arrive. He might almost pierce the veil that INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 63 separates between himself and spiritual realities, and behold them and commune with them, as if the barrier that disconnects, or rather dissevers him, from the invisible world, were broken down. He would attain to such a knowledge of spiritual things, as would appear incredible to a worldly mind, and supernatural to a Christian. But the instinct which would be thus quickened and expanded almost into the vision of inspiration by habits of obedience to it in communion with God, and under the light of his Word, grows weaker and weaker by being disobeyed, till it almost dies out, and leaves the soul in perfect darkness. Sensibility dies with it, and stupor and blindness united form tho characteristic of the soul. The man becomes so hardened, that it is difficult to believe that such a mass of insensibility is really destined to the judgment; so hardened, that the spectator almost questions concerning his immortality. And yet, even in such hardened natures, there is sometimes a sudden waking into life of the spiritual instinct, not to be accounted for on the principles of our common physiology. Sometimes, just as a dying lamp leaps up fitfully before it ex- pires, this spiritual instinct in man, so long neglected and beaten clown beneath sin and passion and evil habits of every kind, rises into a flame, that throws a strong and fearful light upon the world into which the man is speedily to enter. We have known authenticated cases of men predicting their own death, and at the same time declaring that they were given over to hopeless perdition. And may it not be that the singular intimations which men sometimes have of the nearness of death are the results of this mysterious, hidden, spiritual instinct, roused into great activity and acuteness by the nearness of the eternal world, and feeling that nearness, when there is, to sense, no perceptible evidence of it? We say God sends such intimations often in mercy, and no doubt he does; but often they may spring from the very nature of man's immortal being, so fearfully and wonderfully made, which may predict to him sometimes his near entrance into eternity, with as unerring an impulse, as that with which the instinct of the birds predicts the time for their migration. We have compared the spiritual instinct which is inwrought in man's constitution in regard to the spiritual world, warning 64: VOICES Off NATURE. and impelling him to prepare for that world, with the instinctive impulses of the birds and beasts. In the animal creation, the instinct is evidently blind, unreasoning, and mechanical. It ia not voluntary, but irresistible; they cannot help it, and they must obey it. Birds imprisoned have manifested, when the season of emigration came round, the same uneasiness and desire to remove, that they would have done in the midst of the wild flock in freedom. Beavers, even when tamed from infancy, will build dams in any pool of water, or even ditch, to which it may be possible for them to resort. We should probably find the same thing true of the impulses of instinct throughout the entire animal creation. The will has little or nothing to do with them, nor can they, as in man, be warped, or blinded, or destroyed by voluntary resistance. But suppose it were otherwise. Suppose that in these cases the impulse of instinct looking to the future, and inwrought into the frame as a provision for the future, could be evaded, and should be turned aside, neglected, or perverted, for the sake of indulging in impulses of passion for the present. Suppose, for example, that the blackbird, when the mysterious inworking law begins to be felt, warning it to take wing for a warmer clime, should be enticed by the delights of some pleasant nest, or lovely, warm seclusion, or unexpected supply of present wants from day to day, into a habit of procrastination in reference to that migra- tory movement, towards which the impulse of instinct presses it. Suppose that habit of procrastination to be continued, until the season for the activity of this wondrous power of instinct is over, until the impulse which was roused up for the particular season and purpose of migration, ceases for that autumn to be felt. Then the consequence would be, that the bird would no longer have any guardian or guide in reference to the coming winter, would no longer be able to provide against the future, even if it could be supposed to know any thing about the future. It would no longer think of migration, and in the first wintry storm would perish. This would be something like the result of man's folly, guilt, and madness. There is no such possibility in the case of the birds, but their instinct constrains them, involuntarily. I have wondered at the certainty and power of this impression, and at the social energy with which it works, in observing sometimes in the country the INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. Q5 gathering blackbirds in our forests previous to their annual de- parture for the South. The woods in a particular spot, were filled with greater multitudes of these songsters than one might have supposed could have been found in all the forests of the country for fifty miles round. The leafless trees were black with them, chattering like the noise of running brooks, and, as it were, holding counsels before the journey. But how remarkable the unerring instinct that brings them together for this purpose, points out the quarter of the heavens and the straight line in it, along which they are to wing their pathless flight, and makes the social impulse of thousands as infallible and unfaltering, as seasonable and energetic as if it were the impulse of one. There is neither mistake, nor delay, nor confusion, nor contradiction, nor any thing like human in- credulity or unwillingness in the working of their migratory impulse. Men are both unwilling to migrate from their native earth, and to make any preparation for such passage; unwilling to enter eternity, and unbelieving in regard to it. They shrink back from the preparation requisite, and though immortal, they would, if they could, stay upon this earth, buried in its cares and banished from heaven for ever. The instincts of their spiritual nature are both debased and disregarded. Not so with the fowls of heaven. They are true to the nature with which the wisdom of God has framed them, and they follow the un- known path, whither the mysterious impression of instinct urges their removal. We have supposed this habit of human procrastination to exist in the birds, and it would be followed by their destruction. But if to this supposition we add that of a conflict between the present preferences of the blackbird from day to day, and the calls and pressures of the power of instinct, so that day after day there should be a sense of wrong, and the feeling, every evening, that to-morrow there should be a setting out upon the journey, and an end of the delay; then there would not only be the madness that there is in man's conduct, but there would also be the accusations of conscience, the uneasiness, the upbraidings, the forebodings of the whole being, which, as long as the season for the active exercises of the instinctive impulse lasted, would be daily renewed, and daily would lay a cloud and torment of anguish on the existence even of a bird, until the period of the 43 E 66 VOICES OF NATURE. activity of instinct had passed; when the bird, regardless of the future, would ignorantly and insensibly pass to its destruction in the winter's cold. Now it is certain that there is a spiritual instinct in man ; an intuition of his spiritual being, impelling him to provide for his future existence, warning him against the neglect of such pre- paration, so that the sense of his immortality and accountability broods over him like the day, and is a presence which is not to be put by. But this instinct in man is not mechanical, nor compulsory, nor irresistible, whether he choose or no, but demands and awaits the action of his will. It is combined with reason, and therefore, though right reason confirms its impulses as true, a man may, at the allurement of passion, reason against them. It is combined also, and in most cases is overlaid and suffocated, with present desires, affections, impulses of transitory interest and pleasure. A man gives way to what is temporary and transitory, and submits to its dominion, but puts by the eternal. Thoughtless of the future world, for which conscience, instinct, and the Word of God bid him prepare, he yields to the impulses of present inclination, but resists the promptings of the spiritual instinct. The consequence is, that while the impulses of passion increase, till the present gratification becomes supreme, and passion irresistibly despotic, the impulse of instinct, and the light of intuition diminish, till, at length, in many souls, the light and sense of immortality die away, and the man goes to destruction, blindfold and insensible. But the suppression of this spiritual intuition, as it cannot destroy our connection with the spiritual world, so neither can it alter the laws of our spiritual constitution. Prevented from acting with reference to a personal salvation, through faith in the realities of the eternal world as presented in God's Word, those laws break out in other directions, producing anomalies and superstitions. It sometimes seems, amidst men's neglect of the eternal world, as if both spiritual providences and beings were pressing upon us, to attract our notice, gain our attention, and give us warning; just as messengers to some dignitary in the centre of a crowded court, might seek in vain to get the man's ear, absorbed as he is in present business or gaiety, in order to communicate some message of the greatest importance. These INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 67 spiritual tendencies of our being, thus suppressed and defrauded of their right activity, may be laid hold upon for evil purposes, both by men and by wicked spirits. Hence possibly have originated the supernatural tricks and pretensions, the mysteries and jugglings of magic, clairvoyance, and assumed intercourse with the spiritual world. Phenomena like those of mesmerism may perhaps be accounted for in the game way. The human mind, with its spiritual knowledge, intuitions and impulses, works admirably well with the eternal world, as presented in the Word of God, acknowledged and kept in full view. Otherwise it is like an injured and condemned steam-engine, in which the steam, instead of going into the proper cylinder, and working in the appointed way, hisses and splutters, and escapes through side crevices, to the scalding or injury of the bystanders. Just so, these spiritual intuitions and impulses of our being go off in every absurd direction, when not kept under guidance of God's Word; the force is expended in every way except the right, and perhaps in tricks of jugglery and superstition. There are none so superstitious, none so credulous, none so completely the sport of nonsense and of Satan, as those who have cast off the Word of God; none so hampered and tricked by lies from the invisible world, as those who disbelieve the realities of that world, as revealed in the Scriptures. Let it be remembered that if the soul, under such unbelief and consequently in the rejection of Christ the Saviour, passes into the world of spirits, although the poicer of those faculties, which men have perverted and wasted here, will be resumed, yet the perversion will remain eternal. The wicked will be filled with his own ways, and even if left to his own self, with no other agencies or insurances of torment than his own mind and dis- torted sensibilities, must be miserable for ever. Linked with the Immortal, Immortality Begins e'en here. For what is Time to thee, To whose cleared sight the Dight is turned to day, And that but changing life miscalled decay! Is it not glorious then, from thine own heart To pour a stream of life? to make a part With thine eternal spirit, things that rot, That, looked on for a moment, are forgot, But to thine opening vision pass to take New forms of life, and in new beauties wake? To thee the falling leaf but fades to bear Its hues and odours to some fresher air; Some passing sound floats by to yonder sphere That softly answers to thy listening ear. In one eternal round they go and come, And where they travel there hast thou a home For thy far-reaching thoughts. Power Divine ! Has this poor worm a spirit so like thine? Unwrap its folds, and clear its wings to go! Would I could quit earth, sin, and care, and woe! Nay, rather let me use the world aright; Thus make me ready for mine upward flight. Thoughts on the Soul. Dana. Instead of the temple of science having been reared, it ■were more proper to say that the temple of nature had been evolved. The archetype of science is the universe; and it is in the disclosure of its successive parts, that science advances from step to step; not properly raising by any new architec- ture of its own, but rather unveiling by degrees an architec- ture as old as the creation. The labourers in philosophy create nothing, but only bring out into exhibition that which was before created. And there is a resulting harmony in their labours, however widely apart from each other they may have been prosecuted, not because they have adjusted one part to another, but because the adjustment has been already made to their hands. There comes forth, it is true, of their labours, a most magnificent harmony, yet not a harmony which they have made, but a pre-existent harmony which they have only made visible. Chalmeks. CHAPTER VI. Nature as a System of Types, and an Education by Types and Analo- gies: The secret of the Mysticism of Nature: Grandeur of the Science of Geography, as presented in the Manner of Arnold Guyot: The Abuses of Natural Science: The true and Heavenly Spirit and Object of Science. It was a very beautiful remark of Lord Bacon, that "With regard to the sciences that contemplate Nature, the sacred philo- sopher declares it to be the glory of God to conceal a thing, but of the king to search it out ; just as if the Divine Spirit were wont to be pleased with the innocent and gentle sport of chil- dren, who hide themselves that they may be found; and had chosen the human soul as a playmate, out of his indulgence and goodness towards man." And it is the exercise of seeking and finding God and his glory beneath the veil suspended on the frame of universal nature, that strengthens, enlarges, and elevates the soul, and fits it, if grace be there, for the presence and enjoyment of God, when the veil is removed, and the soul in the spiritual world sees no more as through a glass darkly, but face to face. The forms of nature seem to have been designed to discipline man's mind, rather than to teach man knowledge; to educate, and not to inform the soul, is the great object for which the mind is placed within the physical senses, and surrounded by the physical world. The forms of nature are drawn around us, not so much to fill us with knowledge, or let light into the mind, as to make us evolve it ourselves in the exercise of our own powers; they are but as the mulberry-leaf to the silk worm which feeds upon it, indeed, but only to spin forth its beautiful fabric from itself. This beautiful creation, with all its glorious, lovely, and inter- esting forms, is rather to be regarded as a slate, a blackboard INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 71 "which God has placed before us, in order that we might draw upon it those demonstrations in regard to himself, which in the verj nature of our minds he has made inevitable, than as a reve- lation to teach or read out those demonstrations. Nature is the great diagram presented to us, and the soul rejoices to meet it, and in its study to work out and evolve the demonstration. This is God's gracious method in educating us. If he had engraved the argument upon his works in letters, it had not been half so useful for us ; there is all the difference that there is between the education of a boy in geometry by writing down the demonstration beneath the diagram, and merely setting him to read it, and on the other hand giving him the bare diagram, and making him evolve the demonstration from his own mind. The world also is full of types; it is an education by types and analogies. Great mountains, vast oceans, the sky and the stormy wind, are types of the Infinite. The reigning constitu- tional ideas in the soul of man are counterparted, as it were, in the forms of nature. The constitution of our globe has been arranged for their development. As the Old Testament was a dispensation of types, foreshadowing the New and preparing for it, so this material globe and the orbed heavens round about it, are a dispensation of types foreshadowing the eternal world, and preparing for it. Nature is ever looking onward to tte future, and directing our care thither. The globe itself was arranged both with reference to the development and education of the individual soul, and also with reference to the position and progressive civilization, dominion, and power of races and of nations. The interpretation of nature depends upon the discovery and study of the laws of nature. Our planet is a mass, not so much of matter, as of principles and laws. We open a watch of fine workmanship, and are struck with the skill, the art, the ingenuity. It is nothing in comparison with the laws and elementary prin- ciples, could we see those at work, which constitute the matter of the watch itself what it is. So it is in every thing. As we meditate upon the laws, and by the discoveries of science are enabled more and more minutely to trace them, they manifest themselves so intricate, permeating, and omnipresent, that we almost lose sight of material nature and behold a transfiguration; as if body should