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NATURE SERMONS 
 
By Cartes E. JEFFERSON, D.D. 
 
 Nature Sermons . .. . .$1.50 
 Five Present-Day Controversies 1.50 
 Linder Twenty cei. \ iene tie eR 
 What the War Has Taught Us 1.50 
 Old Truths and New Facts. . 1.50 
 
 Roman Catholicism and the Ku 
 Klux Klan . . Paper, net 25c. 
 
NATURE SER 
 
 
 
 lt 
 
 CHARLES E.’JEFFERSON, D.D., LL.D. 
 Pastor, The Broadway Tabernacle, New York, N. Y. 
 
 
 
 New Yore CHICAGO 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 
Copyright, MCMxXxv, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 THE RAINBOW 
 DESERTS 
 
 BIRDS . 
 
 SUNSETS 
 
 STORMS 
 
 SHADOWS 
 
 SOUNDS ° 
 
 MISTS . : ‘ : 
 SPRING 
 
 CIDOURS aaa iteeny ts 
 THE LANDSCAPE : 
 
 LAKES ‘ . s ° 
 
 108 
 
 135 
 
 162 
 
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 CE i FY 
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I 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 HIS is a volume of Nature sermons. By 
 7 Nature sermons, I mean a sermon which 
 draws its substance from some phenomenon 
 or feature or aspect of the physical creation. It 
 differs, chiefly, from the conventional sermon in two 
 points. The traditional sermon has a text taken from 
 the Bible; the Nature sermon needs no text at all. Its 
 theme is an object or a fact or a picture set forth in the 
 book of Nature. In the second place, the materials of 
 the ordinary sermon are collected for the most part 
 from books, whereas the materials made use of in a 
 Nature sermon are largely drawn from the physical 
 universe. In preparing his usual sermon, the preacher 
 takes down his various versions of the Bible, his com- 
 mentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias; he consults, 
 perhaps, various volumes of history and biography 
 and ethics and sociology; sometimes he quotes a novel 
 or a stanza of poetry, a magazine or a newspaper. It 
 is not uncommon for a preacher to make use of a 
 score of volumes in the creation of a single sermon. 
 But in writing a Nature sermon, the preacher locks his 
 library door and takes a stroll through God’s Out-of- 
 Doors. He endeavours to get near to Nature’s heart. 
 She supplies him with hints and suggestions, ideas and 
 illustrations, and becomes to him a medium of revela- 
 tion of the mind of God. 
 If a critic should intimate that a sermon is not a 
 sermon without a text, the reply is that Amos and 
 Hosea were great preachers, and both of them preached 
 
 7 
 
8 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 effective sermons without texts. Isaiah and Jeremiah 
 were mighty spokesmen for God, but neither one of 
 them was in the habit of going to a book for a text. 
 The Hebrew prophets were the great preachers of pre- 
 Christian times, and it was their custom to organize 
 their sermons around facts and events. In the experi- 
 ences of their own heart or of their nation, they found 
 the material which it was their mission to interpret 
 and apply. In the victories and defeats, the joys and 
 the tribulations of their people, they read the will of 
 the Eternal. In their teaching they were always fall- 
 ing back on suggestions and inspirations which swept 
 in upon them from the heavens and the earth, A 
 drought, an earthquake, a famine, a fruitful season, 
 were to them words of the Lord. No Old Testament 
 sermon has the smell of the lamp. 
 
 The Apostles followed the example of the prophets, 
 dealing in their sermons, not with sentences taken from 
 a book, but with facts and events and experiences, 
 especially the experiences of Jesus. The Founder of 
 our religion did not preach from texts. The Sermon 
 on the Mount has no text, nor has any other recorded 
 discourse of our Lord. He drew His sermons out of 
 His heart, refusing to preach after the fashion of the 
 scribes—preachers who got their sermons out of books. 
 He made use of the Old Testament, occasionally, when 
 by doing it He could answer an objection of His foes, 
 or flash light upon an idea which He was endeavouring 
 to drive home; but He seldom went to a book in search 
 of sentences with which to begin His discourses. He 
 kept the eyes of His hearers, not on the pages of a 
 book, but on the book of Life, as that life was unfold- 
 ing itself all around Him, and on the book of Nature 
 whose paragraphs it was His delight to read. “ Look 
 
 ol 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 1 939 
 
 at the flowers!”” He was wont to say. “ Look at the 
 birds!” “Look at the fields of waving grain!” 
 “ Look at the sunbeams and the passing showers!” It 
 was His joy to preach under the open sky, seated on 
 the grass, with the songs of birds in His ear, and 
 the silver gleam of the sea in His eye. 
 
 To the Hebrew mind, Nature was a medium of reve- 
 lation. “ The heavens declare the glory of God; and 
 the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day 
 uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowl- 
 edge.” Nature reveals the character of God because 
 Nature is the creation of God. ‘ Who covereth the 
 heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the earth, 
 who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains. 
 are He giveth snow like wool. He scattereth 
 the noatendst like ashes. He casteth forth his ice like 
 morsels: . . He sendeth out his word, and 
 melteth them: ie causeth his wind to blow, and the 
 waters flow.’ And because God has created the forces 
 of Nature, all these forces are His servants, and they 
 exist solely to do His will. “ Praise the Lord from 
 the earth, ye dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow 
 and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word.” Paul 
 was true to the Hebrew conception when he wrote 
 to the Romans that “the invisible things of him 
 [God] since the creation of the world are clearly seen, 
 being understood by the things that are made, even 
 his eternal power and Godhead.” 
 
 If, then, the physical creation is a revelation of the 
 character and will of the Eternal, why should a Chris- 
 tian minister ignore Nature in his preaching? Why 
 should he deal solely with ideas uttered by holy men 
 of old, and turn his back upon the fresh revelation 
 which God is making daily in the phenomena and 
 
 ¥ 
 
10 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 processes of the material creation? As Emerson long 
 ago wrote: “ The foregoing generations beheld God 
 and Nature face to face, we through their eyes. Why 
 should we not also enjoy an original relation to the 
 universe?” If some one says that the preacher is 
 bound to get his sermon out of the Word of God, the 
 reply is that he does not forsake the Word of God 
 when he goes to Nature. What is the book of Nature 
 but a version of the Word of God? Is not the book 
 of Nature a Bible—an earlier Bible—God’s oldest 
 Bible—and why should we allow the recent Bible, 
 the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, to crowd the 
 ancient Bible completely out? Sir Thomas Browne 
 was a wise man when he wrote: “ There are two 
 books from which I collect my divinity; besides the 
 written one of God, another of His servant Nature, 
 that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed 
 unto the eyes of all. Those that never saw Him in 
 the one have discovered Him in the other.” 
 
 This is a volume of sermons. ‘Those who expect 
 essays or lectures will be disappointed. A Nature 
 sermon like every other type of sermon may readily 
 slip into something other than that it purports to be. 
 Calling a pulpit discourse a sermon does not make it 
 a sermon. A Nature sermon may degenerate into a 
 Nature essay. The preacher may ape the manner of 
 Henry Thoreau or John Burroughs, but an essay is © 
 not a sermon. Essay-writing is not the forte of the 
 preacher. A Nature sermon may also glide into a 
 Nature lecture. The preacher may try to imitate 
 Ffuxley and Tyndall, Lankester and Lodge, but if he 
 does this, he is sure to fail. A lecture is not a sermon. 
 An essay aims at instruction and entertainment. A 
 lecture has for its prime object, the impartation of 
 
INTRODUCTORY II 
 
 knowledge. It furnishes information which the intel- 
 lect may store up for future use. But the aim of the 
 sermon is to move the soul nearer to God. It may 
 instruct, but the instruction is secondary. It may en- 
 tertain, but the entertaining is incidental. The ob- 
 ject of a genuine sermon is edification—the building 
 up of the soul in God. This is a volume of Nature 
 sermons. I am neither an essayist nor a lecturer. I 
 lack the talent of an essayist, and my knowledge of 
 science is meagre. For Nature essays one must go 
 to the library, and for Nature lectures to the univer- 
 sity. The Christian pulpit is no place for either essays 
 or lectures. The pulpit was built for the preacher. 
 Woe to the man in the pulpit who does not preach! 
 If a Nature sermon is less of a sermon than one built 
 on a text of Holy Writ, it is unworthy of a place in 
 the pulpit. The aim of all these Nature sermons is to 
 move the mind and heart nearer to God. 
 
 It was near the end of the nineteenth century that 
 I decided to add a string to my pulpit harp, and on 
 at least one Sunday of every year to preach a Nature 
 sermon. The immediate occasion of my resolution 
 was the unsettled condition of the Christian mind 
 owing to the endless discussion of the results of the 
 Higher Criticism. The air was filled with puzzling 
 questions, and the minds of many were disturbed. 
 Men were eagerly asking who wrote The Pentaieuch, 
 who wrote The Psalms, who wrote Isaiah, who wrote 
 The Fourth Gospel, who wrote The Pastoral Epistles? 
 The question of authorship was at the front. And 
 so, also, was the question of date. In what century 
 were these ancient writings written? Which were 
 exilic—which pre-exilic—which post-exilic? Which 
 of the New ‘Testament writings belong to the first cen- 
 
12 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 tury, and which belong to the second? There was 
 interminable wrangling over interpolations and redac- 
 tions and glosses. Opposing schools affirmed and de- 
 nied the genuineness and authenticity of nearly all the 
 Sacred Writings. 
 
 With all Christendom in such a turmoil, I turned 
 one Sunday to that ancient Bible, of whose plenary 
 inspiration there can be no doubt, and in regard to 
 whose authority all sane minds are agreed. However 
 it may be with the Old and New Testaments, we know 
 who wrote the Scriptures of the heavens and the 
 earth. There are no interpolations in the skies. No 
 redactor has left his mark upon the seas. No forger 
 has ever tampered with the dawn. Men may hesitate 
 to call the Book which lies upon the pulpit God’s Book, 
 but who would hesitate to call Nature the Book of 
 God? He writes His autograph in lines of silver fire 
 across the night, He writes it in the flames of setting 
 suns, He writes it in the changing shimmer of 
 the sea. But no matter how He writes it, we always 
 recognize His hand. And as for dates, we do not 
 think of dates when we feast our eyes on mountain- 
 peaks, or gaze into a sky filled with stars. No one 
 cares what the year was in which the Atlantic Ocean, 
 like a big boy, came up to play on the sand on Rocka- 
 way Beach, nor does any one have the slightest curi- 
 osity to know the number of the century in which the ~ 
 Great Bear joined the procession of the constellations 
 ordered to move around the Pole. If at any time the 
 brain becomes confused by the arguments and counter- 
 arguments of the scholars, it is well to close the Book 
 which contains the words of Prophets and Apostles, 
 and read, for a little while, what has been written by 
 the undoubted finger of God. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 " The big Book which the Church prizes as an in- 
 valuable treasure is both human and divine. It is 
 God’s Book, and it is also man’s Book. In this Book, 
 God and man have collaborated to produce a message 
 to meet the needs of mankind. It is impossible to 
 draw the line, severing the divine from the human. In 
 listening to the Bible, one cannot at all times tell 
 whether he is listening to man or to God. When one 
 listens to Nature he is certain he is listening to God. 
 No human creature has ever been permitted to collabo- 
 rate with the Eternal in the unfolding of the morning 
 or in the painting of a dying day—in the decking of 
 the Springtime or in the creation of the pageantry of 
 a cloudless night. ‘There are no human finger-prints 
 either on the ocean or on the clouds. When one be- 
 comes bewildered by the strife of tongues over the 
 doctrine of Inspiration, let him turn to the sacred 
 volume whose authority cannot be questioned, and 
 whose authorship cannot be successfully assailed. If 
 the Zeitgeist make him sceptical as to the validity of 
 the voices which speak through prophecy and psalm, 
 through epistle and gospel, let him pay reverent atten- 
 tion to another set of voices—the voices which come 
 sounding through the flowers and the forests, through 
 the beauty of the landscapes and the thunder of storms. 
 Nature and the Bible are both rich gifts of God. Let 
 us use them both. 
 
 Moreover: I was preaching to a city congregation, 
 and city congregations are in special need of the heal- 
 ing influences of the woods and fields. A great city 
 has a tendency, in generous natures, to enlarge the 
 mind and widen the heart, but in certain ways it has 
 a tendency to dwarf and narrow. While the intel- 
 lectual faculties are whetted to a keener edge, the phys- 
 
14 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 ical senses are in danger of becoming atrophied. A 
 city shuts men in behind walls of marble and steel, 
 brick and granite, and these are not a wholesome en- 
 vironment for human nerves. Eyeballs which are 
 rubbed constantly against asphalt and iron lose some- 
 thing of their power of seeing, and ears which are 
 filled incessantly with the hubbub and clang of the 
 street lose something of their power of hearing. Now 
 and again, one needs to escape from the gloomy can- 
 yons of city streets, where the sky is cut into narrow 
 and dingy ribbons, and where the air is tainted with 
 the poison of a thousand unhallowed smells, and look 
 upon the world which God has made. One needs to 
 bathe his eyes in the dew upon the morning grass, and 
 to wash his mind in the perfumes of the fields. It is 
 not conducive to fullness of life to live uninterruptedly 
 in a city. A city is an artificial creation—a piece of 
 the handiwork of man. It is a man-made world. A 
 city man is in danger of settling down in the convic- 
 tion that there is no other world. He reads the papers 
 morning and evening. He gets his eyes full of 
 printer’s ink. After dinner, he goes to the theatre, and 
 feasts upon the cheap and tawdry scenery of the stage. 
 In the street he is jostled and hustled by the crowd. 
 In his business he contends with the perversities of 
 many types of human nature. Often he is irritated 
 and, at times, he is exasperated. City life is always © 
 tending to become feverish and abnormal. A city man 
 needs frequent contacts with Nature. He that hath 
 ears to hear can hear Nature saying: “ Come unto 
 me and [ will give you rest.” 
 
 Nature is a great rest-giver. And Nature is a great 
 physician. In the city we become excitable and hot. 
 We move at a headlong pace. ‘The interruptions and 
 
INTRODUCTORY 18 
 
 collisions are many. We need a physician who can 
 take the fever from the brow and the fret out of the 
 heart. Nature has remedies for all who are sick. The 
 pessimism and cynicism of great cities are the result 
 of continuous contact with human tragedies and 
 miseries. Something is always going wrong; vice is 
 always flaunting itself in one’s face; crime is always 
 being committed, some one is always suffering; some 
 one is always dying. It is difficult to keep serene and 
 sane in such a bedlam of a world. We need Nature. 
 She is sensible and strong. She has no vagaries, no 
 hallucinations, no delusions. She indulges in no fads. 
 She wastes no time in speculations or guesses. She 
 keeps, for ever, an even pulse. We need her. To 
 think of her quiets the heart; to gaze on her calm 
 face is refreshment and power. 
 