withdraw from the form of a man, and leave 72 VOICES OF NATURE. nothing but spirit in its place, beneath the same outlines. Our globe itself, when we begin to see something of the wondrous operation of living law in all nature, seems a spiritual body, for it is all compact, not of particles or elementary substances, but of principles and powers, working, transforming, changing, renovating, perpetually crossing, circling, and apparently inter- tangled, yet, as the different combinations of harmony in a piece of music, all running on, in perfect unity, to the same close. Now it is impossible to say how much of the " mysticism" of nature, the mysterious power of nature over the sensitive soul, may be owing to the working of these invisible laws. We have to live long in communion with nature, and in habits of atten- tive observation and patient analysis, before we can begin to understand nature. Generation after generation may do some- thing, and our grand work is in the discovery of law, both past and present. We learn very little by external form and colour, merely, although it is by these mainly that the influences of nature are expressed. la nature as in human character, the elements that most plainly appear are not always the sign of those that are working within; the colour of all substances is only the rays that are reflected, not those that are absorbed. As we cannot tell the character of a man, till we have become thoroughly acquainted with him, as there may have been mysterious expressions upon his countenance, to which nothing but the history of his life and the knowledge of his habits will give the key; so there may be influences and expressions in nature unaccountable till her secret laws are more fully known. But the existence of these laws renders nature a visible Shechinah, a constant manifestation of the Deity. From the centre to the circumference these laws are in activity, pervading, animating, and making all things significant, as the laws of the Spirit of Life. From the upheaving and formation of primordial mountain ranges, to the masses of soil hundreds of feet deep upon the sur- face, impregnated with invisible seeds, that if ever turned up to the light, though after the progress of ages, may rise in new forests of vegetation, what is there from the greatest to the least, that is not the action and expression of law? We trace it in the balancing of the clouds, the currents of the atmosphere, INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 73 the production and distribution of vapour and rain; the conjunc- tion, intermixture, and separation of the elements of activity and power in the air; the presence and operation of heat, light, electricity, magnetism; the conversion of earth, air, and water into vegetable and animal life, the operations of instinct in birds and animals, the action and re-action of all forces and things in the universe. Hence the grandeur of the science of geography, as an inquiry into the physiology of our globe, an endeavour, in the words of Gruyot, " to seize those incessant mutual actions of the different portions of physical nature upon each other, of inorganic nature upon organized beings, upon man in particular, and upon the successive development of human societies; studying the reci- procal action of all those forces, the perpetual play of which constitutes what might be called the life of the globe If, taking life in its most simple aspect, we define it as a mutual exchange of relations, we cannot refuse this name to those lively actions and re-actions, to that perpetual play of the forces of matter, of which we are every day the witnesses It is life; the thousand voices of nature which make themselves heard around us, and which in so many ways betray that incessant and prodigious activity, proclaim it so loudly, that we cannot shut our ears to their language." " We must elevate ourselves to the moral world/' the same writer continues, in a strain which we rejoice to see command- ing the attention of philosophers, " to understand the physical world; the physical world has no meaning, except by and for the moral world. It is in fact the universal law of all that exists in finite nature, not to have, in itself, either the reason or the entire aim of its own existence. Every being exists, not only for itself, but forms necessarily a portion of a great whole, of which the plan and the idea go infinitely beyond it, and in which it is destined to play a part. Thus inorganic nature exists, not only for itself, but to serve as a basis for the life of the plant and the animal; and in their service it performs functions of a kind greatly superior to those assigned to it by the laws which are purely physical and chemical. In the same manner, all nature, our globe, admirable as is its arrangement, is not the final end of creation; but it is the condition of the existence of man. It answers as an instrument by which his education is accomplished, 7i VOICES OF NATURE. and performs in his service functions more exalted and noble than its own nature, and for which it was made. The superior being thus solicits, so to speak, the creation of the inferior being, and associates it to his own functions; and it is correct to say that inorganic nature is made for organised nature, and the whole globe for man, as both are made for God, the origin and end of all things." "For him who can embrace with a glance the great harmo- nies of nature and of history, there is here the most admirable plan to study; there are the past and future destinies of the nations to decipher, traced in ineffaceable characters by the finger of Him who governs the world. Admirable order of the Supreme Intelligence and Goodness, which has arranged all for the great purpose of the education of man, and the realization of the plans of Mercy for his sake." In a higher strain still, in reference to Law, as an effluence from God, pervading all nature, and binding the natural universe in harmony, as Moral Law does the moral universe, that great prophet and seer of nature, S. T. Coleridge, wrote near fifty years ago, as follows : " The necessary tendence of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other, is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. The phenomena (the material) must wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the format) must remain. Hence it comes that in nature itself, the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the hush drop off, the phenomena themselves become more spir- itual, and at length cease altogether in our consciousness." " The optical phenomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the most illustrious New- tonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible, than as an immediate spiritual influence; there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which, on a vast scale, is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would INTERPRETATION OP NATURE. 75 then be completed; when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which, in its highest known power, exists in man as an intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their Maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the Mount in the skirts of his Divinity." 1 But here again the corrective and heavenly magnetism of a truly religious faith is needed, the belief and experimental knowledge of a personal God by the teaching of the Word and the Spirit; or that disastrous result may take place, to which we have already referred, of identifying the Law and the Lawgiver, " reducing the Creator to a mere Anima Mundi; a scheme," says the same great writer in a powerful passage at the conclu- sion of his Aids to Reflection, " that has no advantage over Spinosism but its inconsistency, which does indeed make it suit a certain order of intellect, who, like the Pleuronectas, or Flat Fish in Ichthyology, that have both eyes on the same side, never see but half of a subject at one time, and forgetting the one before they get to the other, are sure not to detect any in- consistency between them." An increasing unwillingness to contemplate the Supreme Being in his personal attributes, and thence a distaste to all the peculiar doctrines of the Christian Faith, the Trinity, the Incar- nation, the Redemption, has been the consequence, Mr. Coleridge declares, of thus confounding God and Nature. He speaks of those who, with himself, (this having been for a brief period his own state,) under this unhealthful influence, have been so estranged from the Heavenly Father, the living God, as even to shrink from the personal pronouns as applied to the Deity ! And he says that he knows and yearly meets with many, in whom a false and sickly Taste co-operates with the prevailing Fashion; many who find the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, far too real, too substantial; who feel it more in harmony with their indefinite sensations, " To worship Nature in the hill and valley Not knowing what they love." We have already alluded to Coleridge'3 description of this devil's bridge to Pantheism and Atheism, in his own poetry. 1 Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. 76 VOICES OF STATURE. We will only add his description of a state of things which it is to be feared has heen growing in some quarters to the present time, or finding an offset in the other extreme of error, the en- shrining and idolizing of God in sacraments and wafers. "Among a numerous and increasing class of the higher and middle ranks, there is an inward withdrawing from the life and personal being of God, a turning of the thoughts exclusively to the so-called physical attributes, to the Omnipresence in the counterfeit form of Ubiquity, to the Immensity, the Infinity, the Immutability, the attributes of space, with a notion of Power as their substra- tum: a Fate, in short, not a Moral Creator and Governor! Let intelligence be imagined, and wherein does the conception of God differ essentially from that of gravitation (conceived as the cause of gravity) in the understanding of those, who represent the Deity not only as a necessary but as a necessitated being? those for whom Justice is but a scheme of general laws, and Holiness, and the divine hatred of sin, yea, and Sin itself, are words without meaning, or mere accommodations to a rude and barbarous race!" 1 Hence, too, the enthronement of Power and Expediency as the law of public and private morality; hence the throttling of Conscience by human law, and throwing it under the Car of the State; as if God had made of organized society a great Jugger- naut, before the wheels of which the most acceptable sacrifice to the Deity is the immolation of a personal conviction of right and wrong! But these monstrosities and excrescences, whether of philosophy or morality, can never change the deep eternal con- sciousness of the difference between holiness and sin, justice and injustice, good and evil. Wherever they gain a temporary lodging-place, such doctrines are like the work of those insects that bore in to the substance of healthy plants (the rose-tree itself thus becomes their nursery) and deposit their eggs; or under the bark of trees, or on the leaves, where a poisonous secretion festers the plant, and thus raises a bulb, beneath which the grub feeds and grows to perfection. Sometimes, however, they are like those intrusive Ichneumon flies, that deposit their eggs in the nests of other insects, where, as soon as the grubs are animated, they eat up every thing around them. Just so may the notions of expediency, instead of the eternal ideas and principles of right and wrong, consume all that is good, all the forms, and even the 1 Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. INTERPRETATION OP NATURE. 77 germs and possibilities, of real excellence in the character. Moreover, the system sets up a standard both of public and private morality, contrary to the Word of God, and gives birth to modes of reasoning, if reasoning it can be called, in- compatible with the very subject of morality, subversive of its nature, incongruous with its essence, applicable only to interest; " a parcel of trashy sophistry in morals, the authors of which would not have employed themselves more irrationally, in sub- mitting the works of Raphael or Titian to canons of criticism deduced from the sense of smell." Most true it is, that those who will not raise themselves above nature, sink below it. Those who will not view it and use it in the light of another world, for the purposes disclosed from that world, and according to the Revelation of the God of nature and of grace in his word, are blinded by it. It becomes a dungeon, whose walls inclose the soul as in a living sepulchre, shutting it lit) from God and against him, instead of a bright and sacred veil through which to see him. Most true it is, that the under- standing, or experimental faculty of our being, unirradiated by the reason and the Spirit, and not walking and working in the light of God, "has no appropriate object but the material world in relation to our worldly interests. The far-sighted prudence of man, and the more narrow, but at the same time far less fallible cunning of the fox, are both no other than a nobler sub- stitute for salt, in order that the hog may not putrefy before its destined hour." 1 But not to such abuses shall nature, or the studies of nature, or the enthusiasm of natural science, long be perverted. An- other eye is in the field, that of a regenerated humanity, armed with the telescope of faith, and the wonder-working microscope of a profound humility. Another spirit is alive, and science is beginning to be alive with it. In the eloquent words of Guyot, " All is life for him who is alive; all is death for him that is dead. All is spirit for him who is spirit; all is matter for him who is nothing but matter. It is with the whole life and the whole intellect that we should study the work of Him, who is Life and Intellect itself." "This work of the Supreme Intelligence, can it be otherwise than intelligent? The work of him who is all Life and all 1 Coleridge. Note to the Aids to Reflection. 78 VOICES OF NATURE, Love, must it not be living, and full of love? How should we not find in our earth itself the realization of an intelligent thought, of a thought of love to rnan, who is the end and aim of all creation, and the bright consummate plan of this admirable organization? "Yes! certainly it is so. Faith so teaches, inspiring us with this sentiment, vague still, yet profound. Science so teaches, by a patient and long continued study, reserving this sublime view as the sweetest reward for our labour. Faith enlightened and expounded by science, the union of faith and science, is liv- ing, harmonious knowledge, is perfected faith, for it has become vision." x 1 Arnold Guyot, Comparative Physical Geography, Section 12. PART II. VOICES OF THE SPRING. X£ — It is the first mild day of March: Each minute sweeter than before, The Eed-breast sings from the tall Larch That stands beside our door. There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And gram in the green field. WORDSWORTH. Alt, abiding and spiritual knowledge, infused into a grate- ful and affectionate fellow-Christian, is as the child of the mind that infuses it. The delight which he gives he re- ceives; and in that bright and liberal hour, the gladdened preacher can scarce gather the ripe produce of to-day, with- out discovering and looking forward to the green fruits and embryons, the heritage and reversionary wealth of the days to come, till he bursts forth in prayer and thanksgiving. The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few. Join with me, reader, in the fervent prayer, that we may seek within us, what we can never find elsewhere, that we may find within us what no words can put there, that one only true religion, which elevateth knowledge into Being, which is at once the Science of Being, and the .Being and the Life of all genuine Science. Coleridge. Appendix to (lie. Statesman's Manual. 