 Why is the human world so agitating and ea 
 How could it be otherwise? When one thinks of the 
 great mass of rebellious souls and disordered minds 
 and corrupted hearts which go to make up a city, it 
 is not to be wondered at that a world so constituted 
 should irritate us, drag us down and wear us out. The 
 world of Nature is soothing because there is no sin 
 there. No blade of grass has ever broken a divine 
 commandment, no flower has ever blushed with guilt, 
 no tree has ever lifted itself in insurrection against the 
 Most High. Not a rock has ever entertained an evil 
 thought. Not an insect has ever rejected the Divine 
 Mercy. Not a mountain, lake or sea has ever blas- 
 phemed the name of Christ. Not a twig has ever been 
 twisted by remorse. Throughout the realm of Nature 
 obedience is perfect, submission to the Divine Will is 
 instantaneous and complete. In the midst of such sur- 
 roundings the soul is calmed and charmed and lifted. 
 
16 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Nature is a giver of joy. The Kingdom of God is 
 a Kingdom of Joy, but joyousness is not one of the 
 notes of the life of the average Christian. We are 
 not joyous because we have not advanced far into the 
 Kingdom of God. As the years increase, many of 
 the fountains of happiness begin to fail. He is a wise 
 man who keeps as many fountains as possible flowing. 
 The love of Nature is an unfailing fountain of joy. 
 The aged man of eighty, as well as the youth of 
 twenty, can drink at her springs and be satisfied. For 
 the man or woman who has learned to enter into the 
 wonder and bloom of the mighty world of eye and 
 ear, there is a perpetual feast spread, and no matter 
 what happens, life will not be without its solace and 
 its song. The spirit of Nature is the spirit of Joy. 
 An ancient poet says that when the foundations of 
 the earth were laid, “ the morning stars sang together, 
 and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” When we 
 love Nature we enter into the joy of our Lord. I 
 have preached these sermons on Nature because I 
 wished to be a helper of your joy. 
 
 “Back to Nature!” That is one of the thrilling 
 slogans of our generation. Who are these men and 
 women who have caught a new vision of the glory 
 of the physical creation, and who are drinking from it 
 fresh strength and gladness? ‘They are the artists 
 and the poets, the scientists and the educators. Why 
 should not the preacher join the procession? Why 
 should not the Christian Church be baptized into this 
 revivifying spirit? Why should not the servants of 
 the King enrich their conception of the majesty and 
 wisdom of the Maker of heaven and earth by meditat- 
 ing more often on the things which He has made? 
 
II 
 THE RAINBOW 
 
 HERE is an interesting paragraph in the ninth 
 chapter of the old Book of Genesis, in which 
 an ancient writer gives his idea of the reason 
 
 for the creation of the rainbow. ‘The earlier chapters 
 of Genesis are filled with bits of folk-lore that come 
 down from an immemorial past. Some Hebrew mind 
 seized upon a number of these old traditions, cleansed 
 them and converted them into vehicles for the expres- 
 sion of high, spiritual truths. From the earliest times 
 men had looked upon the rainbow, no doubt, with in- 
 terest. The Hebrew mind pondered it, asking the 
 question: “Who made it? Of course it could not 
 have come of itself. It could not exist by blind neces- 
 sity. Somebody must have madeit. Who could have 
 made it but God?” ‘That is the way in which the 
 Hebrew mind worked, and that is the way in which 
 every normal mind works. Only minds that have been 
 spoiled by false education, work in any other way. 
 But why did God make the rainbow? What is the 
 purpose of it? What end does it serve? He did not 
 make it by accident. Its mighty arch was not bent 
 without a definite intention. There was a purpose. 
 What was it? It wasamessage. It was intended to 
 say something. It was to communicate a word from 
 God to man. What was its message? The Hebrew 
 mind said its message must be a sweet one; it must be 
 from the tender side of God. ‘The rainbow is so soft 
 and so beautiful, it must speak of God’s friendliness. 
 And because the rainbow always appears after a storm 
 
 Preached, May 26, 1912. 
 17 
 
18 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 the Hebrew mind came to the conclusion that this was 
 God’s way of saying to men: “ Do not be frightened 
 by storms, they are transitory and harmless, you will 
 never be submerged by them. Just to remind you of 
 My goodness and My interest in you, I am going to 
 put My bow in the cloud.” So, to the Hebrew mind, 
 the rainbow became a promise, a token, a sign, a pledge 
 of God’s goodness, an emblem of His love. 
 
 And there was need of just such an emblem, for 
 there are many things in Nature which are dark. 
 There are phenomena which seem like threats. If 
 taken alone, they would be conclusive evidence that the 
 Deity is angry, that at the heart of the world there is 
 a wild indignation. When one thinks of the roar of 
 the sea, and how it often bellows and leaps upon 
 the rocks, showing its white teeth as if eager to devour 
 the homes of men; when one thinks of the storms that 
 rage furiously across the land and sea; when one thinks 
 of volcanoes and eclipses and earthquakes and pesti- 
 lences, he cannot wonder that so many races of men 
 came to the conclusion that God is a vengeful Deity 
 and must be placated and appeased. But here, in the 
 heavens, is one phenomenon which is altogether harm- 
 less and lovely. It does not speak of wrath. In it, 
 there is no sign of threat. It is a word of mercy. 
 After the storm, it comes like the smile of God. 
 
 The Hebrew race never got away from the interpre- 
 tation placed upon the rainbow in this early page of 
 Genesis. When Ezekiel paints a picture of heaven, he 
 wraps a rainbow ’round the throne of God; and when 
 the Seer on Patmos looks into heaven he also sees a 
 rainbow ’round God’s throne; and when the Angel, 
 who is none other than the Son of God, comes down 
 out of the clouds He comes with a rainbow on His 
 
THE RAINBOW 19 
 
 head. This, then, is what the rainbow means in the 
 Scriptures—it is an emblem of God’s mercy. 
 
 What does it mean to your? ‘There are many 
 features of it which are worthy of your attention. In 
 the first place, the rainbow is a familiar sight. Every- 
 body has seen it. There are some things in America 
 that are to be found nowhere else. There are great 
 sights in Europe which one cannot see in Africa or 
 Australia. Asia has its wonders that are nowhere else 
 reproduced. But there is no land over which God has 
 not bent His rainbow. Every one of the continents has 
 been made beautiful by it, and there is not an island 
 of the sea, inhabited by a wretched tribe of savages, 
 over which God has not bent the seven colours of the 
 rainbow. If it be a word of mercy, it is His de- 
 termination that every human being on the earth shall 
 read it. 
 
 The very size of the rainbow is uplifting. You 
 cannot get it into a house. You cannot bring it inside 
 the city gates. It is too vast for any enclosure made 
 by man. It spans the world. It belongs to every- 
 body. It unites commonwealths far removed. It gives 
 a hint of the great thoughts and wide plans of God. 
 
 It is old. The antiquity of it awes the heart. We 
 talk about the Bible being an old book; the fact is, it 
 is a very recent book compared with the rainbow. ‘The 
 Bible was only published late yesterday afternoon, as 
 it were, but the rainbow was published at a date which 
 no man records. One might say that it is a toy God 
 gave to man to play with in his infancy—something to 
 appease his terror and to make him stop his crying. 
 You might consider it a picture-book, printed in bright 
 colours. Children always like picture-hbooks, and this 
 is the earliest that God published for mankind: Itisa 
 
20 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 sort of catechism in which the human mind is trained 
 to think of Deity; it is a book of scripture—one of the 
 oldest extant. 
 
 It is a blessing which God does not allow us to have 
 all the time. Some good things we have incessantly. 
 Other things are granted us periodically. They are 
 given to us, and then taken away, and then given to 
 us again. Parents sometimes give their children pretty 
 things to play with, and then, after a little while, take 
 them and put them away promising the children that, 
 by and by, if certain conditions are fulfilled, they shall 
 have the privilege of playing with them again. So it 
 is with God’s rainbows. They are such delicate, lovely 
 things we cannot have them all the time, but, now and 
 then, after a storm He lets us have one just to remind 
 us that the storm is over, and that the order of Nature 
 still abides. 
 
 The rainbow speaks audibly of God. There is no 
 doubt that God made the rainbow. Man has high pre- 
 tensions and makes great claims, but no man ever yet 
 claimed to have made the rainbow. ‘This is one of 
 the declarations which cannot be disputed. It is in- 
 creasingly difficult to make any assertion which some 
 one is not determined to contradict, but here for once 
 the minister can form a sentence to which no one can 
 bring exception: ‘‘ God makes the rainbow.” 
 
 Theatrical managers are adroit and skillful men; it | 
 
 is wonderful the things they make. They can repro- 
 duce houses to perfection, they can make a cellar or 
 a garret, a parlour or a kitchen, a hovel or a palace— 
 and make it so true to fact that you cannot believe 
 you are looking upon a fictitious scene, manufactured 
 for the hour. They can reproduce old palaces and 
 mansions of Europe so faithfully that when, later on, 
 
THE RAINBOW 21 
 
 you see those buildings in the Old World you say to 
 yourself: “ How familiar all this looks! I must have 
 been here before.” ‘Theatrical managers can reproduce 
 the landscape, they can create hills and mountains, 
 fields of grain, lovely valleys, and they can place a lake 
 in the midst with pleasure boats upon it. They can 
 reproduce many of the phenomena of Nature—light- 
 ning, rain, snow, sand-storms—and they can make 
 them so real that you find it difficult to believe they are 
 sham. But no theatrical manager can successfully re- 
 produce the rainbow. I have read of a man who in- 
 vented a rainbow for theatrical uses, but it has not had 
 a great success. It is a poor, tawdry, cheap affair. 
 Only God makes rainbows. The scientist cannot make 
 one—that is, he cannot make a big one; he can only 
 make a little one. His rainbow may be genuine as 
 far as it goes, but it does not go far. Only God can | 
 make a rainbow that spans the world! 
 
 The rainbow is a sign to us. We are living in a 
 utilitarian age. We Americans are often laughed at 
 because we are so prosaic. We are always thinking of 
 the profit that is coming out of everything we see. If 
 an American goes through a forest, instead of enjoy- 
 ing the beauty of it, he thinks of how much timber 
 could be cut from it and what it would bring in the 
 market. If he walks along the bank of a river, in- 
 stead of listening to the music of it and watching the 
 shadows made by the trees that overhang its banks, he 
 is likely to think of the mills that are built a little 
 higher up, and to calculate the yearly output of these 
 mills. Everybody has heard of the man who went to 
 Niagara Falls, and came away lamenting that so much 
 water was going to waste. We need the rainbow to 
 remind us that a thing is useful if it is beautiful, and 
 
22 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 that all beauty is a joy for ever. Beauty is a form of 
 food. Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every 
 word that proceeds out of the mouth of God—and one 
 of the loveliest of His words is the rainbow. And 
 yet, according to utilitarian standards how useless a 
 rainbow is! You cannot raise anything init. No kind 
 of grain will grow there. No kind of fruit will ripen 
 there. It is as barren as a desert. You cannot build 
 anything upon it, it can bear no weight whatever. You 
 cannot cut it into pieces and build it into houses. It 
 is absolutely unusable. You cannot make any mer- 
 cantile use whatsoever of it. You can use almost 
 everything in Nature,—the wind, the lightning, the 
 tides, the waterfalls, the lakes—but you cannot use the 
 rainbow. ‘There it stands, just beautiful, saying to us 
 all the time: “‘ Beauty is its own excuse for being.” 
 
 It is a sign reminding us that nothing valuable can 
 be injured by analysis. The rainbow has been analyzed 
 by scientists. Everybody now knows how it is made. 
 {t is made of the simplest ingredients—a bowl of sun- 
 beams poured over a few particles of water. ‘That is 
 all. The story of its composition reads like a fairy 
 tale. I would suggest to all boys and girls that, 
 some day, they take down an encyclopedia and read 
 what the scholars have to say about the rainbow. It 
 is wonderful how intricate it all is. The very highest 
 mathematics are necessary in order to deal with it. 
 There are different theories to account for the appear- 
 ance of it. But in spite of all the elaborate computa- 
 tions the rainbow is just as lovely as it was when the 
 man in the Book of Genesis wrote his description of 
 it. You cannot spoil a rainbow by analyzing it. 
 
 Haydon the English painter once held a dinner- 
 party in the city of London to which he invited a 
 
THE RAINBOW 23 
 
 company of distinguished men, among whom were the 
 poets Wordsworth and Keats. In the course of the 
 dinner Keats proposed a toast to the memory of New- 
 ton. Wordsworth refused to drink the toast until 
 Keats explained why he had proposed it. He re- 
 fused to drink to the memory of Newton because 
 he had taken the poetry out of the rainbow by reducing 
 it to prismatic colours. Wordsworth was needlessly 
 alarmed. ‘The poetry has not been taken from the 
 rainbow, and it never will be. You cannot spoil any- 
 thing by analysis. The eye has been analyzed, but it 
 has not lost its lustre. We know a good deal about 
 the aqueous humour and the vitreous humour, about 
 the crystalline lenses and the different layers of the 
 retina, but the eye is just as fascinating now as it was 
 when it was first placed in the skull of man. You can- 
 not spoil bread by analyzing it. It is just as nutritious 
 to-day as it was before modern chemistry did its work. 
 You cannot spoil water by saying that it 1s composed 
 of hydrogen and oxygen. Its sparkle is just as bright 
 and its power to quench thirst is just as great to-day 
 as it was when the first man took a drink from the 
 bubbling spring. 
 
 You cannot spoil the Bible by analyzing it. Literary 
 critics have been engaged in showing us that many of 
 the books of the Scriptures are composite structures, 
 made by different strands of tradition. They have 
 proved this to be true of The Pentateuch, but, they 
 have not destroyed The Pentateuch. After they have 
 completed their work Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
 and Moses and Joseph still walk through those pages 
 like the sons of God. ‘They say that The Psalter is 
 composite. It was once supposed that David wrote al- 
 most all the psalms; but now it is supposed that David 
 
24 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 wrote hardly any of them. But no matter how many 
 poetic voices are sounding in The Psalm-Book, men 
 still repeat: ‘‘ The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not 
 want,” and when they are bowed down with remorse 
 they still continue to say: “Create in me a clean 
 heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” 
 They say that The Gospels contain many interpola- 
 tions, that the redactors have made alterations and ad- 
 ditions. But after the analysis has all been done, the 
 Man of Galilee still walks through those pages, the 
 one matchless Figure of history, drawing all men unto 
 Him. Analysis spoils nothing. 
 
 Here, then, are a few of the lessons which we may 
 carry with us from our study of the rainbow. God 
 undoubtedly likes beauty. He is exceedingly fond of 
 colour. If He is not, why should He paint the sky 
 blue and the fields green? And why, every autumn, 
 should He kindle a great conflagration of golden and 
 purple fire in the Berkshire Hills in order to give men 
 something to remember when the bleak days of winter 
 come? I do not wonder that Ruskin always claimed, 
 that of all the gifts that God gave to the human eye, 
 nothing is so holy and sacred as colour. 
 
 We ourselves are something like rainbows. Cole- 
 ridge was one of the first to point this out. “‘ We are 
 like rainbows,” he said, ‘‘ made up’of reflected splen- 
 dour and our own tears.” Life is a series of alternat- | 
 ing storms and calms. We are up to-day and down 
 to-morrow. ‘To-day, the sky is blue, to-morrow, it is 
 overcast. ‘The mind itself is a world, and storms are 
 driven across its sky. Sometimes it is the storm of 
 sorrow, sometimes the storm of doubt, sometimes the 
 storm of disappointment, sometimes the storm of de- 
 spondency and despair. But is not this true in all our 
 
THE RAINBOW 25 
 
 experience—that after the storm comes the rainbow? 
 Our life is not uninterruptedly dark. The storm does 
 not last for ever. After the tempest comes God’s smile. 
 
 The Bible makes use of the rainbow. It says that 
 when you pass through the waters you will not be 
 overwhelmed, when you pass through the fire you will 
 not be burned. What is that but putting the bow in 
 the cloud in the day of rain? ‘ Now no chastisement 
 for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous, but ~ 
 afterward ”—there, again, you have the bow in the 
 cloud. “ Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” 
 “What I do, you know not now, but you shall know 
 hereafter.” The Gospel is the light from heaven which, 
 falling on our tears, creates a rainbow which spans the 
 heavens. We are saved by hope. What is Christ 
 Himself but God’s rainbow, the emblem of God’s 
 grace, God’s sign, God’s promise of mercy? When we 
 look upon Him we cannot be afraid. After the storm 
 has passed, we see again His shining face. 
 
 The commemoration of Memorial Sunday reminds 
 us of the awful storm which swept across this country 
 more than half a century ago. In the terrible days 
 when the storm was raging there was no rainbow, 
 but now the storm is passed and a wondrous rainbow 
 arches the sky. Within the next few days thousands 
 of orations will be delivered in all parts of the country 
 breathing fraternity and sympathy and good will. 
 What are these but a rainbow—a sign that God is still 
 with us—a promise that civil war will never again 
 submerge the land? 
 
Tit 
 DESERTS 
 
 HERE are three kinds of deserts upon the 
 surface of the earth. ‘The first desert is 
 made of water. The ocean is barren, noth- 
 
 ing grows upon it, no grass or flowers or grain. It 
 has no human inhabitants, there are no cities built 
 upon it. Men pass over it in mighty ships, but they 
 pass in order to reach cities which have foundations. 
 The poet has well described the sea when he says: 
 
 “ Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste.” 
 
 The second desert is made of snow. In the Arctic 
 and Antarctic regions there are great fields of ice. 
 These are barren. To be sure, a few things grow 
 there, but every form of life is stunted, and these vast 
 reaches are well-nigh uninhabited. They are not the 
 home of commerce or of art. No great cities have 
 ever risen in those icy regions. ‘They are sections of 
 the great desert-regions of the earth. Men pass across 
 the snow as they pass across the water; they do not 
 tarry long, their home is somewhere else. 
 
 The third kind of desert is the desert of sand, and 
 it is to that kind of desert to which I invite your at- 
 tention. Like the other deserts already mentioned, the 
 desert of sand is barren. There are a few forms of 
 life, but only a few. ‘The soil is barren because of 
 the lack of water. Great regions lie blasted and 
 blistered by the sun. Men pass through the desert, 
 but they do not tarry there. There is a great desert 
 
 Preached, June 8, 1913. 
 206 
 
DESERTS 27 
 
 in Australia, another in Arabia. We have a vast one 
 here, in our own country. But as everybody knows, 
 the greatest desert on the earth is the Sahara in Africa. 
 Deserts, then, whether made of water, or ice, or sand, 
 are a conspicuous feature of the natural world. 
 
 When we begin to study deserts, we find ourselves 
 face to face with an impenetrable mystery. ‘That is 
 what we always find when we study Nature. Men 
 sometimes speak as if there were no mysteries outside 
 the spiritual world; as a matter of fact, the natural 
 world is also filled with them. Tennyson plucks a 
 flower from the wall, holds it in his hand and finds 
 in it a beautiful mystery, and declares that if he could 
 only understand that little flower, he could under- 
 stand man and God. Horace Bushnell in his interest- 
 ing book entitled The Moral Uses of Dark Things, 
 closes his list of dark things with the ocean. What a 
 mysterious thing it is, when you stop to think about it, 
 that four-fifths of the earth should be covered with 
 water! Man is a land animal and was created to live 
 on the land. The earth was created to be his home, 
 and yet only one-fifth of the earth’s surface is land. 
 There is only a little land and the amazing thing is 
 that so much of that little is uninhabited. Man can- 
 not live amid the eternal snows. He can stay there 
 for a season, but he cannot abide there permanently, 
 and yet a considerable part of all the earth’s land area 
 has been covered for countless thousands of years with 
 a blanket of ice and snow. Man cannot prosper in 
 regions of sand scorched by the sun, and yet there are 
 vast regions of the earth given up to the sand. The 
 Sahara desert is as large as the United States. Leav- 
 ing out Norway, Sweden and Iceland, it is almost as 
 large as Europe. God has thrown down on our planet 
 
28 NATURE, SERMONS 
 
 a few rugs, some of them white, some of them yellow, 
 some of them blue, and some of them green. He has 
 said to humanity, “ Keep off the rugs that are white, 
 and yellow and blue. You may pass over them if you 
 please, but you must not tarry on them long. It is 
 My good pleasure that you should make your home on 
 the rugs that are green.’”’ Verily this is a great mys- 
 tery. 
 
 But however mysterious the desert we are bound to 
 acknowledge that it is one of God’s creations. We 
 are in danger of forgetting this. When we suddenly 
 come upon a magnificent landscape—it may be some 
 beautiful valley with a river running through it, or 
 some great prairie golden with grain—we involuntarily 
 exclaim: “ This is God’s country!’ When we look out 
 upon a region made up entirely of rock and sand, we 
 say: “ What a God-forsaken place this is!” We are 
 ready to acknowledge the handiwork of the Creator in 
 the things that are beautiful and fruitful; it is difficult 
 for us to discern Infinite wisdom and skill in the things 
 that are blasted and ugly. It is not easy, then, to bear 
 always in mind that the desert was created by an in- 
 finitely wise God. 
 
 Nor does the Bible help us much in our appreciation 
 of the desert. The Hebrew heart was sensitive to 
 many parts of the natural world, but there were two 
 things to which it never was able to do justice: it never 
 responded to the sea and it never responded to the 
 desert. You hear the Hebrew poet saying: “ When I 
 consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon 
 and the stars which thou hast ordained,” but you never 
 hear any Hebrew poet saying: ‘“‘ When I consider thy 
 desert the work of thy fingers, the sand-storm and the 
 sand-dunes which thou hast ordained.’’ Hebrew music 
 
DESERTS 29 
 
 never reaches that lofty pitch. In the one hundred 
 and forty-seventh Psalm the poet makes a catalogue of 
 the works of God. He begins with the stars, and then 
 enumerates the features of creation one after the 
 other: clouds, rain, grass, beasts, birds. It delights 
 him to feel that God sends the snow like wool, casts 
 forth His ice like morsels, that at His will the warm 
 winds blow, the snows melt, the waters flow. ‘This 
 poet is exceedingly appreciative of the wonders of the 
 world, but he has nothing to say about deserts. He 
 does not include the desert in his list. 
 
 In the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm another 
 Hebrew poet invites the whole of creation to make a 
 church. He wants to organize a great choir and set 
 everybody singing. He invites everybody and every- 
 thing. He begins at the very top of the universe. 
 His first invitation goes to the angels and all the 
 heavenly hosts; then he includes the sun and the moon 
 and the stars; dropping down to the earth, he invites 
 the ocean and the dragons that sport in their deeps. 
 He also extends an invitation to fire and hail, snow 
 and vapour, and all the winds of the storms. He 
 next invites the mountains and the hills, and all kinds of 
 trees—fruitful trees and forest trees. He desires that 
 every one shall come. He invites every kind of beast, 
 both wild and domestic. He asks the birds to come, 
 and also the snakes, everything that crawls, is exhorted 
 to praise the Lord. And having invited all inanithate 
 creation, all the lower world, all the beasts and the 
 birds, he extends his invitation to humanity. He be- 
 gins with kings and princes and judges, and runs down 
 to the little children. No one is omitted, no part of 
 the earth is left out—except the desert. The Hebrew 
 poet does not invite the desert to come to church. He 
 
30 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 does not seem to know that the desert can sing. It is 
 counted a heathen and a publican. 
 
 And yet it is undoubtedly true that God made the 
 desert. If He did not make it, who did? Man never 
 made it. Only the Almighty could make such a won- 
 derful thing as a desert. He made it by two of His 
 most wonderful servants, the sun and the wind. It is 
 because the sun and the wind work together that we 
 have any deserts at all. The first thing that the wind 
 does is to clear of moisture a space in the air. No 
 rain-clouds are allowed to come into a certain region 
 of the sky. The wind keeps them away. ‘This gives 
 the sun a chance to fall upon the earth with unob- 
 structed energy. The sun falls on the rocks. He heats 
 them burning hot. There is no moisture in the air to 
 obstruct him. He does his fierce pleasure, and then he 
 goes away, and there being no moisture in the air, the 
 radiation is rapid and the rocks cool. The sudden 
 heating and the sudden cooling breaks them, crushes 
 them, pulverizes them, reduces them to sand. It is 
 then that the wind begins its great work. It takes the 
 sand in its hands and it scatters it, scatters it for miles 
 and miles. It uses it as a polishing agency, and it 
 scours the faces of the cliffs until they are smooth as 
 ice. It is in this way that the wind makes more sand. 
 And after it has made it in great abundance, it plays 
 with it. It throws it into the air, sometimes in columns 
 rising two thousand feet above the earth. And after 
 it has made this column of sand it sends it moving 
 across the earth. Why, nobody knows. It would seem 
 that even the sand likes to play. The wind loves the 
 sand. It is always toying with it. It makes things 
 out of it. It says: “I will now make an imitation of 
 the sea when the sea is blown upon by a gentle breeze, 
 
DESERTS 31 
 
 IT will make undulations out of sand, I will make a 
 vast ocean with yellow waves ’”—and it does all this. 
 
 You can stand upon the desert and look out toward 
 the horizon and feel that you are looking out across 
 a golden ocean, every wave kissed by the sun. And 
 then again the wind says: “ I will now make an imita- 
 tion of the ocean tossed by storm,” and it moulds the 
 sand into great billows like the billows of the sea, 
 large and wild and yellow. One can look out across 
 their crests, for miles and miles, and feel that this is 
 indeed a sea—a sea of sand. 
 
 And when the wind is in a different mood it plays 
 with the sand as little children play with it on the 
 seashore. It piles it into hillocks which we call dunes. 
 It piles it into ridges, ramparts, forms that look like 
 old fortifications. Sometimes it piles it into hills and 
 almost into mountains. The formation of the desert 
 is exceedingly varied. Those who have never given 
 attention to the desert, either in books or travel, have 
 the idea that the desert is always flat. They are mis- 
 taken. There are flat places in the desert, but not all 
 of the desert is level. There is just as great variety in 
 the desert as in the fertile regions of the earth. There 
 are hills and there are valleys, there are plateaus and 
 there are prairies, and there are also lofty mountains. 
 There are mountains in the Sahara rising as high as 
 seven thousand feet above the sea, and in our own 
 desert in Colorado there are mountains over ten thou- 
 sand feet in height. If you could strip the Empire 
 State of all its foliage, you would have a region not a 
 whit more varied in its topography than are many of 
 the deserts of the world. 
 
 The desert, then, is made by sun and wind; and what 
 are the sun and wind but servants of Almighty God? 
 
32 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 They could not do what they do if they were not 
 commanded. ‘The Hebrew poet was right when he 
 said that stormy winds are ministers of His and ful- 
 fill His word. I like the Arabs’ word for desert. They 
 call it “‘ The Garden of Allah ’—that is, “ The Garden 
 of God.” We do not ordinarily associate the word gar- 
 den with the thought of Deity, we always think of it 
 in connection with man. In a garden, there is al- 
 ways something more or less conventional, artificial. 
 In a garden, things are trimmed and trained and tied. 
 We have our landscape gardeners, and they are ex- 
 ceedingly clever men. They can take almost any tract 
 of territory and convert it into a thing of beauty. 
 They have a trick of getting the flowers to grow in 
 beds and the trees to grow in clumps. They know 
 where to toss in a pretty little lake and at what spot 
 to erect an artistic bridge. 
 
 It is all quite charming, but, to my mind, there 
 is something more beautiful than anything which 
 a landscape gardener ever did. I know woodlands 
 in New England that run far beyond any garden 
 that an artist ever made, woodlands where the 
 trees all grow just as they please, where vine and 
 ivy cling as they please, and where every little flower 
 takes the place that suits it. And when I look upon 
 that loveliness, I know that it has been created by the 
 supreme Landscape Gardener. God can make gardens 
 as well as men. ‘The desert is the Garden of God. 
 There is nothing in it which has been trimmed, 
 nothing there has felt the touch of man’s training 
 hand, nothing there is tied. Everything is precisely 
 as it was when it left the hand of God. O Arab! 
 you are right, your name is perfect—the desert is the 
 Garden of God! 
 
DESERTS ie 
 
 We always associate a garden with the idea of the 
 beautiful; and those who are not familiar with the 
 desert might be inclined to say that the name is mis- 
 placed when applied to it. To the imagination of many 
 the desert is anything but beautiful; it is a place of 
 ugliness and horror; it is a charnel-house with the 
 grinning skulls of men and the bleached carcasses of 
 animals; it is a region of desolation in which only 
 poisonous insects and reptiles make their home; it is 
 a vast stretch of monotonous sand. But those who 
 really know the desert, know that it is beautiful. One 
 beauty differs from another beauty in glory. ‘The 
 beauty of the desert is not the beauty of the Hudson 
 valley, nor of the Dakota prairie; it has a beauty of 
 its Own. 
 