43 / Amid the quiet of this green recess, But to a higher mark than song can reach, Eose this pure eloquence; and when the stream Which overflowed the soul was passed away, A consciousness remained that it had left, Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory, images and precious thoughts, That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed. Wordsworth. An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and stars, and sometimes when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sunset, appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward. Satyrane's Letters — Coleridge. How suddenly that straight and glittering shaft Shot thwart the earth! In crown of living fire Up comes the day! As if they conscious quaft The sunny flood, hill, forest, city spire, Laugh in the wakening light. Go, vain desire! The dusky lights are gone; go thou thy way! And pining discontent, like them, expire ! Be called my chamber Peace, when ends the day, And let me with the dawn, like Pilgrim, sing and pray. Dana's Daybreak. PART II. VOICES OF THE SPBING. CHAPTER VII. Voices of the Spring : Beginning of the Moral Teaching of Nature : Mightiness of the Change from Winter to Spring: The Time of Seeds, and the Texts taken from it : Eesponsibiiities arising from the Light of Nature. T is the first mild day of March, each minute sweeter than before ! Such is the carol of an English Poet, descriptive of the opening of Spring, in an Island where the season steals upon the senses with a serenity and beauty, that in our New England climate are much later and slower in their development, though perhaps not less lovely when they come. The salutation of our native Poets breaks forth like an Anthem of the tempest : u The stormy March is come at last ! " Nevertheless, with us also there are years when this cold and blustering month opens with a day and an air of such delightful warmth and promise, and the prophecy is carried into successive weeks with such blos- soming fulness and fragrance, and such an evasion of wonted sleet and chilliness, that if the Indian Summer had made a lodgment in the bosom of the Spring, it could hardly be more charming. Thus the Spring is invested with an influence so sweet and soothing, so sacred, so almost introductive to a holier life, that in the quiet of the country a sensitive mind may find the spirit of this season more allied to the renewal of the soul by Divine Grace, and better fitted for the nourishment of 8-i VOICES OF NATURE. heavenly purposes, than that of any other cluster of months in the year. In a Living Calendar, a Calendar computed from the beginning or reviving of natural life and beauty, it is indeed the opening of the year, which it is strange should ever have been permitted to take its New Year's date in January. It is life and love that mark the Spring, and weave its ruling characteristics. How exquisitely beautiful is the imagery de- scriptive of all this in the Field Songs of Inspiration! " My beloved spake, and said unto me, Eise up my love, my fair one, and come away. " For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. " The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. " The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines, with the tender grape, give a good smell. Arise my love, my fair one, and come away." Love now, a universal birth, From heart to heart is stealing, From earth to man, from man to earth; It is the hour of feeling; One moment now may give us more Than fifty years of reason; Our minds shall drink at every pore The spirit of the season. Some silent laws our hearts will make, Which they shall long obey We for the year to come may take Our temper from to-day. And from the blessed power that rolls About, below, above, We'll frame the measure of our souls; They shall be tuned to love. WOKDBWOKTH. The moral teachings of all Nature may be regarded as begin- ning with the Spring. The touch of vernal light, and the kisses of the south wind, wake the earth and its living energies from their winter's slumber. There has been no death, and yet there VOICES OF THE SPRING. 85 is a mighty resurrection into life. It is a gradual awakening from sleep, so gradual, that without a watchful effort in the mind, the whole process may pass, and no new admiration as of a new exercise of Almighty Power, be produced in the soul of the observer. This mighty impression of Creative energy is the first out-shining lesson of the Spring, but it shines increasingly, not suddenly, nor all at once. Such indeed is Nature's custom in all her lessons. What an awakening from death! What resurrection into life! Like most of those teachings, which appeal to the deepest beliefs of our being, they come with the still small voice, so gradually, so quietly, so gently stealing on the soul, like the passing of the dawn into the sunrise, that gross and careless natures seldom take note of them, and never experience the full sense of their power and meaning. There is often a poetic sense of their passing beauty, where there is no excitement, invigoration, or expansion of the mind, by their vast and glorious suggestions. The various seasons are like an An- them, which few souls are musical enough to appreciate as a whole, though many may be touched by separate parts, from strain to strain successively. In the Anthem of Nature the changes pass into one another so imperceptibly, that what would be as the sound of many waters, if it came suddenly and without gradual preparation, is diminished and softened, is as the sound of a waterfall buried in a deep valley among old trees, and heard at a distance. The change from mid-winter to the depth of Spring requires an abstracting effort of the mind to realize; for we are occupied with each day's gliding advancement, and we watch the indica- tions of change, and the stealing steps of its progress, almost with impatience. The idea of the bursting bud, enlivens the forest before the sap has begun its journey in the branches, and the opening leaf is present to the mind beyond the bud, and the first May flowers are anticipated, and the green grass carries us into visions of Summer. So although sometimes we gather the red ivy-plums on a tuft of mossy green, above the melting snow, and bring home, now and then, a flower from the woods before the river opens, yet the great contrast has to be imagined, not seen. And therefore, when the fulness of time and change has come, the grandeur and glory of the process are forgotten. Ob VOICES OF NATURE. In Italy, when the hoar-frosts are melted by the rising sun, the face of the world sometimes changes more in one day, or rather shows the picture of a change, than with us from Feb- ruary to May. To such an incident the poet Dante alludes, in the opening of the 24th Canto of his first vision : In the year's early nonage, -when the sun Tempers his tresses in Aquarius' urn, And now towards equal day the nights recede, When as the rime upon the earth puts on Her dazzling sister's image, (but not long Her milder sway endures;) then rises up The village hind, whom fail3 his wintery store, And looking out beholds the plains around All whitened; whence impatiently he smites His thighs, and to his hut returning in, There paces to and fro, wailing his lot, As a discomfited and helpless man. Then comes he forth again, and feels new hope Spring in his bosom, finding e'en thus soon The world hath changed his countenance; grasps his crook, And forth to pasture drives his little flock. Such change a snow-storm in June might produce, and back again from white-bearded Winter to green and rosy Summer; but such suddenness is happily never known in God's gentle arrangement of our changing seasons, and therefore the great- ness of the change is too little noted. Yet what could be greater? What prodigies can power Divine perform, exclaims the Poet Cowper: More grand than it produces year by year, And all in sight of inattentive man? Familiar with the effect, we slight the cause, And in the constancy of nature's course, The regular return of genial months, And renovation of a faded world, See nought to wonder at. Yet, what an exercise of Divine Power, what a new mani- festation of creative power, every time that the winter of our VOICES OP THE SPRING. 87 world gives place to Spring ! Nature throws off her grave- clothes, and comes forth radiant in light and life. If the change were at any time so sudden, as when, at the voice of the Redeemer, Lazarus came forth, it would be overwhelming. The clothing of an army of dead bones with human flesh would not be more astonishing; the creation of a world could scarcely be more startling. It is only because the process is so gradual, that the impression is ever any thing less than that of a miracle. Should God again As once in Gibeon, interrupt the race Of the undeviating and punctual sun, How would the world admire! hut speaks it less An agency divine, to make him know His moment when to sink and when to rise, Age after age, than to arrest his course? All we behold is miracle; but, seen So only, all is miracle in vain." What is a miracle? asks Dr. Young, in one of the profound pages of the Night Thoughts. A reproach upon mankind, a satire, that censures, even while it satisfies. For the common coarse of Nature proclaims to common sense a Deity, and mir- acles are sent to startle the sense from insensibility, to wake a sleeping world, and prove and manifest the Deity, not by any stronger arguments, but more recent ones. " Say which imports more plenitude of power, Or nature's laws to fix or to repeal? To make a sun, or stop his mid career? To countermand his orders, and send back The flaming courier to the frighted east, Warmed and astonished at his evening ray, Or bid the moon, as with her journey tired, In Aijalon's soft flowery vale repose? Great things are these, still greater to create." Through all the train of miracles from Adam to the present hour, there is nothing more amazing, duly weighed, than the unmiraculous survey of Heaven at night, when the brute sees S8 VOICES OF NATURE. nought but spangles, and the fool no more, but the enlightened reason sees a present God. " Who sees him not Nature's controller, author, guide, and end? Who turns his eye on nature's midnight face, But must inquire, what hand behind the scene, What arm almighty put these wheeling globes In motion, and wound up the vast machine? Who rounded in his palm these spacious orbs? Who bowled them naming through the dark profound, Numerous as glittering drops of morning dew, Or sparks from populous cities in a blaze, And set the bosom of old Night on fire V Now it is the business of faith and love, as well as the pro- vince of genius, to restore to the processes of nature this impress and character of the miraculous, which custom hath stolen away. The veil may be raised, and the inspiration which looks beyond it, may be renewed, and common familiar scenes may be watched with a childlike and delighted wonder. The changes of the seasons are incomparably grand and beautiful to an eye thus gazing upon them. A passage in one of Foster's letters to a friend shows the powerful impression of the opening Spring upon a mind of vivid sensibility, intently observant. " The whole welcome visitation of blossoms, sweet verdure, cuckoos, and nightingales, is come down upon the earth, and made it all a new world within the last month. All the beauties of the scene have been displayed to me this afternoon in an extended rural walk, in which I anxiously endeavoured to seize all the magic images, and fix them in my mind, for a perpetual paradise of fancy to have recourse to, perhaps after I lose the power of receiving any more images by the eye. I could not help being amazed at the power which could thus, by means that none can understand, and in the space of a few weeks, or even days, pour such a deluge of charms over the creation. We should cultivate as much as possible the habit of being led by every thing we contemplate to the Great First Cause." It is in the stealing steps of spring that our quiet, silent, abiding lessons, the deep, ever recurring morals of our natural VOICES OF THE SPRING. 89 "world begin, not in thunder-tones, but in noiseless, irresistible processes. Here, first, is the foundation of the year's life; out of what is committed now, gently, or with careful labour, to the earth's bosom, come the earth's character, life, dress, habits, for the circling dance of months and seasons. The time of seeds, looking forward to results, is the time of weightiest, most instructive thought, most solemn warning. Text after text has the Divine inspiring Spirit condescended to draw out of this part of the book of nature, re-writing it in the book of grace. Hence, from this arrangement of natural law, from these relations of cause and effect, ministered and manifested in the changes and products of our mortal abode, in the woods, flowers, and fruits of our pilgrimage, come all those strains of such prophetic knowledge, those proceeds of time and eternity, that by the force of repetition and demonstration in nature, as well as by the constitution of our moral being, pass from announcement into instinct, and are armed with intuitive and irresistible power. He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption. He that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. We may suppose that God has established that particular order of nature which we observe in our world, partly for the setting of the types of immortality. Eternal and spiritual lessons are to be taught from temporal, material, and natural analogies; and so God hath set one thing over against another; and if that which is natural comes first, it is only, or mainly, with reference to that which is immortal. Thus it is that the reasons and meanings of the works of God, and the arrange- ments of nature, are so infinite and grand, that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time; also he hath set the world in their heart, and its lessons are heart-full. Having provided such arrangements in the order of nature that its laws can be made the moulds or vehicles of celestial truths, God is willing to make his own appeal in us to sense itself, for the illustration and victory of our faith. Sun, moon, and stars, the seasons and their changes, the day and the night, the grain of corn and its wondrous transformations, are as the illuminated margin of God's spiritual teachings to our souls. 90 VOICES OF NATURE. Seed-time and harvest cannot come and go as seasons, and their laws cannot be familiarly known to us from year to year, without impressing on the mind a sense of opportunity and re- sponsibility. The great lesson of a moral probation is borne upon the seasons of the year, is hidden in the very processes of nature, even as the seed itself is deposited in the earth, to germi- nate and be developed. These are stated ministries, knocking at the door of our hearts; forms of light and suggestion, visiting every man that is born into the world. These things intimate how much light men may be sinning against, even if there were nothing hut the light of nature shining. For, we are surrounded by ten thousand hints and influences appealing to our very senses, and poured upon our mortal frame to draw us near to God, and remind us of our im- mortality, and train us up for heaven. And these elements and influences ivould have great power over us, if we were not insen- sible, dead in trespasses and sins, voluntarily estranged from God, and under the influence of that carnal mind, which, instead of rejoicing in his light, and gratefully hailing the possibility of beholding him through his works, as through a glorious trans- parency, would shut out the sight as an unwelcome vision. If we could behold and compute, as angelic beings may do, all the forms of light, and the vast amount of light, in regard to hea- venly things, coming to us from merely natural laws, scenes, and phenomena, we should be astounded at the guilt disclosed in that view alone. It would affect us in some measure as the application of the written law of God by the Holy Spirit affects the conscience. When the commandment came, says the apostle, sin revived, and I died. In like manner, if the commandment came in mere nature, if the soul were cpuckened to see and feel that light, and to hear those voices which day uttereth to day, and night to night, the same guilt and condemnation would be discovered. We should find that every day, in every situation, we had been rejecting and disobeying a present God, a God revealing himself in power and glory to our very senses. And thus it is that to a guilty soul, when conviction comes, the whole universe seems written over with hieroglyphics of guilt and judgment. The sunshine and the air reprove the soul, the stars look down in condemnation, all forms of light and VOICES OF THE SPRING. . 91 loveliness are witnesses against man's sin. The elements and processes of nature around him, in conjunction with the sacred intuitions within him, declare his immortality, and arraign him before his Creator for the violation of natural laws. A man may possibly not be awakened out of this natural in- sensibility, nor have this darkness of the mind broken through, so long as the walls of his earthly tabernacle and the glorious frame of nature are round about him. He may die in darkness, though surrounded by such light. But we are compelled to suppose that when a guilty man passes thus into the more im- mediate presence of his Maker, all this neglected light will burst upon his soul; the knowledge of it, the sense of it, and the con- demnation of it, will be clear and irresistible. Every soul will thus, at some time or another, see light in God's light; for when the soid has been drawn near to God, it will see how every thing reflected his glory; how the invisible things of the Creator were visible through the creation; how great and beautiful that light was, and how, in the midst of it, in insensibility to it, the soul was walking, by preference, in its own darkness. Happy are they who are already sensible of the darkness, and desire to rise out of it! Happy they, who look forward to the coming time of light, and rejoice in the anticipation of it, long- ing for the day of His appearing. One of the finest poems of Henry Vaughan was composed in that anticipation of the judg- ment, when the types of Immortality and wrought veils of imagery in nature will be laid aside for the reality, when the night that reigns here will give place to an eternal day. Let us look to it, that we be up and dressed before the morning, lest that day come upon us as a thief. THE DAWNING. All! "What time wilt thou come? when shall that cry, The Bridegroom's coming! fill the sky? Shall it in the evening run, When our words and works are done? Or will thine all-surprising light Break at midnight, When either sleep, or some dark pleasure, Possesseth madmen without measure? Or shall these early fragrant hours Unlock thy bowers, 92 VOICES OK NATUKE. And with their blush of light descry Thy locks crowned with eternity? Indeed, it is the only time, That with thy glory does best chime. All now are stirring; every field Full hymns doth yield. The whole creation shakes off night, And for thy shadow looks the light. Stars now vanish without number, Sleepy planets set and slumber, The pursy clouds disband and scatter, All expect some sudden matter. Hot one beam triumphs, but ; from far, That morning star. 0, at what time soever thou, Unknown to us, the heavens wilt bow, And with thine angels in the van, Descend to judge poor careless man. Grant I may not like puddle lie In a corrupt security. Where, if a traveller water crave, He finds it dead and in a grave; But as this restless, vocal spring, All day and night doth run and sing, And though here born, yet is acquainted Elsewhere, and flowing keeps untainted, So let me all my busy age In thy free services engage. And though while here of force I must Have commerce sometimes with poor dust, And in my flesh, though vile and low, As this doth in her channel flow, Yet let my course, my aim, my love, And chief acquaintance be above. So when that day and hour shall run In which thyself wilt be the Sun, Thou'lt find me dressed and on my way, Watching the Break of thy Great Day ! Henet Vatjghah. US" Before your sight Mounts on the breeze the butterfly, and soars, Small creature as she is, from earth's bright flowers, Into the dewy clouds ! The soul ascends Towards her native firmament of heaven, When the fresh eagle, in the month of May, Upborne at evening on replenished wing, The shaded valley leaves, and leaves the dark Empurpled hills, conspicuously renewing A proud communication with the sun, Low sunk beneath the horizon. Wordsworth. What is the world itself? thy world? A grave. Where is the dust that has not been alive ? The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors; From human mould we reap our daily bread. The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes, And is the cieling of her sleeping sons. Young. as- Tis but a night, a long and moonless night, We make the grave our bed, and then are gone. Thus, at the shut of even, the weary bird Leaves the wide air, and in some lonely brake Cowers down, and dozes till the dawn of day, Then claps his well-fledged wings, and bears away. Blair's Grave. But some one will say, How are the dead raised? and with what body do they come? Thou fool! That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be; but bare grain, it may cbance of wheat, or of some other kind. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. 1st Corinthians, xv, 35-38. CHAPTEE VIII. Analogies from Nature to the Kesurreetion. The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is purely a doctrine of Divine Revelation. Nevertheless, there is a fore- shadowing of it in the processes of nature itself, so that it may be regarded also as a natural revelation in types and analogies, which only waited for the Word of God to receive their full interpretation and confirmation. All nature is but as the beginning or ground-work of God's revelations; a woof on which the bright and glorious figures of Divine Revelation are wrought, as flowers, landscapes, and historical tablets on a piece of tapestry. The only service of the texture and course of the natural world is to receive these superadded glories, to have them inwrought, (these grand and infinite truths, unattainable by intuitive intel- ligence,) inwrought and supported upon the very vestments of mortality, even as the sentences of God's word were threaded in the robes of the High Priest, and displayed as frontlets and fringes of his garments. The frame of Nature, yea, the uni- verse itself, is but as a loom for the weaving and unrolling of truth revealing God; and wben it shall have answered its present pur- pose, then it shall be laid aside, just as a loom is taken to pieces, when nothing more is to be done with it. Yea, Lord God, said the inspired Psalmist, this earth of wbich thou hast of old laid the foundations, and these heavens which are the work of thy hands, shall perish, but thou shalt endure; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment, as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed; but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end. It exalts the importance of the material universe, and gives it a grandeur even beyond its own 96 VOICES OP NATURE. immeasurable wealth of the Divine intelligence revealed in its principles and laws for our study, when we regard it thus as God's loom, the frame-work, for higher designs and a more infinite glory. In our globe there is reason to believe that the changes of the seasons, and the processes of seed time and harvest, were ordered and arranged on purpose to serve as indications and illustrations, of moral causes and consequences, opportunities and responsibilities, and as stepping stones for faith in regard to the great truths revealed in the Gospel. Hence the perpetual appeals to these natural types and analogies. In disclosing and proving the doctrine of the resur- rection^ the inspired apostle goes directly to God's works, with an intimation that the lesson there taught for faith is so clear and palpable, that the reproach of a fool belongs to him, who, with such peculiar and significant manifestations of God's power to his very senses, doubts and questions, when the rising of the body from the dead is presented to his mind in the light of revelation. Thou fool ! that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. Thou stumblest at the resurrection from the dead, not seeing that death itself is but a process for the resur- rection. And so the apostle carries on the analogy, interweaving it step by step, process by process, with his argument, and rising higher and higher with the theme, till it ends in the Halleluia of immortality, Death is swallowed up in victory! Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ ! But before we pursue more closely the particular argument of the apostle, let us begin a step further back, and consider the weight and power of the analogy from the change between the Winter and the Spring in our world, to the change between the death of the body and a new life in glory. We take the change from mid-winter to the depth of Spring, from the perfection of one season to the perfection of another, for that is the only way of fairly comprehending the analogy; and so regarded, what an awaking from death, what a resurrection into life, is presented to our senses! Abstract from the change itself all the intermediate processes of change, which, seen so constantly by us in their gradual approach, hide from us the greatness of the change, and thus only you can be prepared fitly to consider the power of the VOICES OF THE SPRING. 97 analogy. For, if all the steps in the process of the resurrection were as open to our view as are the steps in the process from Winter to Spring and Summer, it would no longer be faith that is required of us. And if all the intermediate processes from Winter to Summer were as completely hidden, as the darkness of the grave and the curtain of futurity hide what is going on there; if Summer burst out of the midst of Winter as a living glorious body bursts out of the grave, then would the process which we now call that of nature, look as supernatural and incredible to us as the process which now is that of revelation. Consider, if you should be standing on some elevation amidst the reign of perfect and absolute ice, death, and desolation in a winter's landscape, what would be your feelings, what the over- whelming awe and transport of surprise, if instantly, without any foretokening or preparatory steps or signs, the whole scene should break forth into the glowing life, verdure, and beauty of Summer. If you should witness that gloomy snow-covered ravine, now overhung with immoveable crags of ice, or bristling with naked trunks, suddenly changed into a musical, gurgling brook, embosomed in banks of fresh flowers and verdure ! Those skeletons of trees, through which the winter wind sighs drearily, instantly covered with green foliage, whispering in the gentle breeze, and vocal with the melody of happy birds, singing for very excess of ecstacy! If you should see those barren, desolate, and icy fields suddenly springing with fresh herbage, breathing the fragrance of a million wild flowers, greeting the eye with green delicious meadows, and the slopes of luxuriant pastures, and refreshing dells of shrubbery, and copses of wood- land, cool and shady in the summer's sun! It would be as if you saw the arm of Omnipotence made bare, as if you heard the voice of God, as if you saw the very lightning of his coun- tenance ! The spring time is the time of seeds; and when a few weeks have glided away, the face of the earth is changed, and our very senses behold a resurrection. From the certainty of the con- nection between the sowing and the harvest, between the hind, of sowing and the hind of harvest, between the poverty and scantiness of the sowing, and the richness and abundance of the harvest, between the weakness and corruption of the seed, and the power of the harvest, what lessons of instruction, admonition, 43 G oo VOICES OF NATURE. and animating hope and triumph has the God of grace and nature presented to our minds! If any man, questioning and doubtful ask: How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come? go to thine own cornfield, thou foolish interrogating speculator, and see what answer God makes thee through thine own sense and experience. Thou canst not commit a measure of barley to the rood of land thou tillest, but thine own faith in the processes of nature con- tradicts and reproves thy want of faith in the processes of grace. Dost thou ever dream that the same corn which thou so west comes again into the light and air? Is it not a death, that thou committest unto, and dost thou not know that that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die, and that thou sowest not that which shall be, but that which shall be changed, shall pass into other forms of life, shall pass through death itself into new life and abundance? Dost thou ever question the future life of the grain because of present death and rottenness? But who giveth to thy grain its future life? is it thou, thy seed, or God? And cannot thy God as easily give a body to thy sleeping dust, as a harvest to thy rotting grain? Thou sowest thy grain, but thou canst not re- produce it; thou canst not take one step with it, but just to commit it to the ground; thou must leave all the rest with God, and art compelled to wait on God for its re- appearance. Well! thou man of doubt, God himself sows thy body, and he himself will re-produce it. Or if we ourselves are to be regarded also as the husbandmen of the grave-yard, as the sowers of the human grain, because we carry dust to dust, ashes to ashes, because we clothe the body in its shroud, and build the coffin round it, and follow it in the funeral, and see it let down into the grave, and shovel the earth upon it, there also we have to leave all the rest with God; we can take not one step further. And can we do any thing more than this, when we put the seed of the year's life into the ground? Is not that a funeral also? Nevertheless, because of our entire confidence of seeing it again more glorious and abun- dant, we do not think of the funeral, but of the harvest; and the time of seeds is a time of hope and happiness. But do we not have to rely entirely upon God! If we had to put all the seed now existing in the world at once into the earth, it would not VOICES OP THE SPRING. 99 trouble us, so great is this confidence; we feel sure that God will raise it again. And what greater confidence, what greater faith, does it require to believe that God will raise the dead? In both cases we have to rely entirely on God; it is only he who can accomplish the result. We can no more produce a solitary rain-storm, or a quiet fall of dew to moisten the earth, and cause the seed in its bosom to germinate, than we can conduct, or even imagine, one of the processes that may be necessary to prepare the body for the last great exercise of Divine power upon it, in raising it incorruptible and full of glory. Yet this conscious ignorance and want of power in ourselves does not prevent us from relying upon God, in the confidence of a future harvest; and if we can trust God for the resurrection of our grain, we can also for the resurrection of our bodies. It is as easy for him to raise this mortal body and clothe it afresh in glory, as it is to multiply the seed sown, and make each dying kernel the parent of a multitudinous life. Therefore, the resurrection of the just shall be the harvest of eternity, of which, in regard to the bodies of the just, death and the grave are but the spring-time, the sowing-time, the time of disappearance for a season, the time of kindly, hopeful burial for the seeds of hope. A Christian burial, of the land or of the sea, is not so much a funeral, a ceremonial of death, as it is a prepa- ration for life; not so much a consequence of our mortality, as it is of our immortality; not so truly the subject for a dirge, as for a halleluia anthem. The processes of planting in the Spring are not so much a proof of Winter, as that the Winter is over and gone. And so the planting of these bodies, in the likeness of Christ's death, is a result of his divine mercy, and a confident assurance of his divine power, who hath abolished death and brought life and immortality to light. Yes! this is our victory over thee, Death, through thine Almighty Conqueror Jesus Christ! Thou art but our Lord's ministering usher for his followers to eternal life! They are not thine, But only in thy keeping for a season, Till the great promised day of restitution. The illustrious Deliverer of mankind, The Son of God, thee foiled, Him in thy power Thou couldst not hold; self-vigorous he rose, 1 00 VOICES OF NATURE. And shaking off thy fetters, soon retook Those spoils his voluntary yielding lent; Sure pledge of our releasement from thy thrall! Twice twenty days he sojourned here on earth, And showed himself alive to chosen witnesses By proofs so strong, that the most slow-assenting Had not a scruple left. This having done He mounted up to heaven. Methinks I see him Climb the aerial heights, and glide along Athwart the severing clouds; but the faint eye, Flung backwards in the chase, soon drops its hold, Disabled quite, and jaded with pursuing. Heaven's portals wide expand to let him in, Nor are his friends shut out; as some great Prince, Not for bimself alone procures admission, But for his train. It was his royal will That where he is there should his followers be. Death only lies between. A gloomy path! Made yet more gloomy by our coward fears, But not untrod, or tedious. Now thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. And thanks for the gift of that faith, which accepts the victory, and knows it through the grave's de- cay, although the universal earth be but one mighty burial-place. The time draws on, When not a single spot of burial earth, Whether on land, or in the spacious sea, But must give back its long committed dust Inviolate: and faithfully shall then Make up the full account, not the least atom Embezzled or mislaid, of the whole tale, Each soul shall have a body ready furnished, And each shall have his own. Hence ye profane ! Ask not how this can be? Sure the same power Who reared the piece at first, and took it down, Can re-assemble the loose scattered parts, And put them as they were. Almighty God Has done much more; nor is his aim impaired Through length of days; and what he can, he will. His faithfulness stands bound to see it done. Blaik. VOICES OF THE SPRING. 1 01 And a Christian grave-yard is a holy spot. Why should it be a gloomy mansion? Nay, the graves of the just are blessed, for death is not the victor there, but life; death is but the minister of life. A Christian grave-yard is a cradle, where, in the quiet motions of the globe, Jesus rocks his sleeping children. By and by he will wake them from their slumber, and in the arms of angels they shall be translated to the skies. Them also that sleep with Jesus will he bring with him. And many bodies of the Saints, which slept, arose. How beautiful, how serenely confident, is this language! How it takes its terror from the grave to consider it as a place of quiet slumber in the Lord! Them also which sleep in Jesus. As sentinels keep their night watch around the tent, so through this night of slumber in the tabernacle of the grave, God's angels may keep their watch, may have their appointed ministry. The hind of resurrection to be experienced by the body de- pends on what a man sows for the life and character of the soul. Whether a man shall have part in the first resurrection, whether he will be one of Paul's hearers in the fifteenth chapter of his Epistle to the Corinthians, whether he will ever lift up that halleluia anthem over the death of the body, in the prospect of its glorious resurrection in the likeness of the Lord, is to be de- termined by the seed which he puts into his spiritual being. The use made of the seed-time of the soul, for things and seasons temporal, determines the harvest both of soul and body, both for time and eternity. What an infinite solemnity in the truth! What an exceeding and eternal weight of responsibility in the knowledge of it, and in all our movements in regard to it ! Who that comes into existence, and has this law of his being once made known to him, ever can divest himself, for one moment, of this vast accountability, this charge of the character and destiny of soul and body for eternity? Can it be questioned that every habit which we form, of body or of spirit, is connected with our resurrection dress? The habits of time will appear as the dress of eternity. He that raised up the Lord Jesus from the dead, shall also quicken your mortal bodies, by His Spirit that divelleth within you. The habit of the Spirit is the habit of life, and death itself cannot interrupt it, if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you. By that same Spirit these bodies are to be 102 VOICES OF NATURE. quickened, raised, transfigured; and with reference to these bodies especially it is, that the last Adam is said to be a quick- ening Spirit, and mortality is swallowed up of life. Even now, the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts is the beginning of this process; it produces even now an instinctive prediction of the resurrection. The whole earnest expectation of the creature, which waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God, is sus- tained and strengthened by this sacred intuition. The hope in Christ takes up that as one of its elements, and does not leave us to the promise merely, but the day itself dawneth and the day-star ariseth in our hearts; and though as yet we see as through a glass darkly, yet we recognise the star, jLfi-c^ Z — - " And feel through all this fleshy dress ■' -Seine shoots of everlastinsrness." The glorious process begins with " Christ in you the hope of glory; " thus the principle of life is deposited, enshrined, as a flame in a globe, which is to be itself transfigured as one sphere of flame; and so the law of the Spirit of life in Christ works on, till it has permeated all things, and subdued all things to itself. Death cannot stop it, but only removes the process a step be- yond our sight; and so, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the Spirit is life, because of righteousness. This corruptible puts on incorruption, and this mortal puts on immortality, by the power of that divine, indwelling, quickening Spirit. The translation and transfiguration of Enoch and Elijah may have been nothing more than millions of living saints shall experience in the twinkling of an eye, in the resurrection-morning. And the same change, which will then take place in a moment with the living body, may be going on through ages with the sleep- ing dust. Just so it is in death. But thou Shalt in thy mother's bosom sleep, Nor till the wakeful morning know, How all night long they come and go, Who by the grave their heavenly watches keep. Now from which quarter of the horizon shall we come into a grave-yard? There is the side of winter and death, and the side of spring, summer, and life. We must enter by the VOICES OF THE SPRING. 