 It is a mistake to imagine that there is only one 
 colour in the desert. It is true that the desert is pre- 
 vailingly yellow, but there are a thousand shades of 
 yellow. There is the yellow of buff and the yellow 
 of amber; there is the orange yellow, there is the yel- 
 low of gold. There are yellowish whites and whitish 
 yellows and grayish yellows and yellowish grays, yel- 
 lowish browns and brownish yellows, yellowish reds 
 and reddish yellows; and all these are changing with 
 every hour of the day. They are one thing in the 
 morning before the sun is up, and quite another thing 
 when the sun, peeping above the horizon, throws his 
 rays through strata of air saturated with fine particles 
 of sand. Quite another thing is the desert, at noon, 
 and a thousand other things it becomes when the sun 
 goes down, and quite another thing, still, when the 
 starlight falls on it and it becomes pallid and ethereal 
 and wan. Experts in colour tell us that we must go 
 to the desert to learn delicacy of tint and exquisite- 
 
34 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 ness of tinge. No one would ever say that the desert 
 is not beautiful who had ever camped for a night on 
 the sand. 
 
 When I look down the Connecticut valley at North- 
 field, in summer, I am delighted by the infinite variety 
 in its shades of green. God must love green because 
 He makes so many shades of it; so also must He love 
 yellow, for the shades of it are infinite in number. 
 Yellow is more exciting to our eye than green because 
 we are less accustomed to it, and when one looks out 
 upon the desert he feels he is looking upon a world 
 the like of which he has never before seen. It seems 
 almost as though some one were holding a coloured 
 glass before the eyes in order to make the world look 
 like enchantment. 
 
 Ordinarily we associate a garden with fragrance. 
 In a garden there is always the suggestion of per- 
 fume. “ Certainly there is no fragrance in the desert,” 
 you may say. “ How can you get perfume when you 
 have no trees, no plants, no grasses?’’ Who told you 
 that there are no shrubs or grasses, no flowers or 
 blossoms in the desert? There are. Not only does 
 every desert have its oases, but, here and there, there 
 are shrubs and flowering plants. I have always 
 thought that if I were a botanist I should love to de- 
 _ vote myself to the plants of the desert. There is some- 
 ' thing about them that bewitches me. They are so 
 | heroic, their powers of endurance are marvellous, they 
 _ seem to defy the sun and the sand, they live right on in 
 
 | spite of almost incredible opposition. They devise the 
 _most curious methods for getting all the moisture they 
 can and for making the utmost out of it. Heroic little 
 plants!’ They have in them the very courage and en- 
 durance of the Son of God Himself, and they give 
 
DESERTS 35 
 
 out, many of them, a faint but exquisite perfume. It, 
 is with flowers as it is with people. Oftentimes the 
 lives that have been most oppressed and crushed ex- 
 hibit the finest beauty. It is the hearts that have been 
 compelled to resist the most cruel circumstances that 
 have in them a loveliness which we find nowhere else. 
 So it is with desert shrubs and desert flowers. The 
 very fact that they are obliged to fight, day by day 
 and night by night, for mere existence on the earth, 
 gives them a peculiar fragrance which seems to be 
 brought from some far-off, celestial world. These 
 faint and delicate odours steal across the sand. There 
 is no moisture in the air and therefore nothing to im- 
 pede their onward progress. ‘They will travel for 
 miles to greet you, and now and then it seems as 
 though you were breathing an atmosphere wafted from 
 some hidden paradise. 
 
 What an odourous place a city is! Our atmosphere 
 is reeking with foul odours. Walk down almost any 
 of our streets, and the nose is offended, again and 
 again, by the odours that assail it. There is the smell 
 of soot, of smoke, of the garbage-can, of escaping 
 gases, all sorts of earthly smells stirred up by men 
 who are digging in the streets, bringing to the sun- 
 light soil that has been soaked in all kinds of pollu- 
 tion. Pass into the houses—in the hallway a heavy 
 smell, in the parlour a musty smell, in the bedrogm an 
 unventilated smell, in the dining-room the smell of the 
 kitchen. If it were not that our olfactory sense is 
 dulled, we could not live in the city at all. We speak 
 of ventilation—there is no ventilation in the city. In 
 the desert, the ventilation is perfect. No chimneys to 
 belch out soot and smoke, none of the thousand sources 
 of contamination with which we are afflicted in great 
 
36 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 cities. The desert air is clean, and because it is so 
 clean, and because the desert shrubs and plants are so — 
 heroic, their delicate odours steal across the sand to 
 refresh and delight the weary traveller. Never think 
 of the desert as being devoid of fragrance. 
 
 What, then, is it possible for the desert to do for 
 us? Itisa medium of revelation. It brings a message 
 from the Most High. It gives us a new idea of sun- 
 light. We hardly know what sunlight is. Our air is 
 always filled with moisture, and the sunlight only 
 comes dripping through. We are never exposed to 
 the full glare of the sun, even on the days that are 
 sunniest, but in the desert the sun falls through the 
 air unobstructed and his light is well-nigh blinding. 
 The world in which we live is dark. It eats up the 
 sunbeams as soon as they fall. Green is especially 
 greedy of light, and when the light falls on it it is 
 extinguished. ‘The desert does not eat the sun, it 
 keeps it. The sun throws down a flood of glory upon 
 it and it lies there, and when you look out across 
 the desert it seems to be burning like a fiery furnace, it 
 seethes like an oven. We do not know what light is 
 until the desert tells us, nor do we know the full range 
 or the heavenly loveliness of colour. God is a great 
 colourist, and He performs some of His very greatest 
 miracles of colouring in the desert. In the desert the 
 sun is not obstructed by vapour, it can make use of the 
 sand. It can create the mirage, which is one of the 
 loveliest of all veils. And the desert can put it on 
 and lay it off at its will. 
 
 The desert, too, gives us a new revelation of im- 
 mensity. We get the revelation, to be sure, from the 
 midnight sky. It has a wonderful, tranquillizing in- 
 fluence on the heart. If one can look upon the night 
 
DESERTS a9 
 
 sky for ten minutes and hold himself still for that long, 
 one receives an impression which only immensity can 
 give. But that is immensity in one of its forms only. 
 If you stand on the prow of an ocean liner and look 
 ahead of you toward the horizon, here you have both 
 sky and sea, and again the heart is awed, but the im- 
 pression is different from that which is given by the 
 starry heavens. Look out upon the desert and you 
 have immensity again, but it is different from the sky 
 and it is different from the sea. ‘The sea is always 
 restless. 
 
 “The ocean old, centuries old, 
 Strong as youth and as uncontrolled, 
 Paces restless to and fro, 
 Up and down the sands of gold.” 
 
 The desert is still. The desert is not impatient. The 
 desert suggests no restlessness. Here is immensity as 
 immovable as marble, as calm as death. ‘The desert 
 also gives us the revelation of silence. We are liv- 
 ing in a noisy world. Many of us hardly know what 
 silence is. There are different degrees and forms of 
 silence. ‘There is a silence of the mountain-top, and 
 there is a silence of the cave, and there is also the 
 silence of the desert. I have felt the silence of the 
 mountain-top in the Canadian Rockies, and it was an 
 exhilarating silence, a silence that lifted the heart and 
 excited it. I have felt the silence of the Mammoth 
 Cave in Kentucky; it was an oppressive silence, a 
 silence that was painful, and which became, at last, 
 unendurable. I have felt the silence of the Libyan 
 Desert, and it was different from the other two. It 
 was an illuminating silence—it quieted and soothed the 
 heart. One could understand why it is written in The 
 
38 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Psalier, as a word from the mouth of the Almighty: 
 “ Be still, and know that I am God.” Here, then, in 
 the desert we find another medium of revelation. A 
 drop of water, a flake of snow, a grain of sand—these 
 are three windows in the temple of matter through 
 which we look out upon the Infinite. . 
 
 But can the desert do anything more than awe us 
 and charm us? Yes, it can cheer us. It can give us 
 fresh hope. It has only recently dawned upon the 
 human mind that the desert can be changed. For cen- 
 turies it has remained one of the unchanging things in 
 God’s universe. At one time man was afraid of the 
 ocean. Little by little he learned to conquer it. To- 
 day he feels he is master of it. Mountains were once 
 barriers. Man has learned to chisel his way through 
 them. But the desert, through all the centuries, has 
 remained what it was at the beginning—erim, defiant, 
 unconquerable. But a change has been coming over 
 our dreams. Man is now dreaming of conquering the 
 desert. It has been discovered that there is water 
 under the desert. It is possible to bring the water to 
 the surface and to make the desert bloom as the rose. 
 
 When you go out to Heliopolis in Egypt, you find 
 yourself in the midst of a wonderful city that has 
 sprung up, as it were, out of the sand. ‘There is 
 sand all around it, and you wonder how a city so 
 magnificent could have grown there. Ask some one 
 to explain to you the mystery, and he will tell you that 
 they brought up water from beneath the sand. 
 
 Out in our Colorado desert they have, by the skill- 
 ful use of water, learned how to produce all kinds of 
 fruits, right in the midst of regions that were held 
 for centuries in the grip of the wind and the sand. 
 Watermelons and cantaloupes, oranges and lemons, 
 
DESERTS 39 
 
 pomegranates and figs, grapes and dates, some of the 
 most luscious fruit grown upon the earth is now com- 
 ing out of the Colorado desert. But shall we ever be 
 able to do anything with the Sahara? Undoubtedly. 
 The engineers are entertaining dreams. Some of them 
 have already put their plans on paper. The Sahara 
 will not be conquered to-day nor to-morrow, but, some 
 day, it will be completely subdued by man. We make 
 a mistake when we suppose that the desert is sand 
 and sand only. There are sand-areas in the desert, but 
 the most of the desert is not sand. Only one-third of 
 the Sahara is sand; more than two-thirds of it are 
 fertile soil, and the soil will bring forth rich harvests 
 as soon as it is given water. What, then, seems to be 
 hopeless barrenness is, after all, fertility waiting for 
 water. | 
 
 And this gives me hope for myself. ‘There have 
 been, in my own nature, barren stretches which have 
 produced no harvests for the glory of God. These, 
 too, can be brought into cultivation if only my will- 
 power co-operates with the grace of God. There are 
 vast regions in society which seem absolutely aban- 
 doned and hopeless, great stretches of human beings 
 out of whom no fruits of civilization have ever come. 
 But we shall not lose hope. This is not all sand, this 
 is fertile soil. All it needs is the water of life, the 
 water which is supplied by the Son of God. The 
 desert can be made to bloom. That is true physically, 
 it is also true spiritually. All deserts, no matter where 
 they are, can be made to bring forth fruit to the glory 
 of the God who made them. Oh, the depth of the 
 riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, 
 Who is able to make the desert blossom as the rose! 
 
IV, 
 BIRDS 
 
 ET me remind you at the start that I am not 
 going to give you a lecture on ornithology. 
 a. I have no ability as a lecturer, and I have no 
 
 time to lecture. J am a preacher—a prophet. I am 
 
 ordained to speak for God. My purpose is not to de- 
 liver a scientific dissertation on birds, for 1 know 
 almost nothing of birds from the scientific stand- 
 point. There are many men in this city who can speak 
 to you learnedly about the nature and habits and value 
 of birds. My aim is not to impart information. You 
 can readily get that for yourselves. All the public 
 libraries and all the bookstores have many volumes 
 on birds, and special magazines and newspapers can 
 tell you all you need to know. My sermon is a sermon 
 
 —a spiritual discourse. My wish is that I may be 
 
 able to open your eyes a little and your ears a little, 
 
 and your mind a little to the wonder and beauty of 
 the bird-world, in order that you may cry out with 
 
 a fresh rapture: “ O Lord our Lord, how excellent is 
 
 thy name in all the earth.” 
 
 What a mystery a bird is! Tennyson, in one of his 
 best known poems, has said that if he knew a little 
 flower completely, in all its essences and relationships, 
 he would know everything. But a bird is a greater 
 mystery than a flower. It has higher potencies and 
 wider possibilities. Little, timid, quivering, fluttering, 
 scary thing, what is it but a ball of mystery wrapped 
 up in feathers! How strange that a thing like that 
 Preached, June 14, 1914. 
 
 
 
 40 
 
| BIRDS 4I 
 
 should come out of the earth! How remarkable that 
 it should come out of protoplasm: that one_pinch 
 of protoplasm.,should be worked into a thing that 
 swims, and another pinch into a thing that crawls, and 
 another pinch into a thing that flies! How extra- 
 ordinary that a bird should come out of the star-stuff! 
 At first there was a great mass of stuff. Large pieces 
 flew off and became stars, small pieces, tiny bits flew 
 off and became birds. How amazing that a bird 
 should come out of the fire-mist! In the huge ball of 
 fire-mist the seeds of bird-life were hidden, and out of 
 the mist there flew, in the fullness of time, a little 
 creature with a spark of the primeval fire burning in 
 its heart. Birds are the hottest of all creatures. They 
 have a blood-temperature which would quickly bur 
 us up. 
 
 But how could a bird come out of protoplasm, star- 
 stuff, fire-mist? Only because it was, first, in the mind 
 of God. From eternity the bird idea was in the Divine 
 Mind. One day God said: “ Let us make birds,” and 
 they were made. He said that before He said: “‘ Let 
 us make man.” Birds are older than man. We some- 
 times look upon them as interlopers, troublesome in- 
 truders, saucy upstarts, but they were here long before 
 the first man made this planet his habitation. Accord- 
 ing to a Greek tradition birds are the oldest of all 
 created things. Before the sun and winds, before man- 
 kind, even before the gods, they were. And it was 
 because they were supposed to possess primal powers 
 and to reach back into ante-mundane times that sooth- 
 sayers watched their flight and ministers of religion 
 tried to find out from them the will of God. eR 
 _ Why did God create birds? A common answer 
 is—He created them for man. That is pleasing to 
 
 PPeme per Teyenerass psec terrmnrn en 
 
42 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 our vanity, but it is hardly a tenable explanation of 
 their existence. If birds were made for man, then 
 why did they exist millions of years before man was 
 made? Why did they fly and sing, age after age, when 
 there was no human eye to see them and no human ear 
 to hear them? And why, even to the present hour, 
 do many of the most beautiful birds in. all the world 
 make their homes in thickets and jungles and mighty 
 forests, and on uninhabited islands where the foot of 
 man has never trod? Why do they flash their gor- 
 geous plumage in the sun, and pour their melodies on 
 the air, where there is no human heart to enjoy them? 
 
 a f It is true that God made birds for man and it is also 
 ‘! true that God made birds for Himself. He created 
 
 ‘ them because He wanted them. He wanted them for 
 
 \ Himself. He now shares them with man, but He 
 
 wants them Himself. He likes them. He likes their 
 \ plumage and He likes their song. 
 
 ~ Abraham Lincoln used to say that God must like the 
 common people because He makes so many of them. 
 
 If that be a sound method of argument, then God must 
 like birds because He makes so many of them. There 
 are more kinds of birds than there are kinds of fish, 
 and more than there are kinds of serpents, and more 
 than there are kinds of animals. There are more 
 species of birds than there are species of fish and 
 serpents and animals combined. ‘The largest of all the 
 kingdoms of sentient life is the kingdom of the 
 
 “birds. I do not wonder that Jesus of Nazareth used 
 
 y to say: “ Look at the birds!” God keeps His eye on 
 
 them. Not one of them can fall without His noting 
 its fall. Jesus felt that bird-life was a page in God’s 
 great Bible, and that by reading this page men would 
 receive a message from their heavenly Father. 
 
BIRDS 43 
 
 This leads us to another mystery—the majority of 
 mankind are indifferent to birds. Men ignore.them as 
 unworthy of attention. Indeed, the human race may 
 be said to be almost hostile to birds. Are there not 
 societies organized for the express work of protect- 
 ing them, and do not congresses and parliaments pass 
 laws for the purpose of saving them from extermina- 
 tion? Mr. Hornaday, of our own city, set himself 
 to raise a fund of $100,000 to save a particular kind of 
 bird from extinction. In New York birds have de- | 
 creased forty-six per cent. But most men are not hos-? 
 tile to birds,they-are-simply-indifferent to them, They 
 do not care for them, never think about them, never 
 read about them, simply pass them by as uninteresting 
 and useless. ‘To be sure, there are exceptions. There 
 are bird-lovers in every community, men and women 
 who take unceasing delight in birds, and the number of 
 these bird-lovers is increasing every year. But, at 
 present, the majority of people are not interested in 
 birds. 
 
 This isamystery. Birds are easily seen. Fishes are 
 not. Fishes hide. In order that fishes may be seen, 
 the city must catch them and put them in an aquarium 
 and carefully adjust the lights. It does not seem that 
 fishes were created to be looked at. Serpents also 
 hide. They conceal themselves in the grass, behind 
 rocks, in holes in the ground, and even if we could 
 see them we do not want to see them, for the sight 
 of them causes a revulsion in our blood. But birds 
 do not hide. They rise before us. They soar into 
 the air. They wheel and circle above our heads, as if 
 they would say: “ Now you like to see men looping 
 the loop, and performing other aerial stunts, just look 
 at us! See how gracefully we can do these things, 
 
4A NATURE SERMONS 
 
 and how easily and without danger at all.” Birds do 
 everything they can to attract our attention, but most 
 of us refuse to look. 
 
 Not only are they visible, but they are beautiful. 
 They are beautiful in form, in movement, in colour. 
 The colouring of birds is one of the miracles of crea- 
 tion. In some of them the colours are splendid, in 
 others they are gorgeous, in others they are posi- 
 tively dazzling. Oh, the delicacy and vividness of 
 the patterns woven into the plumage of a bird! 
 We think it wonderful when men can bring to- 
 gether bits of stone in such a way as to create those 
 matchless mosaics in St. Peter’s at Rome. We 
 count it marvellous that men can create such de- 
 signs as one sees in the priceless tapestries of the 
 Vatican; but all these masterpieces of human artistry 
 are poor, cheap, faded things compared with the 
 splendour of some of the most common of our birds. 
 When you want to see delicate shadings, exquisite 
 gradations of colour, and artistic designs that cannot 
 be matched in the studios and. factories of men, go to 
 the breast or the wing of a bird! There are more 
 rich and vivid colours in the plumage of birds than 
 you can find in the foliage of a landscape on a summer 
 afternoon, more than you can see in the ocean when it 
 breaks against the rocks and the sunlight is mingled 
 with the spray, more than you will find in the sky, 
 even when the day is breaking or when the sun is 
 dying in the west. This colour in the plumage of 
 birds is the Lord’s doing, and it ought to be marvellous 
 in our eyes. Feathers do not come together to form 
 exquisite patterns with every line unbroken and every 
 matching of colour perfect, without a superintending 
 mind. But most of us do not care. 
 
BIRDS 45 
 
 Birds, again, are vocal. It is difficult for birds to 
 keep still. They are always chattering or twittering 
 or chirping or calling or singing. ‘They are so full 
 of life they cannot keep silent. By their singing they 
 say: “ Please listen to us!” But we turn a deaf ear. 
 Most of us do not care for birds. | 
 
 And yet they follow us. They like us. They come 
 into the city. ‘They take possession of all our parks. 
 Central Park, New York, has nearly one hundred and 
 fifty different kinds of birds within its bounds every 
 year. But birds are not aristocratic. They do not 
 confine themselves to stately parks. They will visit 
 your backyard—anybody’s backyard—no matter how 
 poor or mean you are, provided you have a tree or 
 even a bush there. A woman in Chicago counted fifty- 
 seven kinds of birds which in one year visited her 
 backyard. Is it not strange that we should ignore 
 them when they are so beautiful, so musical, and so 
 friendly 
 
 How many birds do you know? How many kinds 
 of birds live in our city? How many are here in the 
 winter, how many in the summer, how many all 
 through the year? How many transients do we enter- 
 tain in the course of every twelve calendar months? 
 Birds are coming and going all the time, just as 
 people are coming and going. We are interested in 
 city life—well, bird-life is a part of city life, and 
 most of us ought to know more about it than we do. 
 
 One object of this sermon, then, is to persuade you 
 to pay attention to birds, to look at them, to listen 
 to them, to think about them, to come to like them. 
 This.is.one.of your religious privileges, this is one of 
 the means of grace. God makes the birds. ‘They are 
 parts of His ways. He has something to say to you 
 
46 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 through them. If you ignore the birds, you lose a 
 part of His message. | 
 
 This sermon is specially for boys. Many boys do 
 not think of birds. Because they do not think, they 
 throw stones at them. A stone may break a bird’s 
 wing. A bird with one wing broken cannot use the 
 other wing, and so it has no wings at all. A bird 
 with no wings is helpless, ruined. It is in the same 
 condition that a boy would be in if some one put out 
 both of his eyes or cut off both of his legs. This 
 sermon is specially for girls. Girls do not think about 
 birds, and that is why some girls wear the dead bodies 
 of birds on their hats. Saige of the loveliest species 
 ‘of birds have become almost extinct because of the 
 thoughtlessness and cruelty of girls and women. 
 
 it ee sermon is specially for grown-up people. None 
 of us perhaps are as happy as we ought to be. We 
 are not so happy as we might be if we were interested 
 in a larger circle of things. Having eyes we see not, 
 having ears we hear not, and having hearts we feel 
 not the things we might see and hear and feel. The 
 result is that we get old early. Nobody gets.old_so 
 long as he is eee in a large number of things. 
 All of us know men and women in the upper eighties 
 or early nineties who are yet young, because they are 
 interested in so many things. ‘This sermon is to remind 
 | |you that if you are not interested in birds you will 
 ‘get old before your time. This sermon is specially for 
 the old, for the men and women who realize they are ° 
 old, who find the days somewhat tedious and who [a> 
 ment that much of the zest has gone out of life. Let 
 me suggest that you enter the bird-world. Buy one 
 of Charles M. Chapman’s books and go to work. Be- 
 gin this summer. Begin to-day. Introduce the bird- 
 
BIRDS 47 
 
 note into your life. You are going down the western 
 side of the hill. Let the birds—God’s choristers—sing 
 for you all the way down until the shadow falls and 
 you hear other voices sweeter still. 
 
 The bird-world is a fascinating field of study. One 
 can devote his leisure hours to it for a lifetime and 
 always have something new to learn. Every feature of 
 bird-life is bewitching. The flying of birds—what a 
 feat that is! Men have learned to fly in recent years; 
 yet a sorry mess they often make of it. Look at the 
 airplane! What a noisy thing itis! It makes a great 
 ado, and every now and then it gets out of order, and 
 comes tumbling to the earth, killing the man who is 
 learning how to fly. But a bird dank. nothing of 
 flying. A bird is God’s flying machine. In the 
 machine there is a little engine—the bird’s heart—not 
 so large as the tip end of your little finger. How tiny, 
 and yet how mighty! It can carry the bird a thou- 
 
 sand miles, two thousand, three, four, five, six thou- ' 
 
 sand miles. Some birds spend their summers in the 
 
 Arctic circle and their winters in Argentina. Twelve | 
 thousand miles a year they fly, just for the sake of | 
 
 being comfortable. 
 
 And how fast they fly—some birds a mile a minute, 
 others, two miles a minute. Experts declare that 
 certain birds can fly three miles a minute. Against 
 what obstacles they fly—right in the teeth of the wind, 
 straight through the storm, on they go to their destina- 
 tion. What energy is locked up in those little engines! 
 The albatross is a mighty bird. It measures, some- 
 times, seventeen feet between the tips of its out- 
 stretched wings. It can fly day and night for three 
 thousand miles, as fast as the fastest steamer can 
 sail, sleeping on the wing, if it sleep at all, and at the 
 
 Jy 
 
48 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 end of the journey be apparently as fresh as it was 
 when it started. And it flies without any observable 
 
 movement of its wings. In the presence of such_a ' 
 
 bird the heart cries out: *O, Lord, how manifold are 
 thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them ail!” 
 
 The migration of birds—you can study that for a 
 lifetime. Many birds spend one season of the year 
 in one country, and another season in a different 
 country. The countries may lie thousands of miles 
 apart. ‘They lay out courses of travel and they follow 
 these courses for thousands of years. They start 
 south at the same time every year. They start north 
 at a time that never varies. The experts can tell you 
 almost to the day when certain birds will be here from 
 the West Indies, when other birds will be here from 
 Brazil, when still others will be here from Patagonia. 
 They fly often at night. They fly in great armies. 
 Sometimes they fly so low you can hear them shouting 
 and calling to one another, at other times they fly high 
 and can be seen only through the telescope passing 
 across the silver disk of the moon. ‘The tides of the 
 ocean are wonderful, so certain, regular and mighty. 
 But there are other tides, tides of feathered life, flow- 
 ing north and south, with the regularity of the trade 
 winds and the precision of the movement of the stars, 
 and these tides of bird life have ebbed and flowed 
 every year through all the ages of human history, and 
 through uncounted millenniums before history began. 
 “O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and 
 knowledge of God! how wunsearchable are his judg- 
 ments and his ways past finding out!” 
 
 The economic uses of birds—the millions of dollars 
 | ‘they save us by making war on the enemies of our 
 orchards and crops, this is an interesting study, and 
 
 > 
 
BIRDS 49 
 
 a still more interesting study is the poetic uses of birds. 
 What use did Homer make of them, Dante, Shake- 
 speare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, our own 
 American poets? Shakespeare, the world’s greatest 
 poet, apparently loved birds the best. Six hundred 
 times in his dramas he brings them in, and some- 
 times with magic effect. In the love scene in Romeo 
 and Jultet, in the moment of intensest passion a bird 
 is heard and the maiden cries: 
 
 “It was the nightingale : 
 Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.” 
 
 But Romeo better understands the notes of birds 
 and his reply comes sadly: 
 
 “Tt was the lark, the herald of the dawn, 
 No nightingale 
 
 How did the Hebrew poets deal with birds? They 
 saw in them a partial revelation of God. They noticed 
 how birds will break up their nests and train their 
 young ones to fly. So does God break up men’s rest- 
 ing places. He wants men to soar aloft. The tender- | | 
 
 | 
 i 
 
 ness and solicitude and faithfulness of the mother- bird | | | 
 made a profound impression on the Hebrew heart. | | 
 The downy softness, the warm tenderness, and the all- 
 surrounding security of the protecting wings were 
 hints, the poet thought, of qualities ae ae. in ‘the 
 heart of the Eternal. There was an old poet of Israel 
 who did not hesitate to think of God under the image | 
 of a bird: ‘‘ He will cover thee with his feathers, and | 
 under his wings shalt thou trust.” ; 
 Birds are man’s companions in every quarter of the 
 globe, and yet they are removed from him by a gulf 
 
50 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 both deep and wide. They do not come so close to 
 him as a horse, or a dog, or a cat. They do not like 
 to be held in the hand. They resent a caress. They 
 cannot talk to us as a dog can. It is impossible for 
 them to express in any way which we can under- 
 stand what they think or feel or wish. They cannot 
 look us in the eye, nor can we look into their eye. 
 They look at us but they do not look into us. Mat- 
 thew Arnold had a dog—* Rover ”—-and when Rover 
 died, Arnold wrote no poem. He had a cat named 
 “‘ Atossa,’ and when Atossa died he wrote no elegy. 
 He had a bird named “ Matthias,” and when Mat- 
 thias died, Arnold wrote a poem expressive of his 
 remorse and sorrow. His heart was pierced because 
 he had not known the bird was going to die. He had 
 not suspected even that the bird was sick. He had 
 offered him sugar and cake and seed, and had spoken 
 jocosely to the bird even when he was under the 
 shadow of death, and it was this sense of ignorance 
 and inability to understand a bird that wrung from 
 Arnold’s heart one of the most beautiful poems he 
 ever penned. 
 
 But though we cannot understand them birds are 
 company for us. ‘They relieve our loneliness. They 
 , are comrades along the perilous road. They never 
 ' forsake us. They are faithful to the end. One of 
 the darkest features of the tragedy of human life is — 
 _ its increasing loneliness as the years multiply. One by 
 _ one, our friends, our acquaintances, our companions in 
 | pleasure and work, leave us. The boys and girls we 
 _ played with when we were children, our schoolmates, 
 our friends of the early years, drop out, one by one, 
 and we find ourselves attended by an ever diminish- 
 ing company of those who care whether we are alive 
 
BIRDS SI 
 
 or not. Charles Lamb was not an old man when he 
 wrote: 
 
 “T have had playmates, I have had companions, 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays— 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.” 
 
 Tom Moore was not aged when he wrote: 
 
 “TI feel like one 
 Who treads alone 
 
 Some banquet hall deserted, 
 Whose lights are fled, 
 Whose garlands dead 
 
 And all but he departed!” 
 