103 Southern exposure, where the sun lies soft and warm upon the verdure, and lovely is that walk for meditation, in the light of the sunshine of faith in the soul. There may be days, when, though a snowy shroud seems to cover the graves on one side, there is a robe of fresh living green on the other. Look thou upon the grave in the direction of the quickening light, and read the vivid promise of the ray divine, and rejoice in it. This is that lesson so sweetly taught by the Poet Wordsworth, in that very beautiful, though simple, unpretending picture in the fifth book of the Excursion. in changeful April, when, as he is wont, Winter has re-assumed a short-lived sway, And whitened all the surface of the fields, If, from the sullen region of the North, Towards the circuit of this holy ground, Your walk conducts you, ere the vigorous sun, High climbing, hath attained his noon-tide height, These mounds, transversely lying side by side From east to west before you, will appear A dreary plain of unillumined snow, With more than wintry cheerlessness and gloom Saddening the heart. Go forward, and look back; On the same circuit of this church-yard ground Look, from the quarter whence the Lord of light, Of life, of love, and gladness, doth dispense His beams; which, unexcluded in their fall, Upon the southern side of every grave Have gently exercised a melting power; Then will a vernal prospect greet your eye, All fresh and beautiful, and green, and bright, Hopeful and cheerful: vanished is the snow, Vanished or hidden; and the whole domain, To some, too lightly minded, might appear A meadow-carpet for the dancing hours. This contrast not unsuitable to life Is to that other state more apposite, Death, and its two-fold aspect; wintry one, Cold, sullen, blank, from hope and joy shut out; The other which the ray divine hath touched, Seplete with vivid promise, bright as spring. 104 VOICES OF NATURE. We have been viewing our beautiful world as one of hiero- glyphical predictions, both in the changes of its scenery and the working of its laws and elements of reproduction and decay. For the interpretation of this grand natural language we look into our own being, as well as into the Word of God, remember- ing that he hath set the world in our hearts. In this view, how full of profound meaning is the following suggestive and com- prehensive passage from Coleridge, worthy to be made the text of another " Analogy of religion natural and revealed." It is contained in the first volume of the Biographia Literaria. " They, and they only, can acquire the philosophic imagina- tion, the sacred power of self-intuition, who, within themselves, can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those who feel in their own spirits the same instinct which impels the chrysalis of the homed fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a corresponding world of spirit; though the latter organs are not developed alike in all. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being." And faith itself is in the moral being first, not in the intel- lectual. There, where the intuitive prediction first discloses itself, the germ of faith also takes root. There is a reflection of the world to come in the depths of our moral being, as the stars in heaven and the trees upon the banks are reflected in the bosom of a quiet lake. This is part of the evidence on which our faith is founded, for faith receives the evidence of things not seen, and is never supposition, or assumption, or blind confidence. The evidence is never such, nor was meant to be such, as to over- power the possibility or doubt, and if a man will keep the eye of the soul shut, he may doubt of every thing. The evidence of the great truths of our religious faith is such as to permit of faith being a voluntary exercise, a moral virtue, dependent, after all the overwhelming array of argument, on a right condition of the heart. Hence the great writer just quoted has said, that the grounds for the belief of God and a future state " could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less VOICES OF THE SPKING. 105 effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing tlie life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless, because compulsory, assent." This remark is exceedingly profound and important. The I evidence of faith may be as demonstrative where the heart is; right, as that of mathematics to the understanding; but the life of faith is not in the clearness of the proof, nor the comprehen- siveness of the reason that embraces it, but in the congenial affections that spring to meet it, in the intuitive unerring spiritual yearnings that predict it, and in the earnest of the Spirit, which is the consequence and seal of our adoption as the sons of God. ■ i Without or star or angel for their guide, Who worship God, shall find him. Humble Love, And not proud Reason, keeps the door of heaven. I Love finds admission, where proud Science fails. Man's science is the culture of his heart, And not to lose his plummet in the depths Of nature, or the mere profound of God. Young's Night Thoughts. 1X3- How much I regret to see so generally abandoned to the weeds of vanity, that fertile and vigorous space of life, in which might be planted the oaks and fruit-trees of enlight- ened principle and virtuous habit, which, growing up, would yield to old age an enjoyment, a glory, and a shade. John Foster. And when I grieve, rather let it be That I, whom Nature taught to sit with her, On her proud mountains, by her rolling sea, Who, when the winds are up, with mighty stir Of woods and waters, feel the quickening spur To my strong spirit, who, as my own child, Do love the flower, and in the ragged burr A beauty see, that I this mother mild Should leave, and go with care and passions fierce and wild. Dana's Daybreak. You do well to improve your opportunity; to speak in the rural phrase, this is your sowing time, and the sheaves that you look for never can be yours, unless you make that use of it. The colour of our whole life is generally such as the three or four first years in which we are our own masters make it. Then it is that we may be said to shape our own destiny, and to treasure up for ourselves a series of future successes or disappointments. Had I employed my time as wisely as you, in a situation very similar to yours, I had never been a poet perhaps; but I might by this time have acquired a character of more importance in society, and a situation in which my friends would have been better pleased to see me. But three years misspent in an Attorney's office were, almost of course, followed by several more equally misspent in the Temple, and the consequence has been, as the Italian epitaph says, "Sto qui." Cowper's Letters. CHAPTEE IX. Voices of the Spring continued: Spiritual Agriculture laborious: The Fallow Ground, and the breaking of it up, in preparation for Sowing: The Process of Subsoiling in the Mind and Heart: The connection between Working and Praying: Consequences of the Skimming System. The Poets and Prophets of the Old Testament drew much of their imagery and illustration of spiritual things from rural occupations. So did our Blessed Lord and His Disciples. From this, as well as from their announcement of everlasting princi- ples, their perpetual dealing with such principles, and their introduction of the human soul into the presence-chamber of eternal realities, resulted the universality, simplicity, and homely power of their compositions. God was pleased to put His Word in this shape. Now there are two spring directions in the Prophets, bringing together the work of sowing and praying, and illustrating the dependence of each of these duties upon the other, and the rela- tion of both for success to the state of the moral soil, and the labour necessary to be performed upon it; directions from dif- ferent husbandmen, but almost in the same words, yet with some variety of addition and details; two in particular, so pointed and full of meaning, that we must bring them together from Hosea and Jeremiah. "Break up your fallow-grotmd," says the first and earlier Prophet (earlier by about a hundred years), "for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteous- ness upon you." This command comes down in the midst of a perfect shower of rural images; and it connects, in a remarkable manner, the ploughing, and all that kind of work upon the heart VOICES OF THE SPRING. 109 and mind, indicated in that part of husbandry, with the work of seeking God, the work of effectually praying. "Break up your fallow-ground," says the second and more majestic of these Prophets, but not more pointed, 'and sow not among thorns.' Break up your fallow-ground, or all your sowing will be in vain. Here the process turns upon the sowing; in the other case upon the seeking; in both cases it is necessary for success. It is time to seek the Lord; but it is useless to seek him, indeed there is no true seeking of him, unless therewith you go to work upon your own soil, your own heart, and break up the fallow-ground. It is time to sow; but it is useless to sow, unless first you dig and plough, and break up the hard soil, and the thorns with it. The work of praying itself is a kind of sowing; it is a sowing with God's promises; and to this work especially both these Prophets refer, announcing directly, in answer to the question, How shall we gain God's blessing? a work to be done on our part, along with prayer, if we would render prayer effectual. The intimate and essential connection between praying and working is no where in the Word of God more strikingly exhi- bited than in these passages. In some of Paul's recorded experiences, as well as admonitions, the illustrations of the same kind of truth are most instructive and impressive, and we may add, most encouraging. "By the grace of God I am what I am; and His grace bestowed on me was not in vain, but I laboured more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." So like- wise in his Epistle to the Colossians, "Whereunto I also labour, striving according to His working, which worketh in me mightily." Paul besought the grace of God, with amazing earnestness and importunity, yea, with great conflict in prayer, and at the same time laboured mightily in the direction of that grace; not only for it, but by it. Paul was a working, as well as a praying Christian; and he must have taken his type of piety, in the union of these, not only from his Lord's example, but partly from just such instructive hints as these in the Prophets of the Old Testament. A man must work. If any will not work, said Paul, neither shall he eat. It is so in spiritual things, as well as temporal. And if any will not work, neither can he pray, for working is 110 VOICES OF NATURE. essential to praying; and the right union and combination of these two things would form the perfect and conquering Chris- tian. A Christian must not only work in prayer, but he must work in order that he may pray. If a man would have spiritual blessings, he must put himself in the way of them, in the way of receiving them; if not, he is likely to lose them. A familiar instance is presented in the case of Thomas, at the resurrection of our Lord. For some inexplicable reason, he absented himself from the prayer-meeting of the disciples, the evening of the third day. It may have been his unbelief, which too often is permitted to cut the nerves of prayer, and to render almost the sight of a fellow-Christian distasteful. Perhaps he was wander- ing by himself, and brooding over the dark prospect, which after the few sweet years they had enjoyed of intercourse with their beloved Master, now gloomed before them. But there were duties for Thomas to perform in connection with his fellows, in the neglect of which he lost, much longer than they did, the light of Christ's presence; he continued without it, when the other disciples had found it, and rejoiced in it. He wandered on in darkness and unbelief for a succession of despairing days, that must have seemed to him like years, in storm and tempest, driven by the wind and tossed, because he was not with the disciples, at their gathering (though he probably knew of it) when the Lord himself came into their meeting. So it not unfrequently happens. A man who would have blessings, must use the occasions of those blessings, he must seize the spring-time. And a man who would have Christ to sympathize with him, must himself sympathize with others. It is nothing but pride and selfishness that ever make men unsocial in their piety, whether it be of tears or joy. But they who sow in tears at the season of Spring shall reap in joy; only first there must come that breaking up of the fal- low-ground presented in the prophets. This breaking up, set forth as so essential to successful prayer, and to the right kind of sowing, intimates many things under the one bold image em- ployed. The soil must be turned upside down, and thoroughly beaten to pieces. It must be so thoroughly furrowed and broken, that the thorns themselves shall die, and turn into manure. This is no small task, even in things that stand related to this VOICES OF THE SPRING, 111 life only. When any one class of duties has been neglected, or the preparation necessary for any employment in life has long been deferred, an amount of passive resistance accumulates, which at the very outset it is difficult to overcome. There is a repugnance and a habit of indolence, and an inaptitude, both of inclination and of custom. By courses of truth and duty ne- glected, erroneous impressions, prejudices, and evil habits, become confirmed; the thorns tower into the size and strength of oaks; and the soil so occupied is harder to be broken up than the most rocky fallow-ground to be disintegrated. Ignorance itself, from being merely passive at first, assumes a character of obstinate, stolid opposition. Add to this the growth of inevitable evil habits, (for where good seed does not grow, thorns and tares will) and whether it be a man's mind or heart that has long lain fallow, or both together, the work of breaking up becomes exceedingly arduous, and sometimes desperate. And neither mind nor heart, neither intellectual nor moral habits or natures, can long he neglected, without a powerful' mutual influence. And if either be broken up, the other is started. Any powerful revolution or deep change in mental pursuits and opinions, would have great effect on the moral state, could not take place indeed, without carrying the moral along with it. A great mental awakening is a moral excitement, and still more powerfully a great moral excitement awakens, strengthens, renovates the mind. If it be in the right direction, it is some- times not merely the new creation of a man's moral sensibilities, but his whole mental constitution and habits are formed, re- newed, vivified. An over-mastering, inspiring impulse heaven- ward, has trained many a man to a noble stature and strength of intellect, who otherwise would have lived and died, intellec- tually as well as morally, much like the clod that covers him. In regard to men's training for a future endless life, and their habits in reference to heavenly realities, a great spiritual disci- pline is recognised, or designated, under this image of breaking up the fallow ground. Before men's natures are fitted to receive and germinate the seeds of an unchanging holiness and happi- ness, the Word of God, by the Spirit of God, must make thorough work within them. The ploughshare of the Law and the Gos- pel must be driven through the soul. What old theological 112 VOICES OF NATURE. writers were fond of calling the Law-ivork must have a thorough operation, and the heart in that way must become fully prepared for the fruits of a Gospel piety. Blessed is that soul which is thus thoroughly ploughed up. Whatever plant of righteousness may yet get root there, it will be of no dwarfish or transitory growth. This operation of breaking up the fallow ground may have to be renewed more than once in a man's spiritual life-time. Nay, were it done as often as the Spring of the year comes round, abundant and glorious would be the spiritual harvest, if the breaking up were followed by the right sowing. In reality there ought to be no fallow ground in a man's heart, and no places left for the growth of nettles; every neglected patch of ground makes hard work for the future, whenever the attempt is made to bring it under a Christian cultivation. This ploughing in the heart, when it has long been left unsubdued, is of the hardest kind of work in spiritual agriculture. When it has been ne- glected, the roots of evil habits and earthly affections, tough and strong, entangle and detain you, and the soil itself becomes like clods of iron. Of a truth it is hard work to plough in such a soil. All the operations of the divine life are very different things in practice from what they are in theory. It is just as it is in agriculture. A man to be a practical farmer must be a working man. It is one thing to have romantic ideas of green glades, and longings after a quiet farm in the country, and to be turn- ing over books of landscape-gardening, and studying the chemistry of soils and manures, and quite another thing to go into the fields and ditch, and dig, and plough, and harrow. It is one thing to manage a farm by proxy, and have all your work done by others, and quite another thing to take hold with the oxen, and clear up wild lands, and break the fallow ground, and plant corn and potatoes with your own hands. Now, although the managing of a farm can be done by proxy, if a man has wealth enough, yet there is no such possibility in the Christian life. Here you have to keep your own vineyard, and to work your own farm. A man cannot dig in his own heart with hired labourers; he can do nothing there at second- hand. The digging and the ditching, the ploughing and harrow- ing, he must do himself. If it could be done by others, there VOICES OF THE SFRING. 