 But he who makes friends with the birds will have 
 them with him to the end. Birds never change. So 
 far as you are concerned they never die. You prob- 
 ably never saw one die. You never saw its body after 
 it was dead. There are just as many pewees and 
 juncos, sparrows and swallows, orioles and robins as 
 there ever were. And they do not change either their 
 form or their colour or their voice. ‘The robin will 
 sing to you this summer just as he sang when you 
 first heard him sing, and the whippoorwill will speak 
 to you out of the dusk with the same accent which he 
 used long years ago. No matter how old you live to 
 be, when it comes time to die—if you die in the sea- 
 son of the singing of birds—if the window is open—. 
 you will hear the birds singing the same songs which 
 they sang to you when you were a child. ‘There are} 
 two things which never forsake us—the stars and the’ 
 birds. | 
 
 And although they cannot look into our eyes they 
 can sing their way into our hearts. Martin Luther, 
 
52 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 in an hour of terrible depression, was lifted up and 
 strengthened by the spectacle of a little bird swinging 
 on a twig and sending forth a song of perfect trust. 
 Thomas Carlyle walked one day to Edinburgh on a 
 disagreeable errand, and on his way home his heart 
 was heavy with care. But the larks rising and sing- 
 ing around him made him think of his father’s house, 
 and he was comforted. Dan Crawford, years ago, 
 went as a missionary to Central Africa. He sat one 
 day on a cliff overhanging a lovely lake, feeling as 
 desolate as Robinson Crusoe felt before he found his 
 man Friday. While he was pondering the fact that 
 Scotland was four thousand miles from where he sat, 
 suddenly there came the tapping of a woodpecker on 
 a tree immediately behind him. “What a warm- 
 hearted tap that is!” he said, and, at once, it seemed 
 that Scotland was just round the next bend of the lake. 
 
 In one of the finest of his poems, Wordsworth tells 
 the experience of a poor woman who went every 
 morning to her humble work in a crowded part of 
 London. On her way she passed a corner at which 
 hung a thrush in a cage. When the thrush sang there 
 came before her eyes the cottage in which she was 
 born. She saw the path through the meadows along 
 which she had tripped with her milk-pail when a girl, 
 she saw the woods, the mountain, and the river. ‘The 
 whole scene of her childhood rose before her, as by 
 enchantment, at the singing of this bird. 
 
 Charles Silvester Horne was one of the radiant and 
 anointed spirits of our time. For many years he was 
 Pastor of Whitefield’s Tabernacle in Tottenham Court 
 Road, London. He was elected to the British House 
 of Commons and wherever he was, he was a cham- 
 pion of noble causes, the loyal servant of mankind. 
 
BIRDS 53 
 
 Horne’s death came when he was but fifty, and when 
 he died a darkness fell upon the hearts of those who 
 knew and loved him. It was a sad-hearted company 
 which gathered round his open grave. ‘They had lined 
 it with moss and wild flowers, but they could not cover 
 up the wound in their hearts. Mrs. Horne was there 
 with her seven children, Horne’s two brothers and his 
 sisters were there, and a large company of men of 
 distinction who had been his comrades in many a hard- 
 fought campaign. When the minister began.to read 
 the committal service, and every heart was at the point 
 of breaking, a thrush in the oak-tree poured forth a 
 jubilant song. The human heart was not able just 
 then to say: “O death, where is thy victory? O death 
 where is thy sting?” and so God said it through a 
 bird. 
 
 The most original poem ever written by an Ameri- 
 can_bears the name of a bird—The Raven. It is by 
 Edgar Allan Poe. The weirdest poem ever written 
 by an Englishman telling the story of how a curse fell 
 
 on a man for the killing of a bird, is The Rime of the 
 
 Ancient Mariner, written by Samuel Taylor Cole- 
 ridge. For days the hero’s life was a long-drawn 
 agony. Because of the softening of the man’s heart 
 the curse was finally lifted, and the poem closes with 
 the noble thought: 
 
 “ He prayeth best, who loveth best 
 All things both great and small; 
 For the dear God, who loveth us, 
 He made and loveth all.” 
 
"4 
 SUNSETS 
 
 OW many sunsets have you seen during this 
 H last week, this last month, this last year? 
 How many have you seen in the last ten 
 years, the last twenty, the last thirty? JI do not ask 
 how many have you glanced at, but how many have 
 you gazed upon, paid attention to, pondered? On how 
 many have you held your mind long enough for it 
 to become impressed, for an influence to be diffused 
 through your heart, for a discipline to be exercised 
 upon your spirit? How many sunsets stand out vivid 
 and glorious on the walls of your memory? How 
 many of you can say, that the glory of setting suns is 
 an appreciable factor in the development of your 
 emotional and spiritual life? 
 
 It is a lamentable fact, that what is customary soon 
 becomes commonplace. ‘The oft-repeated soon loses 
 its power over us. Repetition seems to sear the heart 
 as if by a red-hot iron. If the sun went down only 
 once in a hundred years what a world-wide commo- 
 tion the sunset would create! If only once in a hun- 
 dred years the western sky glowed and burned as 
 though some colossal, celestial glory were about to 
 burst through upon the world; if only once in a hun- 
 dred years, the clouds along the western horizon took 
 on unwonted brilliancy, flashing with a magnificence 
 leaping beyond the power of language to express or 
 the ingenuity of the human mind to conceive; if, only 
 once in a century, after the sun went down, an ethereal 
 softness began to steal toward the zenith, and an un- 
 
 Preached, May 23, 1915. 
 54 
 
SUNSETS 55 
 
 speakable beauty began to flush the upper spaces—then 
 ‘the fame of the spectacle would be heralded around 
 the earth, and would give people something to talk 
 about for another hundred years. 
 
 If such an event had taken place seventy-five years 
 ago, how enthusiastically we should gather round the 
 old men and women of eighty and eighty-five and 
 ninety, begging them to tell us of the sunset which 
 they saw in the days of their childhood. And how 
 eagerly the reporters would harass these old people for 
 descriptions of the great event of the long ago. And 
 if we knew that there would not be another sunset 
 until twenty-five years from now, some of us would 
 be filled with sadness, saying one to another, “I am 
 afraid I shall not live so long. I fear I shall die be- 
 fore I have seen that thrilling and sublime event!” 
 Young people, however, would stand on the tiptoe of 
 expectation, counting the passing years, reading the 
 poets and historians for descriptions of the last sunset, 
 and preparing their minds and hearts for the great 
 experience awaiting them a quarter of a century from 
 now. If a sunset took place once in a century, every- 
 body would be interested in it, but such is the per- 
 versity of human nature that a sunset occurring every 
 day loses its power to charm or thrill, and the majority 
 of human beings now living on our planet pay no more 
 attention to a sunset than do the animals at their feet. 
 We never rightly value anything which happens every 
 day. We cannot appreciate any blessing which we 
 possess all the time. 
 
 Nor do we appreciate anything which we get for 
 nothing. The only things we value highly are the 
 things which we buy at a great cost. We should all 
 enjoy the sunsets more, if we had to pay an admission 
 
56 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 fee. If some enterprising showman could curtain off 
 the western sky, and, walling in the edge of the world, 
 should advertise in all the papers: “ Beautiful Sunsets 
 every evening next week—best seats ten dollars 
 each; seats in the balcony five and four and three dol- 
 lars according to location; gallery seats one dollar 
 each,”’ what a scramble there would be to get in! We 
 should all want to go, and the ticket-scalpers would 
 do a booming business. We should save up our money 
 for this great treat, and we should ask one another: 
 “How many times do you expect to go? Which sun- 
 sets have you seen this season? ’’—just as we now talk 
 about grand opera. Yes; if it only cost something to 
 see the sunset we should be eager to see it. But be- 
 cause an angel of the Lord stands in the glory of the 
 blazing west, crying, ‘“Ho, ye who thirst for beauty, 
 come ye to the fountain, come, without money and 
 without price,’ we turn on our heel and go away. We 
 do not want things which are free. 
 
 And so, every evening of the month, thousands and 
 tens of thousands of our people go from their places 
 of business to their homes with never a glance toward 
 the gorgeous west. They hastily eat their dinner. 
 They return down town, paying for a place in the 
 opera house or theatre in order to see the burning 
 of some cheap chemicals, the dexterous manipulation 
 of a searchlight or a few electric bulbs—ingenious 
 tricks played with the mystery of light, cheap and 
 tawdry flashes in a tin-pan—when God’s great master- 
 piece of light and colour hangs all unnoticed on the 
 western wall of the world. 
 
 The purpose of my sermon is to awaken in you the 
 sense of condemnation, the consciousness of sin be- 
 cause of your neglect of this great feast of the Lord. 
 
SUNSETS 57 
 
 would have you think of the sunset as a means of 
 grace. Have you ever counted up the means of grace? 
 How long is your list? What have you included? 
 Public worship? Yes. Bible reading? Yes. Prayer? 
 Yes. Is that all? Have you not put down the sun- 
 set? That is a means of grace. By all means, put 
 that down. It is a sacrament. It is the visible sign 
 of jan invisible grace. It is a symbol for mediating 
 God’s grace to your heart. Put it down in the list 
 of the means of grace; include it, also, in your list of 
 sacraments. 
 
 Reckon it a page in your Bible. It is certainly a 
 word of the Lord. It is not a word of man. Man 
 cannot speak after that fashion. There are some 
 things which God allows man to assist Him in mak- 
 ing. If God wants a potato or a turnip, a cucumber 
 or a squash, He allows man to help Him in produc- 
 ing it. If God wants a flower-bed or a lawn He al- 
 lows man to collaborate with Him. But there are 
 some things in which man can have no part. When 
 God makes a sunset He says to man: “ Now, please 
 step aside; I want to do all this by Myself. You can- 
 not in any way assist Me. This work is completely 
 beyond you. I, alone, can produce a work like this.” 
 A father allows his little boy to do many things. He 
 lets him run on this errand and on that. Some things 
 he and the boy work at together. But, finally, the 
 father says: “ Now my boy, I must do this all by 
 myself. All you can do is to sit down and watch 
 how I do it.” God alone makes the sunset. He al- 
 lows man to run on many an errand, He collaborates 
 with him in many a task, but when evening comes the 
 heavenly Father says: “‘ Now my child, sit down, and 
 see how beautiful I can make a sunset!” 
 
58 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 It is a means of grace, it is a holy sacrament, it is 
 a page of the Bible, and yet many of you turn away 
 from it. I know you are ready with excuses. You 
 say you do not live in the right quarter of the town, 
 or you live on the wrong side of the street, or you live 
 in an unfortunate part of the house. If you lived any- 
 where else than where you do live, you would look at 
 the sunset every evening! And others of you tell me 
 you cannot see the sunset because of your work. Your 
 work is not over until after sunset, or you are on your 
 way home at sunset—and who can see a sunset in the 
 subway or in our narrow streets? Or you are a 
 woman and you must prepare the dinner when the sun 
 is going down, and if you neglected the dinner in order 
 to see the sunset you would have more clouds in the 
 house than there are in the western sky. I know your 
 excuses. They are all plausible, but not one of them 
 is sound. We are all experts in making excuses. 
 Whenever God prepares a feast and asks us to partake 
 of it, we all, with one consent, begin to make excuse. 
 It is not because of where you live, or because of your 
 work that you see so few sunsets. It is because you 
 do not care for them. ‘They do not appeal to you. 
 They do not increase the sum-total of your joy. You 
 can get on well without them and so you do. But if 
 you wanted to see them you would go out of your > 
 way, you would plan, you would sacrifice to see them. 
 
 The sun sets at different times in different seasons 
 of the year. You are not always at work, not always 
 in the subway, not always in the kitchen when the sun 
 is going down. If you do not live in a home with a 
 western outlook you could walk to Riverside Drive, or 
 you could walk to the end of the street in which you 
 are living, and stay there long enough to see the sun 
 
SUNSETS 59 
 
 go down. And if you could not do that on any other 
 evening of the week, you could do it on Sunday eve- 
 ning. You could put down the sunset as one of the 
 features of your Sunday worship. Or, if you could 
 not do this on every Sunday evening, you could make 
 it a habit to devote a half-hour every evening to sun- 
 sets during your summer vacation. If you only wanted 
 to see the sunset and believed that it had a blessing to 
 impart, and that your life is impoverished because you 
 see so few sunsets, you would make it possible to see 
 more sunsets this year than you have ever seen be- 
 fore. 
 
 Let me suggest a few reasons why you ought to 
 give more attention to the sunset: 
 
 In the first place, it is a miracle. Many persons are 
 much troubled by the miracles of the New Testament. 
 They cannot believe them. In the first place they never 
 saw them with their own eyes, and not having seen 
 them, they cannot accept them, and, moreover, the idea 
 of a miracle seems to clash with the scientific concep- 
 tion of universal and unchangeable law. For these 
 two reasons many men and women of culture and high 
 intelligence are loath to give credence to the New 
 Testament accounts of miraculous events. Let me 
 suggest to all such persons that you close your New 
 Testament for a season and look at a miracle per- 
 formed before your eyes. The day of miracles is not 
 passed. God will perform one for you if you will 
 open your eyes and look. ‘The sunset is a miracle, ac- 
 cording to the New Testament idea of a miracle. 
 
 There are four words used in the New Testament 
 for the extraordinary deeds of Jesus. The first is 
 “wonder.” They were called wonders because they 
 excited astonishment in the eyes of all beholders. Men 
 
60 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 were amazed and dumbfounded by what they saw. 
 Now if a miracle is a phenomenon which arouses 
 amazement then the sunset is a miracle. It will surely 
 stir up astonishment in any mind which dwells upon 
 it, it will amaze anybody who picks it to pieces and 
 finds out how it is made. It is a wonder! 
 
 Another New ‘Testament word for miracle is 
 “sign.” A miracle is an event which points to some- 
 thing, it is a token of something, it is a symbol of 
 something, it is a pledge of something, it is an indica- 
 tion of thought and purpose. It points to something 
 beyond itself. Certainly the sunset does that. It is a 
 signboard painted on the flaming highway of the gor- 
 geous west, pointing to God! 
 
 A third word is “ power.” ‘The things which Jesus 
 did are sometimes called “ powers,” that is, they are 
 displays of power. ‘They give the impression of a 
 power at work beyond the strength of man. ‘The sun- 
 set fulfills this idea. The sunset is a power—a display 
 of power, running beyond the reach of human faculty. 
 No man can make the sunset, no set. of men can make 
 it. Not all the men of all the earth, with all their 
 talent and all their genius, and making use of all the 
 apparatus and machinery which man’s ingénuity has 
 been able to produce, can create the vast and dazzling 
 splendour of a western sky. A sunset is a power. A 
 display of force running beyond the energy of man- 
 kind is a miracle. 
 
 A fourth word is “ work.’ Sometimes the New 
 Testament writers call the deeds of Jesus “signs,” 
 sometimes “signs and wonders,” sometimes “ signs 
 and worders and powers,” and sometimes they con- 
 tent themselves with the word “ works.” A miracle 
 is a work—a mighty work; and surely the sunset is a 
 
SUNSETS 61 
 
 work—a mighty work. It is something achieved, done, 
 brought to pass. A sunset, then, fulfills every condi- 
 tion of a miracle which the New Testament lays down. 
 Look, then, at this miracle which God Almighty per- 
 forms every day before your eyes. It is not done con- 
 trary to law. No law 1s broken by the formation of 
 the clouds, by the colouring of them, by the movement 
 of them. All the vibrations of the ether, the dancing 
 of the dust-particles, the movements of the air- 
 currents, take place according to law. God achieves 
 the sunset through law. A miracle is not a violation 
 of law. No law is said to have been suspended or 
 broken by the men who wrote the New Testament. 
 All the wonderful deeds of our Lord were done 
 through law! 
 
 The sunset is a parable. A parable is a verbal pic- 
 ture used in order to set forth a spiritual truth. All 
 our Lord’s parables are pictures. The Prodigal Son, 
 The Good Samaritan, The Foolish Virgins, The 
 Sower, Dives and Lazarus—what are they all but un- 
 fading pictures, hung in the gallery of the mind, not 
 to be taken down for ever? Our Lord loved to 
 speak in parables, and on some days He spake in no 
 other way. He loves to speak in parables now. One 
 of His favourite parables is the sunset. It is a pic- 
 ture, setting forth a spiritual truth. The fact which it 
 proclaims is that God is a lover of beauty, God is 
 fond of colour, God is an artist. There is no parable 
 recorded in the New ‘Testament which makes that fact 
 so vivid and impressive as the parable which God 
 speaks daily in the sky of the west. 
 
 The sunset is a medicine. Shakespeare says that 
 sleep is a balm for hurt minds. So, also, is a sunset. 
 It is soft and tender and beautiful, and that is what 
 
62 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 we need at the end of the day. In the morning we 
 are courageous and jubilant, but the cares of the day 
 sap our vitality, and we often come to the evening hour 
 with strength depleted and much of our vim and zest 
 gone. Life which was spangled in the morning be- 
 comes in the late afternoon a dingy drab, and so God 
 hangs up a beautiful picture to cheer our heart a bit. 
 Just when the beauty is fading out of life, God gives 
 this great splash of colour to create hope and joy 
 again. When we begin to stagger under life’s routine 
 and monotony, God sets the western sky on fire to 
 make the world romantic again. 
 
 The New Testament says that sometimes Jesus did 
 His most wonderful cures at sunset. It was when the 
 sun was hovering over the horizon, and the poetry of 
 the dusk was stealing into the air, that the people 
 carried out their sick ones and laid them at His feet. 
 It was when the necromancy of the sunset was at its 
 height, that streams of healing flowed from Him into 
 the exhausted veins of men. Every evening He takes 
 His place on His throne in the west, and e’er the sun 
 goes down we should bring out our weakened faith 
 and shadowed hopes and wounded affections, and lay 
 them at His feet, allowing the glory of the sinking 
 sun to shine around about them, and give us health 
 and strength again. : 
 
 The sunset is a mystery. Did you ever hear a 
 scientist talk about the mechanism of a sunset? You 
 can read all that up some time for yourselves. My 
 sermons are not scientific lectures. They are not 
 scientific expositions, but sermons, their inner purpose 
 being the purpose of all true sermons—the moving of 
 the soul toward God. But if you should hear a 
 physicist talk to you about the sunset, he would sur- 
 
SUNSETS 63 
 
 prise you by his declarations. He would tell you that 
 the sunset is made of a few gases, a multitude of drops 
 of vapour, millions of particles of dust, and a handful 
 of sunbeams. He would go on to assure you that the 
 gorgeousness of the sunset is due to atmospheric dust. 
 The earth is tied up in a dust-bag. An ocean of dust 
 flows round our planet several miles deep. The dust 
 particles nearer the earth are large and coarse. But 
 as you ascend they become smaller and smaller, until 
 at last they become microscopic, and in the highest 
 regions they are so small that no instrument can detect 
 them. We know of their existence solely from the ef- 
 fects they produce. If it were not for this dust, the 
 sky would not be blue and the sun would not be golden. 
 If it were not for the dust, the sunset would be shorn 
 of its glory. 
 
 Why is the sun more beautiful on the horizon than 
 it is above our heads? It is because we see it through 
 more air, and that means we see it through more dust; 
 the more dust the greater scope for reflection and re- 
 fraction, and the operations of all the other principles 
 by which the potential glories of light are unfolded. 
 The sunsets near great cities are usually red, and this 
 is because of the dust. The red waves are longer and 
 stronger than the yellow and orange rays, and much 
 longer than the green and the blue, so that.it is often- 
 times only the red waves which shoulder their way 
 through the dust-ocean and succeed in reaching the 
 eye. Why is yonder cloud so gloriously white? It 
 is because of the dust-particles in it. They are re- 
 flecting the light. Why are its edges gorgeously crim- 
 son or purple? It is because of the dust particles 
 which are refracting the light. 
 
 What a mystery it is that a thing so resplendently 
 
64 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 beautiful should be made of vibrations, and dust- 
 particles and the movements of vapour. By reflec- 
 tion and refraction, and radiation and absorption, 
 every dust particle obeying one law, and every vibra- 
 tion obeying another law, and every air-current obey- 
 ing still another law, this stupendous miracle comes to 
 pass. 
 
 A sunset is a revelation of God. It reveals His in- 
 finite resources. It lights up for us the idea of in- 
 finity. A sunset is one of the most transitory of all 
 creations. It is shorter lived than the flower of the 
 field. In the morning the flower grows up—in the eve- 
 ning it is cut down and withered. But a sunset grows 
 up in the evening and is cut down in the evening. Its 
 entire life covers but a few minutes. You have known 
 a child to draw a picture on a slate, and rub it out, 
 draw another and rub it out, draw still another and rub 
 it out. But he soon gets tired and lays down his slate. 
 God draws a sunset and rubs it out, draws another and 
 rubs it out, another and another and another, and rubs 
 them out. He has been doing this for thousands of 
 years, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, mil- 
 lions, ten of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of 
 years, every evening of every week of every month 
 of every year. For hundreds of millions of years a 
 sunset, and no two sunsets alike, “since the morning 
 stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for 
 joy”! I have studied sunsets for many years, and I 
 have never seen two alike. One summer I made a rec- 
 ord, day after day, of the features of every sunset, and 
 there was not a reproduction or a repetition in the 
 entire series. In the sunset you are certain to get 
 something new. A sunset is like a romance: you never 
 know how it is coming out. You may have seen five 
 
SUNSETS 65 
 
 hundred sunsets, and the way they concluded; but you 
 cannot tell what God will do with the sun this evening. 
 
 You get, also, in the sunset, a revelation of the 
 character of God’s mind. It reveals to you His intel- 
 ligence, the zesthetic element of His nature. You all, 
 doubtless, have experimented with oil paintings of the 
 impressionist school. You have gone up close to the 
 painting, and held your eye only four or five inches 
 away. What a daub it was! No proportion, no per- 
 spective, no beauty, no trace of mind, no hint of intelli- 
 gence, no indication of a lofty end, nothing but gobs of 
 paint. It seemed as though some boys might have 
 smeared the pigments on the canvas in fun, or as 
 though a dog with his tail drenched in paint might have 
 produced just such effects by wagging his tail against 
 the canvas, or as though the wind, saturated with colour 
 might, in blowing over the canvas, have deposited these 
 blotches and scabs. Certainly it gives no evidence of an 
 intelligent and rational soul. But now stand back—a 
 little farther—still farther. Ah, now! You are at the 
 right focal distance, and you see that it is a painting, it 
 is a picture, it is a landscape—a glorious landscape. 
 There is proportion, perspective, outline in it; there are 
 delicate shadings, exquisite gradations in it; and as you 
 look upon the beautiful creation, you feel you stand 
 face to face with the artist’s soul. Only intelligence, 
 skill, and a soul in love with beauty, could ever have 
 created a work like that. 
 
 Stand near to a sunset and what do you see? Ex- 
 amine it through the microscope of science and what 
 have you? Vibrations, dust, aqueous vapour, air-cur- 
 rents. That is all. It seems as though these things 
 might have been swept together by the wind, as though 
 it all might be due to a fortuitous concourse of atoms, 
 
66 NATURE, SERMONS 
 
 as though bits of matter might have fallen into a 
 meaningless hodgepodge. But wait! Stand back! 
 Farther back! Now look at it! A picture! Outlines 
 such as no artist ever sketched—cathedrals, minarets, 
 spires, ancient castles, majestic palaces, towers, domes, 
 more majestic than those of which any architect ever 
 dreamed. And colours—oh, what colours! Delicate 
 tints, exquisite hues, artistic shadings, bewitching 
 gradations, combinations of lights and shadows such 
 as never entered into the heart of man to conceive. 
 Ah, this is none other than the work of God—the work 
 of the Infinite Artist. If Moses took off his sandals 
 in the presence of a burning bush, well may we bow 
 our heads and hearts in the presence of a sky all aflame 
 with God! 
 
 Our generation needs the sunset. We need the re- 
 fining influence of its quiet, unsurpassable beauty. We 
 are growing coarse, civilization is brutalizing the heart. 
 We love the blaze and bang of things. “ Let us have 
 a good time,” says one man to another. “ What shall 
 we do?” “Let us go to Coney Island.” That would 
 be the answer given by tens of thousands of people 
 in New York. A good time is time spent amid a lot 
 of cheap attractions, the glare of lights, the blare of 
 noise, enjoying things which are of the earth earthy. 
 “Let us have a good time!” ‘ What shall we do?” 
 “Let us go to a big hotel, and have a fine dinner, | 
 where the music is like the music at a circus, and where 
 women dance all the time you eat.” The heart is be- 
 coming benumbed by the deadening influences of 
 modern life. How few people there are who can have 
 a good time by themselves: who can sit enraptured in 
 the presence of the ineffable tenderness and ethereal 
 loveliness of the sky! 
 
SUNSETS 67, 
 We need the sunset for consolation. We need to 
 be comforted. In his famous hymn, Reginald Heber 
 speaks of a country in which “ every prospect pleases 
 and only man is vile.” Yes, Nature is everywhere and 
 always beautiful. Look over a landscape from any 
 hilltop. Beautiful! Stand on the prairie and look 
 toward the horizon. Beautiful! The mountains are 
 beautiful and so are the hills. ‘The rivers are beauti- 
 ful and so are the lakes. ‘The ocean is beautiful; there 
 is one beauty in the silence of the central sea, and 
 there is another beauty near the shore where the tide 
 beats itself into spray on the rocks, and the spray 
 catches the sunbeams and holds them as if loath to 
 let them go. Look into the heavens at morning, at 
 noon, and at evening—nothing but beauty the whole 
 day long! Look again at night. The beauty has 
 changed only in this—that it has been raised to a 
 higher power. ‘‘ Every prospect pleases.” Every view 
 delights the eye. Every look rejoices the heart. 
 “Only man is vile.” It is man who breaks down 
 our faith, darkens our hope, tramples the life out of 
 our love. It is man who makes us doubt the goodness 
 of God. It would be easy to believe in God if it were 
 not for men. | 
 Let us, then, spend more time with Nature. The 
 trouble with us is that we spend too much time with 
 men. We get the daily paper between us and: the 
 setting sun. Every evening the streets are filled with 
 newsboys. Everybody wants the last edition. We 
 read it at sunset. Go into the elevated trains—every- 
 body is reading the evening edition. Go into the sub- 
 way—everybody reading. Nobody thinking of the 
 sunset, nobody thinking of God, and so we get feverish 
 and despondent and our hearts are filled with bitter 
 
68 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 feelings, all because we think too much about men. 
 Let us get God’s evening edition. He publishes an 
 extra every hour of the day, but the evening edition 
 is the best of all. It is the one which He prints in 
 purple and gold. In this one He gives us fresh as- 
 surances of His love. It would be well for all of us 
 if we read the newspapers less, and paid more atten- 
 tion to God’s last edition which He flings down to us 
 every evening from the printing presses of the sky. 
 Let us, then, come back to the idea with which we 
 started. The sunset is a word of God. He gives 
 some things to our mouth, other things He gives to our 
 ears, other things He gives to our eyes. He gives 
 music to our ears. Music is one of the languages of 
 the heart. You cannot remain in a room in which 
 music is being played without your mood being 
 affected. You may be reading, or working, or listen- 
 ing to a conversation, but underneath it all that music 
 will be speaking to your heart, and the currents of 
 your emotional life will be changed. Colour is an- 
 other language of the heart. Just as music reaches the 
 heart through the ear so does colour reach the heart 
 through the eye. It changes one’s mood. We cannot 
 remain unaltered in the presence of colour. Beauty 
 does not allow us to remain what we were. God, 
 through the colours of the western sky will bring us, 
 if we let Him, into the tranquillity and sweetness of 
 a Christlike mood. Man cannot live by bread alone, 
 but by every word which proceedeth from the mouth 
 of God, and one of His great words is the sunset. 
 “The heavens declare the glory of God: and the 
 firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day 
 uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowl- 
 edge. There is no speech nor language where 
 
SUNSETS 69 
 
 their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out 
 through all the earth, and their words to the end of 
 the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the 
 sun.” 
 
 “ Day is dying in the west; 
 Heaven is touching earth with rest ; 
 Wat and worship while the night 
 Sets her evening lamps alight 
 Through all the sky.” 
 
 “ Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts! 
 Heaven and earth are full of Thee; 
 Heaven and earth are praising Thee, 
 
 O Lord Most High!” 
 
VI 
 STORMS 
 
 | HE subject of my sermon is storms. We do 
 not know much about them from experience. 
 We are living in a part of the world in which 
 we have few storms. They come only occasionally, 
 and when they do come they are, as a rule, quite 
 small. Even the most furious of them are nothing 
 compared with the mighty storms which visit many 
 sections of our planet. If we have a storm of un- 
 usual violence we talk about it for twenty or thirty 
 years. But while our storms are infrequent and also 
 diminutive, we do not like them. Many of us are 
 offended by them. We say: “I do hope it won’t 
 storm.” After a little squall has passed we say: 
 “What a terrible storm!” We put down a storm as 
 an intruder, an interloper, a disturber of our peace, 
 an upsetter of our plans. We class it among our 
 enemies. We group it with the snakes, the brambles; 
 the briars, and other things that torment us and make 
 us afraid. It is because we do not like storms and 
 have paid so little attention to them, that it may be 
 profitable for us to think about them in the house of 
 God. 
 
 What is a storm? If you asked me to suggest a 
 definition it would be this: an extensive and violent 
 disturbance of the air. Not every disturbance is a 
 storm. Limited disturbance or a gentle disturbance 
 would not be a storm, but a breeze. It might be a 
 draught, or a zephyr. A disturbance must be both 
 Preached, May 28, 1916. 
 