113 is many a Christian merchant who would pay a thousand dollars a year salary to any man who would farm his heart for him, and get the work done, while he could be all the while accumu- lating money. There are many persons, both poor and rich, who would give all that they are worth, if they could get some trusty agent to farm out their hearts for them, with the assur- ance of keeping them in good order and fruitful. But this cannot be done. Neither the best knowledge of the i theory of religion, nor the closest study of other men's piety, will do any thing without our own sturdy, steady, hard, diligent \ labour. You cannot break up your fallow ground by reading J ' Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,' nor run | the Christian race merely by reading the ' Pilgrim's Progress ; ' ; nor could you do this, even if you had both Doddridge and Bunyan to preach to you and to pray for you, unless you preached to yourself, and prayed for j^ourself, and laboured with yourself, and ploughed up your own heart. Break up your fallow ground, says Jeremiah, and soiv not among thorns, for if you do, the thorns are sure to choke your seed, and make it unfruitful. Break up your fallow ground, for if you leave it unbroken, it is sure to be covered with thorns and weeds, so that there is no possibility of the good seed taking root among them. Are there any of my readers ignorant of the meaning of fallow ground? Many, if they knew the state of their own hearts, would know by that the meaning of fallow ground in agriculture. Sometimes it signifies, and most generally, ground uncultivated, uninclosed for tillage and fruit, waste and left to itself, and to just what may happen to spring up, which is an apt emblem of the condition of many a soul. Sometimes it means ground which has been ploughed once, but slightly, in order to a second more thorough ploughing previous to sowing. And this again is an apt emblem of the condition of many a soul, where the first ploughing has been begun, but the second is utterly ne- glected, and the plough is left in the furrow, and neither ploughing nor sowing any longer really goes on.. It is a sad, and well nigh desperate condition when this is the case, for this was partly the meaning of the Saviour when he said: No man having put his hand to the plough and looking back, turning away, leaving his work undone, is fit for the kingdom of God. 43 11 114 VOICES OF NATURE. No man's soul, thu3 neglected, or carelessly and but half ploughed, is fit even for the seed of the kingdom of heaven. And here we may see, in such a condition, the reason why prayer, if offered by such a person, being essentially heartless, must, be wholly ineffectual. It is just like faith without works, dead. And if God sees thou art not breaking up the fallow ground, yet still art praying to him for his Spirit, why should thy prayers, in such a case, be answered? There 'is no true praying ever, where the fallow ground is not broken up; but even if there were, of what use would it be for the rain to de- scend upon such a soil? Therefore are these two things put together : " Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord;" " Break up your fallow ground and sow not among thorns;" intimating clearly that you cannot seek the Lord with success, until you do break up your fallow ground and sow the seed of righteousness in a soil thus prepared. The fallow ground, until it be thus prepared, is as hard, almost, as a nether mill- stone, and all grown over with thorns and nettles. If ever the rain of God's Spirit should descend upon such a soil, it would all run off unavailing from the surface, carrying even the seed with it, or it would be absorbed by the growth of nettles. Precisely this effect has been sometimes witnessed in a superficial excitement of religious emotion, where the heart soil has not been broken up, so that the seed of divine truth could be put beneath the furrows. The spring-rain that was meant to make it germinate, has washed it all away. Let us suppose that a farmer, in great imaginary reliance upon God, should, without any ploughing or harrowing, go and scatter seed all over a hard-baked, barren field, filled with thistles, and then leaving his plough and his oxen idle in their places, should betake himself to God's promises of answer to prayer, and with the Bible in his hand, should sit down in the house or by the way-side, begging of God that he would grant a great shower of rain ! Would that be a true reliance upon God! Would that be a kind of prayer likely to prevail with God? The showers might come, might come upon that whole region; but little good would they do that man's field, and they could not be supposed to be sent in answer to that man's prayers. His prayers are a mere excuse for his indolence; they are a mockery of God VOICES OF THE spring. 115 furthermore, what is called fallow ground sometimes means that which has been once slightly ploughed, in preparation for another ploughing before sowing. This ploughing must be thorough, and we may need what is called a sub-soil plough in order to break up and pulverize that which lies under the surface. The hard sterile earth is thereby thoroughly disintegrated, and is also exposed to the meliorating influences of the atmo- sphere, thus furnishing increased supplies of nourishment and moisture in dry seasons for the roots of plants. In our minds and hearts we need this kind of ploughing, and when it is generally and faithfully performed, we may be sure there will be no more complaining of spiritual droughts or desolations. The vegetative powers and processes of the earth, and of seeds and plants, are a deep mystery; but the analogies between seeds and truths, between the germinating processes in matter and mind, in vegetable life and the soul's being, are obvious and striking. Principles, germs, the beginnings and the seeds of things; what powers, what laws, what prophecies they com- prehend ! what cares, what duties, what watchful appropriate corresponding discipline they both suppose and render neces- sary! The secrecy, the darkness, the impenetrable obscurity of nature, in the beginnings of life, the openness, the freedom, the visibility of nature in its development, are themes for profound meditation. The seed must germinate, and the roots exist, be- neath the surface; and the same motions by which the spreading and down-shooting threads of the tangled roots seek nourishment for the plant, establish it firmly in the soil. But the stalk shoots upward, and the bud opens, and the flower blossoms, and the fruit ripens, in the light, the air, beneath the eye of all that hath vision on the earth and in heaven. The radicle descends, and the plume rises; the invariable law, the unerring vegetable instinct of these motions, has a counter- part in the germination and growth of all truth and principle in the mind and heart. There are two directions, downwards, upwards; within, without; meditative, active; introspective, ex- pansive. The germ contains the prophecy, marks the future; an absolute certainty, of which circumstances are but the cradle. What a fact for thought, for profoundest meditation, when we behold, in a seed so small, that it shall almost elude the sight, yet, placed in the focus of a powerful microscope, the whole 116 VOICES OF NATURE. future tree visible; the trunk, and the branches, a plain indis- putable reality, a prophecy inevitable in the fulfilment. And so it is with thought, emotion, life, the principles of character. There too, in every germ there is a prophecy, a future tree. Circumstances are but the cradle, or the sheath, or the soil; for even thought is not spontaneous, but requires deep discipline. There's no such thing as chance; And what to us seems merest accident, Springs from the deepest source of destiny. This various human being's thoughts and deeds, - Are not like ocean billows, blindly moved. The inner world, his microcosmos, is The deep shaft, out of which they spring eternally. They grow by certain laws, like the tree's fruit; No juggling chance can metamorphose them. Have I the human kernel first examined^ Then I know too, the future will and action. Schillek's Wallenstein. The kernel breaks and develops by circumstances, out of which it selects its nourishment. The future will and action are developed also by circumstances; developed, not created, nor entirely governed, but in their measure governing, determining, yea, making circumstances, as well as seizing occasions. So the being grows firmly on. In the meditative notice of these goings on of nature, in the watchful examination of things necessary for a happy and suc- cessful agriculture, a thoughtful mind, dwelling on the higher realities, typified by natural forms, sees suddenly and forcibly presented the importance of the science of self-culture and self- discipline. One of Lord Bacon's pregnant aphorisms contains a volume of wisdom in this science. " For if you will have a tree bear more fruit than it hath used to do, it is not any thing you can do to the boughs, but it is in the stirring of the earth, and putting new mould about the roots, that must work it." The stirring of the earth is our present appropriate lesson; what can be' done the better to prepare the mind for seed, and to quicken and strengthen the descending radicle. The earth needs to be VOICES OF THE SPUING. 117 stirred deeply, not superficially, if a grand and noble growth is ever expected: though indeed the work of applying new mould has also its accompanying, appropriate, immediate place from the outset, and the mould itself must be stirred in. All sugges- tive and strong excitement of the intellect is good; and what- ever turns the mind powerfully in upon itself, and throws the soul upon an invisible God and a world of spiritual reality, found as a realized world, by self-experiment, by the conflict of the soul under the working of the Spirit, and the witness of the Spirit in the working of the soul, begets originality and power. Such a work, and such divine results, come not at second- hand; every thing of true power must be in- working, experimen- tal, self-experienced. And the labour of the mind is requisite for the soundness of the heart. Yea, exclaims the same great poet, whose prediction from the human kernel we have just quoted : Yea, he deserves to find himself deceived Who seeks a heart in the unthinking man. Like shadows on a stream, the forms of life Impress their characters on the smooth forehead. Nought sinks into the bosom's silent depth: Quick sensibility of pain and pleasure Moves the light fluids lightly; but no soul Warmeth the inner frame. i A fever sometimes renovates the physical system: so may even an undue intellectual excitement, if it prove not fatal, leave the mind stronger than before. A predilection for some author or system, amounting for the time almost to mental aberration, may in the end prove salutary to the character; provided always that the extreme be thoroughly recovered from, and that the fever fall not into a slow quotidian or septennial ague. Nevertheless, here again the nature of an individuality is to be respected; for not precisely the same treatment may prove the best for different constitutions and tendencies. The fire refines gold, but destroys steel; the same furnace that will but remove the dros3 in the one case, in the other takes away a par- ticular virtue, and would blunt the cutting edge of the sharpest razor. Moreover, in the same patch of ground, respect must be had to what must be eradicated, as well as to the growth of 118 VOICES OF NATURE. "what must be planted. Fallow ground is not barren of weeds; but may be very rich and flowering with them. And there may be such self-deception, that these infesting growths of native evil may be cherished and chosen as the forms of good. " Ancient and rooted prejudices," remarks Bishop Berkeley, '*' do often pass into principles; and those propositions which once obtain the force and credit of a principle, are not only them- selves, but likewise whatever is deducible from them, thought privileged from all examination. And there is no absurdity, which by this means the mind of man may not be prepared to swallow." x There is greater work for self-discipline in the con- quering and removing of such tenants of the mental soil, than ever the settler of a new region could undergo in the clearing of wild lands and the uprooting of stumps. In the spiritual, as well as the rural world of discipline, the subsoil ploughing is effectual and thorough. In the mind and heart there is never any danger of going too deep; the planting of the soul is to be the very interpenetration of its whole being with the power of truth. It is a baptism, a transfiguration, a new creation of the whole, as well as a growth from it. The truth becomes its life, its habit, a part and possession of its nature. The instinctive search of plants for nourishment, the busy, joyous activity and reach of the roots in generous and softened soils, is but a type of the earnestness and profoundness with which the truth runs through the well -disciplined and softened mind, and takes possession of it. This is especially the case with the realities of the spiritual world into which the soul enters, as in its destined, native, spontaneous alliance, its ele- mental relationship and home. We are here tracing an eminently practical analogy. Few persons, not practically versed in agriculture, have any idea of the great depth to which the roots of plants, even from small seeds, will descend in favourable situations. The fibrils of a wheat kernel have been found more than thirty inches below the surface; those of red clover, Indian corn, and the Swedish turnip, five feet, and of sainfoin and lucerne, from twenty to thirty feet! And long after they have become invisible to the naked eye, they can be detected by the microscope, pushing themselves into the heart of the earth for nourishment. It is the constant effort 1 Principles of Human Knowledge, section 124. VOICES OF THE SPRING. 119 of the good gardener to facilitate this wonderful operation of .nature, and so he digs and trenches the soil to the depth of two •or three feet, and finds himself repaid by a most luxuriant vegetation. After the same manner the roots of the seed of the Divine Word, where the soil is turned up deep, and made tender and moist, hide themselves away, far beyond sight, in the depths of the sanctified soul, till they get so rooted, that all the powers of ^earth and hell cannot pluck them up, neither can any drought wither them, but in light from heaven above, they grow like a great tree planted by the river-side, always bearing fruit in its season. That is the effect of sub-soil ploughing in the soul, God's eye follows the microscopic roots, and his Spirit goes with them, and ministers nourishment and power. There is a gentle and free circulation of air around them, and it is absorbed by the earth, and treasured up for the growing plant. Moreover, this subsoiling secures a thorough draining of the soil, in cases where the land happens to be wet and marshy, as is sometimes the case with the neglected soul. There is, in opposition to all this, a careless, surface kind of ploughing in husbandry, very aptly called the shimming system, and this skimming system, instead of the subsoiling, is, alas, most generally, that which prevails in spiritual things, in the husbandry of the soul. The consequence of this careless surface- ploughing of the land is just this; the pressure of the soil, and the treading of the team and driver form at the bottom of the furrow a hard crust, which is with difficulty penetrated by the delicate fibres at the ends of the roots. Sometimes this substratum is naturally so hard, or becomes such, that it receives the expressive name of an iron pan. In the habits of the mind, in the hard- ness and indifferences of perverted sensibilities, and in cherished obstinacies of prejudice or opinion, how often is just such a substratum of character formed and perpetuated! Has it never happened to us to observe just such hard-soiled Christians, with the whole character destitute of heavenly tender- ness and spirituality, and the heart and conscience very much hardened and insensible? This is the effect of careless surface ploughing in the Spring, sub-soiling being neglected. The skim- ming system always produces such characters; there is that iron- pan at the bottom. Out of that grow hard speeches, severe and 12!) VOICES OF NATTJRK. censorious judgments, a bitter, fault-finding spirit, stupidity of heart, a tough conscience, self-delusion, a sectarian disposition, formalism, neglect of prayer, and all kinds of spiritual weeds, instead of the gentleness, prayerfulness, humility, and love of the Gospel. This hard bed, untouched, may be the ruin of a man's spiritual nature. It is a fallow-ground lying under the surface, and unless it be broken up, the tender roots of the word, and the gentle influences of the Spirit, cannot get hold upon the soil. If seed be sown in such a condition, and spring up, it speedily withers away, our Saviour tells us, because there is no deepness of earth. Let it be broken up, let there be a thorough sub-soiling, and there will be growth in grace, a fruitful harvest, and all the graces of the Spirit in the soul. But without this labour, this thorough heavenly preparation and discipline, the soul may be fatally deceived, and may continue in just the condition so solemnly depicted, by the apostle, in contrast with a gracious state : " For the earth, which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, re- ceiveth blessing from God; but that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be burned." Now if it be true that in the kingdom of grace all our barrenness and all our ivant of grace, and all the fruitlessness of our prayers and efforts, come from not having the fallow-ground broken up in the Spring, and from the skimming system, and from sowing among thorns, we have a great work to do. We have been too exclusively seedsmen, and not soilsmen; for a very easy and indolent thing it may be to select and scatter the seed, while a very difficult and self-denying thing it is to break up and prepare the soil. This may be the very secret of the poverty and lowness of the piety in many a well ranked, numerous Church of the Lord Jesus. The fallow-ground not being broken up, nor sub-soiled, and con- sequently there being no deepness of earth, the seed of the word, though it may seem to spring up to a profession, is swiftly over- topped and choked, strangled and withered, by the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the anxious pursuit of other things. And just so it is with faint, half-determined, superficial seekers. VOICES OF THE SPRING. 121 God loves an earnest violence of strife, an importunity of pres- sure into the kingdom of Heaven; and the thing itself requires it. But there is a wide difference between striving earnestly, and leisurely seeking. The superficial seeker seldom, if ever, gets lower than that iron-pan, of which we have spoken; never, except he gives his whole soul to the work, and breaks up, deeply and thoroughly, this fallow-ground. If he will do this, he will soon find salvation. But let him not expect that a process which takes time is to be finished at a blow, nor that a fruit intended as the possession of life everlasting, is to spring up in a night, like Jonah's gourd. Paul maintained the spiritual conflict and importunity through his whole life; and it was because the fallow-ground had been so thoroughly broken up at the outset. And it is worthy of note that Paul's description of his own Christian experience is in almost the very same language which our Saviour used, when describing a pilgrim thoroughly in earnest at the first setting out. The agonizing earnestness to enter in is kept up, even till the welcome shout of glory, Enter ye in to THE JOY OF YOUR Lord! -S3 Linked with the Immortal, Immortality Begins e'en here. For what is time to thee, To whose cleared sight the night is turned to day, And that but changing life miscalled decay? Is it not glorious then, from thine own heart To pour a stream of life? to make a part With thine eternal spirit, things that rot, That, looked on for a moment, are forgot, But to thine opening vision pass to take New forms of life, and in new beauties wake ! To thee the falling leaf but fades to bear Its hues and odours to some fresher air; Some passing sound floats by to yonder sphere, That softly answers to thy listening ear. In one eternal round they go and come, A nd where they travel there thou hast a home For thy far-reaching thoughts. Power Divine! Has this poor worm a spirit so like thine? Upwrap its folds, and clear its wings to go! Would I could quit earth, sin, and care, and woe ! Nay, rather let me use the world aright, Thus make me ready for mine upward flight. E. H. Dana. j$3 Every thing is education ; the trains of thought you are indulging this hour; the society in which you will spend the evening; the conversations, walks, and incidents of to-mor- row. And so it ought to be. We may thank the world for its infinite means of impression and excitement, which keep our faculties awake and in action, while it is our important office to preside over that action, and guide it to some divine result. John Foster. The contemplation of a spiritual world, which, without the addition of a misgiving conscience, is enough to shake some natures to their foundation, is smoothly got over by others, who shall float over the black billows in their little boat of No-Distrust as unconcernedly as over a summer sea. Charles Lamb. CHAPTEE X. Voices of the Spring continued: The Probation- Acre: The inextricable Entanglement of Responsibility in Human Life: Interminable reach of Moral influence: Eeturn of Evils to their Owners: Congregation of Congenial Spirits in the Eternal World. The Spring time has opened, and all human and material agencies are busy, with a restless and never-ending activity. Life and death are busy, death beginning life, and life springing out of death; and the germs, whether of good or evil, are no sooner committed to the bosom of the soil, be it physical or immortal, than they begin to work out what is in them. Ex- cept a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The Spring time is this season of dying into life. Here and there the seed may fall, and merely go into the soil as compost, and so abide alone; but the rule is that of an indestructible germinating power both in man and nature. This is our plot of ground, our time-acre, which, according as we cultivate it here, is to prove our vast reversionary inheri- tance in eternity. Of what nature, we ourselves must determine, as being the husbandmen; for we are all agriculturists, we are all landowners, we are all sowers. And our farms lying contigu- ous, we are all subject to reciprocal influences. No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself; it is quite impossible. If I sow my field with white weed, then the next season, my neighbour's field is sure to suffer for it. Thus we are not only sowers for ourselves, but for others. Neighbours sow for neigh- bours, friends for friends, enemies for enemies, parents for chil- dren, children for parents, servants for their masters, masters for VOICES OF THE SPRING. 125 their servants; and the different classes, professions, and grades in life affect one another. The involvement or entanglement of responsibility is indissoluble and inextricable. It began with Adam and Eve, Cain and Seth, Enoch and Enos, and can never stop, but runs on multiplying. The hand of Tubal-Cain is in the building of the ark, and Noah's husbandry prepares the graves for the nephews of Moses in the wilderness. Who can trace the vast, interminable, innumerable ramifications of influ- ence and example, of second causes and consequences, of remote side-agencies with direct and illimitable results? The airs that breathe over our own homesteads, gardens, farms, carry upon downy wings the germs of what we have sown for ourselves into the germinant domains of others. And the winds that blow across our neighbours' grounds bear into our own enclosures, and drop unseen, a reciprocal measure of others' living and characteristic agencies. The elements evaporated from the farm-yards and forests a thousand miles off, may come down with the rain upon the slopes of our native mountains. Nay, visible or invisible, across the ocean they may come. In this mighty moral connection that makes our world one world, and the human family one, what a man plants in Europe may tell in America, though he never dreamed of it, and what we plant in America may be found growing from the seed in Europe, before we are aware of it. And all things throw their branches and their fruits into eternity. If we cannot get out of this chain of causes and consequences, of influences given and received, then it becomes us to act care- fully and wisely in it. We may have sifters and winnowers -for our seed, if we will, and the word of God itself is as a great filterer, through which every stream of influence may be purified . If a person would know how it acts, directly and reflectively, let him read the 119th Psalm. A man in such a world as this is as one walking or working in the galleries of a mine, in hourly danger from explosions; he needs something like Sir Humphrey Davy's Safety Lamp amidst the pressure of perilous influences around him. Then he can walk securely. If not, he endangers not only himself but others. The very flame of a man's natural life is as an open blaze in the fire-damp; and the man himself is responsible for carrying the flame of mere nature, without the guards of grace, into such elements. If the consequences were 126 VOICES OF NATURE, seen and felt instantly, no man would dare do it, though they are not the less known for being at present invisible. How often a winged word is dropped without a purpose, yet goes down into an immortal soul, and will be found a thousand times reduplicated in eternity! How often a careless listener has received a life-long impression from a still more careless speaker! Words are dropped, and forgotten, and seen no more; even as a farmer scatters seed not only from his hand, but un- knowingly from the basket, and goes his way, and sleeps and wakes; seen, no more than the seeds are seen when the earth has covered them, or than the forms of the uttered syllables are seen upon the air that is stirred by them. Yet they may be everlasting. And the seed that the very fowls of the air seem to steal from the farmer's wheat-field, they may sow somewhere else. A bird upon the wing may carry a seed that shall add a new species to the vegetable family of a continent; and just so, a word, a thought, from a flying soul, may have results im- measurable, eternal. You may not be able to follow them now, but they may follow you, hereafter; nor to trace them now, but you may reap the harvest hereafter. Think not because things do not spring up now, to sight, they are therefore necessarily gone, or dying, or inactive. Impres- sions may be piled upon impressions, and whole beds of seeds on seeds, and layers of leaves mingled with them. Then afterwards you know not what the stirring of the soil may produce, nor at what period. For as sometimes it may happen that when you cut down a growth of oaks, there will spring up a forest of young pines, or when you burn over an inclosure of birch woods, you may sec afterwards a wilderness of maple in its place, so you know not what forests of germs may lie in the heart-soil of man's nature and affections. There may be seeds of things unseen, in- active, and unknown, for the present, merely because another growth has prevented them, and keeps them down. And even if all should be changed into fossils, who knows what influence they may have upon the life of future generations? How many coal-fires may be kindled, how many steam-engines driven, by the discovered mineral beds of past opinions. Nearly half the world, even now, are living by or upon the fossil vices of past generations. Old errors are dug up, and brought into use again. The wheat buried three thousand years ago in Egyptian tombs VOICES OE THE SPRING. 127 may sprout in European gardens, and the fashions and luxuries of a sepulchred world may be reproduced in American drawing- rooms. Indeed, if the pitch of Sodom and Gomorrah, both physical and moral, could be disinterred, it would become mer- chandize. And so it is with opinion. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, it is that which shall be done. The moral habits of a man's life may be reproduced out of the jewels buried with his mummy. "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; they rest from their labours, and their works follow them." Their good once done, its work ever after is spontaneous, kindly, and refreshing. But not in the future world alone do their works thus follow them; for in this world they live also, and from this world new harvests following on, will be reported in that, from every generation. And is there not a reverse curse, for those of an opposite character, whose influence, alike immortal, by thought, word, and deed, runs on in like manner, in the reproduction of succes- sive harvests of evil? What shall be said of the authors of licentious but fascinating books, immortal by the combination of their genius with the flame of depraved passion, the fires of which it both feeds upon and kindles anew, with fresh intensity? Into how many generations of minds may the seed thus sown go down, reproductive in every generation? Their works follow them, but they never rest from their labours. Those retributive agencies that act for the bottomless pit, as the scavengers of the universe, shoot their successive loads of the evil so accumulated and fostered, into hell, at the door of every owner's mansion, and without mistake. The evils let loose in human society are sure to come back to their masters. "Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment, and some they follow after." Those that are open beforehand are not ordinarily of such germinant and reproductive power, because in their very glare and gangrene here they carry a repulsive warning. But, those that do not appear till hidden consequences appear, till \ insidious influences, and seeds silently dropped, and opinions insinuated, and habits fostered, are all ripe and ready for the I harvest, are of incalculable, interminable fertility and power./ They follow after perhaps to the end of time, in a funeral array VOICES OF NATURE. of souls. They are as the stream from a perpetual volcano, falling, with everlasting fire and roar, over mountain precipices into the deep. Will a man meet his old acquaintances in the eternal world? Yea, and new ones also; all that the creations of his mind, his heart, his words, his example, have attached to his own spirit, whether in one generation or another. Time and space are an- nihilated by moral influence, and a man walks eternally with the beings congenial to himself, or whom he has drawn to him- self by the immutable attraction of powerful elements of charac- ter. All that thus know him draw after him to one abode. An innumerable and solemn array, more terrible than the imagery of any of Dante's friezes of fiery woe, sculptured in words, is disclosed winding in the galleries of those congregations of the dead. There is a time wherein one man ruleth over another to his own hurt; and so I saw the wicked buried. The ruler never rests from his ruling, and the ruled rule others after them, and all pass to successive thrones of fire. Our moral influence, except God interpose to prevent it, must be eternal; and if evil, it is more to our own hurt than the hurt of others. It comes back upon us in successive and per- petual waves, each crested higher than the one before; till as from the waste of a boundless ocean, the vast surf breaks upon the beach with the wail of a righteous, natural retribution. God only can interpose; and if He does interpose, still the influence is eternal, though blissfully changed in its nature, yet eternal in duration. God interposes when man's prayer is heard; when a man looks into the stream and fountain of his being, and cries out to God to change its elements. "Who shall replace this fountain law of sin and death witli the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus'? All the power of men and angels united could not do it. God's grace must come in, and then, the tide is turned, and from the company of that innumerable array drawing on to the congregation of the dead eternally, he joins the innumer- able company of angels, and the general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are registered in heaven. There is a moral warning in the germs of thought; that after a time they pass into inevitable results, in character and destiny. Thought merely dreamlike, speculative, and fanciful when first ! indulged, may draw the will along with it, and become at length VOICES OP THE SPRING. 129 a choice and necessity of self-will. There is a masterly scene, or rather soliloquy, in Schiller's Tragedy of Wallenstein, where a great mind finds that it has passed the Rubicon from the side of dreaming and dallying with a dread temptation, to the tremendous necessity of enacting it. A decision of the character has been made, has been all the while advancing; a point reached where unless a supernatural force, out of the character, and beyond it, turns it back, the necessity of self-preservation seems to impel it onward. When the mind discovers this posi- tion, this reality, and suddenly confronts the consequence, and yet experiences the drawing on to doom, how fearful is the struggle, how ineffectual the agony! Is it possible? Is it so? Can it be that I can no longer what I would? No longer can draw back at my liking, having thus far come by choice? Must I do the deed, because I thought of it? Because I just fed this heart here with a dream, never my serious meaning, never re- solved, must it resolve me into the dread fulfilment? But who can tell where dreaming, wishful hesitation passes into choice? Must it be so, because I did not scowl temptation from my presence, Dallied with thoughts of possible fulfilment, Commenced no movement, left all time uncertain, And only kept the road, the access open? I but amused myself with thinking of it. The free-will tempted me: the power to do, Or not to do it. Was it criminal To make the Fancy minister to Hope, To fill the air with pretty toys of air, And clutch fantastic sceptres moving towards me? Was not the will kept free? Beheld I not The road of duty close beside me; but One little step, and once more I was in it? Where am I? Whither have I been transported? No road, no track behind me, but a wall Impenetrable, insurmountable, Rises obedient to the spells I muttered, And meant not! Mine own doings tower behind me! A punishable man I seem; the guilt, Try what I will, I cannot roll off from me! 43 1 130 VOICES OF NATCRE. The road of Duty close beside me still, and only a little step, to be again upon it! What tremendous self-deception, always exercised, in all who ever pass from the King's Highway into I By- Path meadow! Only for a season, only a little experiment, only a little self-indulgence, the heart whispers to the conscience; and the great road of Duty still near, and no impossibility as yet of regaining it! But ah! before you are aware, the conse- quences are upon you, and the wall impenetrable, insurmount- able, rises behind you, and without an interposition for which, perhaps, you will not ask, perhaps will not even wish, j'ou cannot return, and must go forward! Stern is the on-look of necessity ! Not without shudder may a human hand Grasp the mysterious urn of Destiny. My deed was mine, remaining in my bosom: Once suffered to escape from its safe corner W ithin the heart, its nursery and birth-place, Sent forth into the Foreign, it belongs For ever to those sly malicious powers Whom never art of man conciliated. Schiller's Wallenstein.. I can truly affirm of myself, that my studies Lave been profitable and availing to me, only so far aslhave endeavoured to use all my other knowledge as a glass, enabling me to receive more light, in a wider field of vision, from the Word of God. If you have accompanied me thus far, thoughtful reader, let it not weary you if I digress for a few moments to another book, likewise a revelation of God, the great book of his servant Nature. That in its obvious sense and literal interpretation, it declares the being and attributes of the Almighty Father, none but the fool in heart has ever dared gainsay. But it has been the music of gent! e and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspon- dencies and symbols of the spiritual worid. Coleridge. Appendix to the Statesman's Manual. g>§_ .,„..., .. . & Ik energetic minds truth soon changes, by domestication, into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes infiuencire in the production. To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. Coleridge. Biog. Literaria. Meanwhile, the process of education is going on, even though unobserved, and tending fast towards the ultimate fixed form of character. Character grows with a force that I operates every moment; it were as easy to check the growth of a forest. You find that to counteract any one of its determined tendencies, is a task of hard and recurring labour. Even its slightest propensity, when opposed, seems inspirited with the energy of the whole. John Foster. CHAPTEE XL The Periods of Suggestion, Susceptibility, Germination, and Growth: Importance of making the most of these periods, each in their season. In the possession of youth, with all its opportunities and capa- cities, as the seed period of life, a responsibility is laid upon us, and a power put into our hands, of the preciousness of which there is rarely any realization, till the advantages are beyond our recall. There can be little doubt that most persons settle the question even of their eternal destiny, while young. It is the time of roots and seeds, the time of foundations, the time of fountains and of laws, the time of principles and prophecies, that are to be developed and fulfilled, in the man and in the angel, good or bad. It is the time of quick and vivid sensibility to all impressions from abroad, whether of good or evil; the imitative time of our being, and the reproducing time of examples; the time of intense feeling, and of energy and impulse in following the heart, and carrying out its purposes. ■ A good thing inwrought while the being is in this impressible and plastic state, wrought amid the intensity of youthful enthu- siasm, is as an element of nature. Is it safe to be careless of such a period? Shall a man let the metal cool, before he puts it to its intended shape ? Must not the figure of the die be stamped upon the metal, or the form of the mould be given to it, while it is plastic with heat? The same image and super- scription may indeed be attempted later; but it will be scarcely legible, or it can be accomplished only by an amount of force not likely to be brought to bear upon it. Such is the difference 134 VOICES OF NATURE. between the impressible period, the susceptible period of early life, and the confirmed and comparatively immoveable period of manhood. It is a law of the seed-period, that whatever the soul receives deep into itself during that season, shall grow up and be de- veloped as a part of itself, and shall form the character at the period of harvest. One season cannot be changed for another, the summer for the spring, nor the autumn for the summer. If the seed-period be neglected or abused, and then afterwards at the period of harvest, or what ought to have been that period, the man attempts the recurrence of the seed-period, it will be a failure; the seed will not germinate, but rots, or if it strives to germinate, it dies without fruit, without becoming a fixture in the character. Almost every thing that falls into the ground, but just goes to the nourishment and strengthening of that which had got its fixture and its growth before; or if the seed scattered seem to take root on its own account, it never rises to any thing better than a thin, feeble, stunted underbrush around the trunks and beneath the shadow of the old great trees. After those fixtures come to a certain height and age, they tyrannize over every thing else in the character. We go on, indeed, sowing seed all the way through life; and each successive period of life is in most impressive reality a period of probation and of seeds for the next period ; because what we were and what we did I yesterday is continually coming out in consequences to-day. But the one grand seed-period of our being, the period of the oaks that build the ships, in which our fortunes are embarked for eternity, the period of all the commanding fixtures and fea- tures of character, is never repeated, and is ordinarily early in life. That early seed-period, as well as the germinating and grow- ing period that follows, is imaginative, romantic, full of rich powers and tendencies. Nettles will grow to the size of a forest, ; if you sow those; rich fruits and magnificent trees will grow, if | you plant those. Whatever you set out, starts on its career with energy. The germinating, springing power in our im- mortal nature is, in one sense, omnipotent; it will be exercised, if not for good, then for evil, and no created agency can restrain it. It works for eternity, and at a rate of intensity with which VOICES OF THE SPRING. 135 perhaps only an immortal nature could work The roots of our earliest habits twine themselves all about our immortality, and the trunk of character, strengthened by such roots, is immove- able, and the branches spread themselves out, a mighty shade of foliage. Whatever, during the period of susceptibility and growing power, is implanted, takes strong hold, and if it be evil, becomes so omnipotent, that God only can cut it away; and if good, it is quite as hard to be eradicated, when once firmly set; but if set by grace, it grows on, even against the tendencies of a depraved nature. So prodigiously, intensely energetic, is the impressible period and growing power of our being. While it lasts, almost any thing can be done with it; but by-and-bye, the susceptible and growing power is past, at least as to new things, because almost every principle of being has been in turn tried, and the soul has become fully engaged with what it has settled down upon, and the power of the being works portentously in the in- crease of that, but takes hold of nothing new. Our Eiessed Lord took young men for his Apostles. He could make any thing out of them then, and the wine of the new dispensation was to be put into new bottles. It was the sugges- tive period, the power period, in the foundation of character. In that period he kept them with himself. His teachings went down into their souls, and took the entire and exclusive posses- sion, not merely by the law of grace, and of a Divine Inspiration, but by the laws of their own constitution, under so early and heavenly a development. It depends upon what men meet with and entertain at such a period, whether they shall become apostles of good or evil in our fallen world. Ordinarily whatever comes first, in a seduc- tive shape, is received with open heart, and gets possession. If it be good, it is an impregnable citadel, manned in the soul for God and duty. If i,t be evil, it is the strong man armed, and who shall cast it out? "I learned more from his conversation," says Southey, speak- ing of a friend in early life, " than any other man ever taught me, because the rain fell when the young plant vvas just germi- nating, and wanted it most," At such a time, whatever falls in the shape of rain, the young plant drinks it in, as do the thirsty ridges. If the rain were mingled with a metallic poison, it | 136 VOICES OF NATURE. would not be absorbed less eagerly, but disastrous would be the results. When we speak of the suggestive period, we mean not the period in which the mind itself makes, puts forth, or proposes suggestions, but the period in which suggestions are enthusiasti- cally, romantically, eagerly entertained, and become the source of other suggestions. We use the expression, a suggestive book. It means a book that for a thoughtful mind touches a great many springs of thought and feeling, pronounces the u Open '; Sesame" before a great many doors in the gem-enclosing caverns of the soul; a book that sets the mind upon tracks of investiga- tion, and calls up shadows of prophetic revelation before it, making it earnestly imaginative; a book that like a flash of lightning in a dark summer's night, reveals for the moment a whole horizon. Such a book ordinarily affects a young mind and an old one in a very different manner. In a young mind, it meets the growing, germinating power, the enthusiastic, imaginative, im- pulsive tendency, and carries the mind onward to results. In an old mind it stops at the threshold where you have laid it; it enters not into the activity of the being. Old men may make suggestions, but cannot so easily receive them. If, during their suggestive period, they received and acted upon good, rich, noble, powerful suggestions, under which, by the Divine blessing, mag- nificent habits of life and character were formed, then, when their own susceptibility to new impressions of thought and feel- ing is declining, and their germinating period is passed, they will still be able to communicate power to electrify others; there is a hidden fountain-power stored up. Their sowing time in the hearts and minds of others shall never be gone, if their own re- ceiving time ahd growing time from others was rightly improved. A man may, like the Apostle John, continue to touch the keys of revelation when he is old. Dr. Payson, when dropping his / mantle of mortality, could throw the mantle of his piety, and I the flame of his rejoicing soul upon the watchers around him, i even after he had ceased to receive any new suggestions or excitements from the things of earth, or the discipline of heaven. With some persons the suggestive period may continue longer than with others, just as the growing and developing period is various 'with different individuals. But it is a limited period VOICES OP THE SPRIKG. 137 with all; that is, there is a period of receptivity and growth,, looking to a period of bestowment and results, of harvest and of fruits. The period of receptivity .and growth stops, for the most part, where the period of harvest and of fruits is expected to begin, or ought to begin. Just so, there is the period of increase and of receptivity in the human life, and then the period of decline and of spending. The energies of this mortal frame are first gathered and compacted, then thrown off in pre- paration for the grave. First in our being is the period of (ienesis, then Law, then Prophecy, then Fulfilment and Revela- i " tion of eternal results. Out of the nature of the law which we have made our own, working in us, whether good or evil, in the period of receptivity, germination and growth, springs the predic- tion of the future, never mistaken, never annulled. The suggestive period is the period in which the character is formed : all that is done to it is usually done then. All that appears in it is usually the fruit of principles entertained and chosen then, and is developed as part of the being, and forms the character at the period of harvest. All developments, all tran- sactions, are only results of what took place, what was done, what was deposited in the suggestive and forming period. Radical changes are rarely made after that first period. Take the character as you find it after that period, and you are pretty sure that you have the character through life, and in all likeli- hood for ever. You have it mainly through life, in many^ , features, even if the great change of piety, the change by the ( } ' regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, should intervene : for stilf it is found to be a fact that the main habits of the character liave so stiffened in the mould, have become so rigid and difficult of accommodation, that the new soul put into it for heaven is much constrained by it, and hardly makes its way through the whole form to change that. There will be an entirely new character by-and-bye, but here in this world many of the habits of the new man will be modified by the habits of the old man, which continue to produce their disturbances, and rock the whole being, just as the ground-swell of a tempest continues in the sea after the storm is over, and the wind has changed and subsided. Ordinarily, take any man's character after the suggestive period, and draw the portrait then, and you have it for ever. 138 VOICES OF NATURE. There are not likely to be any new elements in it, nor any great change in the combination or expression of those already there. What seem sometimes to be new elements are but the hidden seeds germinating, the invisible principles coming out and assert- ing their supremacy. A change of circumstances seems some- times to produce a change of character, whereas it is only the development of what was there before; just as when a growth of birch or maple displaces a forest of pines burned over, it is not a new creation, but the seeds were there before, or the germs, waiting to be developed. So it often is with the develop- ment of character. But in general, before the suggestive period | is over, all the tendencies and growths of a man's character will J have begun to show themselves, and the change afterwards is of ; degree, not of kind; of strength in old impulses, and not the adoption of new ones. It is very much with character as it is in sketching the face and the frame. Take a young face, and you do not by any means know, you are not at all sure, that it will be a likeness by-and-bye, or that even one feature or expression will be found remaining. There may be so entire a change, both in the face and character, and in the face mainly because in the character, that the portrait of a few years further on shall not have one trait in common with the portrait further back. But take an old face, and you have it to the end; there is no more change. Thus it is easier to paint an aged face than a young one, because the features are settled and unchangeable, sculptured, as it were, into marked and perceptible moulds and grooves of character and expression. Just so it is with the soul. The older each human being grows, the more likely it is that the character of the soul now is that which it will wear for ever, and that if the likeness be taken now, it will be found to be a true likeness at the day of death. Who then would be willing to have the great Portrait Painter ! for Eternity take his character as it now is, and hang it up in his gallery for ever? He, the Supreme, new-creating Artist, must set the Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus at work in the whole being, and then He shall draw the character, and it shall be that of God's own holiness. When he has done his work upon me, the Christian may say, he may take the picture, and may show it to whomsoever he pleaseth; for if I am a new VOICES OF THE SPRING. 139 creature in Christ Jesus, then my portrait is that of a child of God; and when the Saviour has done with it, it will be that of a being without fault before the throne of God. He must change me into His image, from glory to glory, before the por- trait can be fit to be hung up in Heaven's gallery; and He must give me a new name, before my name can be written in His Book of Life, for I am a miserable sinner. But when that is done^ then the glory of Christ himself will be seen in the revela- tion and reflection of his own likeness; it shall be gazed at, and j wondered at, in myriads of redeemed beings, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints and admired in all them that believe; f when unto principalities and powers, for ever and ever, shall be I made known through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God. I r