 7O 
 
STORMS 71 
 
 extensive and violent in order to create what people 
 cal! a storm. A storm is always made of agitated air. 
 It may put on different suits of clothing, but when 
 you strip it, you will find nothing but air in a state 
 of disturbance. It does not matter what clothing the 
 storm puts on (and it will put on anything upon 
 which it can lay its hands). If rain-drops are 
 abundant, then it clothes itself in rain, and we call it 
 a rain-storm. If there are snowflakes at hand, then 
 it wraps itself in snow, and we call it a snow-storm. 
 If there are grains of sand present, then it dresses it- 
 self up in sand, and we call it a sand-storm. If there 
 is a great deal of electricity present then it wraps itself 
 in thunder and lightning, and we call it a thunder- 
 storm. When a storm moves out from the land upon 
 the sea, it will, in certain cases, tear a strip off the 
 ocean, and wrap that strip of the ocean around it, in 
 which case we call it a waterspout. But, in every 
 case, the storm is really agitated air. 
 
 Storms are among God’s earliest creations. There 
 were storms long before men existed on the planet. 
 They are older than the animals, the birds and the 
 fish, they are older than the grass and the trees. Ever 
 since man has been on the planet he has had to live 
 with them, and from the beginning he has been more 
 or less afraid of them. One of the reasons why man, 
 for so many centuries, dreaded the sea was because, the 
 sea was the home of fierce storms. He did not ven- 
 ture very far from the shore because of his dread of 
 meeting a storm. From the beginning man has been 
 awed by them, and the most sensitive men have been 
 most profoundly impressed by them. But there have 
 always been men who have delighted in storms. They 
 have felt in the midst of the storm a thrill which came 
 
72 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 to them at no other time. The poets from the be- 
 ginning have taken pleasure in describing the phenom- 
 ena of the storm. Some of you remember the storm 
 in The Iliad of Homer. Some of you have not for- 
 gotten the description which Virgil gives us in the 
 first book of The Aineid: | 
 
 “ South, East and West with mixed confusion roar, 
 
 And roll the foaming billows to the shore. 
 
 The cables crack; the sailors’ fearful cries 
 Ascend; and sable night involves the skies; 
 
 And heaven itself is ravished from their eyes. 
 Loud peals of thunder from the poles ensue, 
 Then fiashing fires the transient light renew: 
 The face of things a frightful image bears, 
 
 And present death in various forms appears.” 
 
 Shakespeare, again and again, makes use of storms. 
 I would suggest to the young people a very pleasant 
 way of spending a part of their vacation: Turn over 
 the pages of Shakespeare and see how the storms move 
 through his dramas. Read Julius Cesar, and see how 
 the poet prepares for the climax of the great tragedy 
 by telling you all about “a tempest dropping fire.” 
 Read Macbeth and see how wild the night was when 
 Duncan was slain. The greatest of all Shakespeare’s 
 storms is the storm in the midst of which poor, old 
 King Lear pours out the agony of his broken heart. 
 There is nothing sublimer or more awe-inspiring in all 
 Shakespeare’s tragedies than the picture of King Lear 
 in the midst of a storm. The storm of the human 
 heart is there projected against a storm of the air. 
 Byron was great in his description of storms. Read 
 his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage again, and see how 
 skillfully he can manage the lightning and thunder. 
 The Hebrew poets also tried their hand. If you want 
 
STORMS 73 
 
 a graphic description of a thunderstorm read the eight- 
 eenth Psalm. ‘The Hebrew heart was very sensitive 
 to the majesty of storms. They looked upon the winds 
 as servants of the Almighty. One of the great decla- 
 rations of Hebrew poetry is: “‘ He makes messengers 
 out of the winds,” and in the one hundred and forty- 
 eighth Psalm when the poet is calling on the different 
 parts of creation to come to church and worship the 
 Eternal, he calls upon the fire and the hail, the sun 
 and the vapour, and then he calls for the stormy wind 
 fulfilling God’s word. “ Come,” he says, ““O stormy 
 winds, and praise the name of the Lord.” 
 
 The wind has always been a symbol of mystery. 
 Our Lord talking to Nicodemus, uses the wind in that 
 way: “ You hear the sound of it,’ He said, “ but you 
 do not know where it comes from, and you do not 
 know where it is going.” Equally mysterious is this 
 spiritual experience which the soul of man must pass 
 through. It is a remarkable fact that it was not until 
 the beginning of the nineteenth century that men began 
 to study storms scientifically. Up to that time they 
 had known about them externally, they had been in- 
 spired by them or frightened by them, but it never 
 apparently occurred to anybody that it was possible to 
 understand a storm. ‘The first scientific book ever 
 printed upon winds was published in the year 1801, 
 the first year of the nineteenth century. But 
 from that day to this the study has been carried on 
 with increasing vigour and enthusiasm, so that mete- 
 orology has become one of the most fascinating of 
 all studies, and there are thousands of observers 
 scattered over the earth that are making a special 
 study of storms. Men of science have now taken the 
 storm into the laboratory, they have put it on the 
 
[ 
 
 74 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 dissecting table, they have thrown it into the crucible, 
 they are finding what it is made of, and how it is 
 possible for us to adjust our lives to it. 
 
 The whole story of the investigation reads like 
 romance. We now know where storms are born. 
 There are various cradles scattered over the ¢arth. 
 One of them, for instance, is the region west of 
 the Mississippi, another is the Gulf of St. Law- 
 rence, another is a little south of Ireland, another is 
 in the Philippines and out of these cradles one storm 
 after another proceeds. Science tells us that there 
 is a large variety of storms. ‘The variety is indicated 
 by the number of names that we use. We speak of 
 the tempest, the hurricane, the cyclone, the whirlwind, 
 the tornado, the typhoon. Every storm has its own 
 behaviour, and that behaviour is carefully noted. 
 Some storms are regular, and come at regular periods, 
 and others are irregular. Some storms move north- 
 east and others move southeast. Many storms move 
 along certain tracks just as express trains do. You 
 can tell in advance where a storm of a certain type is 
 coming out. But there are other storms which are 
 capricious. ‘They move in one direction a certain dis- 
 tance, then change the direction. They move with a 
 certain speed up to a certain point, and then their 
 speed is accelerated or it is retarded. ‘They often play 
 jokes upon the weather-bureau man. He announces, 
 with all gravity, that a storm is going to appear on a 
 certain day. It does not arrive because the storm ap- 
 parently changed its mind and turned either to the 
 north or the south. ‘The weather-bureau man says it 
 will arrive at a certain hour, but for some inexplicable 
 reason the storm hastens its speed and arrives six 
 hours ahead of time, or it seems to grow weary and 
 
STORMS 75 
 
 lags behind, arriving several hours late. A storm seems 
 to have as many dispositions and tempers as human 
 beings have. It is hard to predict anything about 
 some of them. 
 
 The causes of storms have been the subject of pro- 
 longed investigation. We are living, as you know, at 
 the bottom of a great ocean of air, which is never in 
 a state of equilibrium. Upon this air-ocean the sun 
 is always throwing down great quantities of heat. 
 This heat throws the ocean out of equilibrium. Some 
 parts of the air become heated and rise. When they 
 rise they flow toward the north. This leaves a vacuum 
 in the south. Great currents of air proceed to fill up 
 that vacuum so that the lower strata of air flow south- 
 ward and the upper strata of air flow northward. 
 All the winds would blow north and south were it 
 not for the rotation of the earth. This deflects the 
 course of the storms, and in one hemisphere they move 
 to the northeast and in the other hemisphere they move 
 to the southeast, all because the earth moves more 
 rapidly at the equator than anywhere else. So that 
 if you want to account for the behaviour of the storm 
 you must take into consideration, not only the heat, 
 but the rotation of the earth, and not only this but 
 the forces of gravity and the forces of magnetic in- 
 duction, and you must take into account numberless 
 electrical attractions and repulsions. 
 
 Thus every storm is the resultant of a great many 
 different forces that contribute to make it what it is. 
 But the most wonderful thing that science has dis- 
 covered about storms is that they are all obedient to 
 law. It was once supposed that comets were lawless 
 —that they whisked their tails in our faces whenever 
 they chose, but the astronomer has discovered that 
 
76 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 every comet is as subservient to law as the sun itself. 
 It was once supposed that storms were utterly reck- 
 less, tearing frantically across the face of the earth, 
 amenable to no sovereignty whatsoever. But it is a 
 demonstrated fact that no storm ever breaks the law. 
 Every storm is what it is and moves where it does, in 
 absolute obedience to law. And when I sit down with 
 these books that tell us about all this—about the mag- 
 netic induction and the electric attractions and re- 
 pulsions—and when I look at the diagrams that set 
 forth the nature of storms, and when I consider the 
 marvellous way in which they are generated and in 
 which they move, I cry out in the language of Paul: 
 ““O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and 
 the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his 
 judgments and his ways past finding out! 
 
 For of him, and through him, and to him, are all 
 things: to whom be glory for ever.” 
 
 A. storm is the clearest of all the revelations we 
 have of God’s power. Nowhere else in the universe 
 do we get so impressively the idea of limitless power 
 as we get it in the storm. ‘The stars do not impress 
 us with God’s power; they are quiet, scintillating points 
 of light projected on the softest of blue backgrounds. 
 When we stop to meditate about the size of them, we 
 arrive at the idea of power, but the stars themselves do — 
 not make us sensible of power. Nor do the moun- 
 tains: they are quiet, sleepy masses of granite basking 
 in the sun. If we meditate upon the way in which 
 they come up, we arrive at the idea of power, but the 
 mountains, themselves, do not indicate to the mind the 
 idea of power. Nor does the ocean—in its quiet 
 moods. It is beautiful, even sublime, because of its 
 size and its depth; but it is only when the wind 
 
STORMS 77 
 
 tramples on it and makes it mad that the ocean gives 
 us the idea of power. 
 
 The only phenomenon in the world of Nature, other 
 than wind, which gives us the conception of power is 
 the cataract. Water leaping from lofty altitudes has 
 a wonderful capacity for impressing and awing the 
 heart. Some of you know what the heart feels when 
 you stand either above or below Niagara, and some of 
 you know how wild and terrific is the leap of the 
 Yellowstone River in the canyon that bears its name. 
 But even in the presence of the greatest cataracts, the 
 idea of power is not driven so far into the soul as it 
 is by a storm. When you see great masses of water 
 falling, there is a regularity about it all, and you feel 
 that the strength is measurable, that the power can be 
 computed. But when a storm tears across the earth 
 you are face to face with power that cannot be com- 
 puted and that it is impossible to curb or restrain. 
 When the wind rushes at the rate of two hundred 
 miles an hour it strikes a feeling through the heart 
 different from that which any cataract, however great, 
 can inspire. And when the wind raises its speed to 
 three hundred or four hundred or five hundred miles 
 an hour, sweeping everything before it, we gaze upon 
 the mightiest manifestation of power ‘presented any 
 where in the heavens or on the earth. 
 
 There is nothing that the wind cannot do. The 
 proudest edifices erected by man are only cardboards 
 to it. It can pick suspension bridges from their piers 
 and toss them aside as though they were so many 
 straws. It can tear up trees by the roots or twist 
 them off many feet above the ground. There are few 
 sounds so piercing as the shriek which an oak gives 
 when the storm twists it to death. Anybody who has 
 
78 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 ever heard an oak die in a storm, has taken into his 
 soul an experience which can never be obliterated. 
 There is a strikingly significant sentence in one of the 
 Psalms: “ He breaketh in pieces the cedars of Leb- 
 anon.” ‘The Hebrew poet was impressed by many 
 wonderful things that the Almighty could do, but he 
 could conceive of nothing more amazing than this— 
 His power to break into pieces the cedars of Leb- 
 anon. 
 
 It is in the midst of the storm, therefore, that man 
 learns anew his absolute helplessness. When the sun 
 is shining, man sometimes begins to strut and thinks 
 himself a wonderful being, or vaunts himself upon the 
 solidity of the things which he can create; then a storm 
 comes and lays flat his proudest buildings and tears 
 to pieces the most solid of his creations and blows 
 away, as if they were only so much thistledown, the 
 heaviest of his possessions. ‘The wind is a great re- 
 vealer of God’s power. 
 
 The storm also presents a great problem to faith. 
 Storms are destructive, both of property and of life. 
 Storms have no pity, no mercy. Ever since the Great 
 War began many of us have been sorely distressed 
 because of the cruelty of the methods of warfare 
 pursued. The practice of drowning men, women and. 
 children in the ocean who were not combatants at all, 
 and were entirely innocent, and who had done nothing 
 whatever to deserve their fate—that has struck con- 
 sternation and agony through the heart of mankind. 
 But to the thoughtful mind that kind of a problem 
 is always on hand; that sort of a tragedy has been 
 perpetuated through all the centuries of human his- 
 tory. The winds are God’s messengers, says the 
 Psalmist. Well, if they are they do amazing things! 
 
STORMS 79 
 
 They make no distinction: they sweep into eternity 
 men, women and children, the innocent along with the 
 guilty. They have sent to the bottom of the sea 
 thousands of men and hundreds of billions of dollars’ 
 worth of property. They have swept across the land 
 and crushed to death human beings by the tens of 
 thousands. They have destroyed man’s crops, blown 
 his home into fragments, killed his wife and his chil- 
 dren. You would suppose that the winds were mes- 
 sengers of a fiend. 
 
 If you want to read some of the most appalling 
 pages in the history of the world, then read the his- 
 tory of a dozen of the world’s great storms. Read 
 the account, some time, of the two great storms in the 
 month of August in 1780 that swept over the West 
 Indies, two of the most frightful visitations that this 
 earth has ever known. Scores killed in one place, two 
 hundred, three hundred, six hundred in another, in 
 one place fourteen hundred invalids and wounded 
 persons crushed to death. Thousands of buildings 
 levelled to the earth, the labour of generations 
 wiped completely out. Or, read about that terrific 
 storm of October 31, 1876, which sent a tidal 
 wave from ten to forty-five feet deep into the mouth 
 of the Ganges, drowning a hundred thousand human 
 beings. Or, read the account of the great tornado that 
 tore its way through the City of St. Louis, May 27, 
 1896, destroying thirteen million dollars’ worth of 
 property ina few minutes. Many of us still remember 
 distinctly the consternation in the national heart 
 caused by the terrific storm which overwhelmed Gal- 
 veston in 1900. There had been many a storm that 
 had crossed the Gulf of Mexico but never a storm 
 just like that one. For some unaccountable reason that 
 
80 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 storm made at once for the City of Galveston, and its 
 people were helpless in its awful embrace. 
 
 Is it true that God makes His winds messengers? 
 What are we to say about these storms? Certainly 
 man has nothing to do with them. Man is responsible 
 for much, but he is not responsible for storms. If 
 there be any God at all, they would seem to be His. 
 He must be responsible for their conduct, He must 
 be held accountable for what they do. And what have 
 they done? They have worked devastation and ruin 
 for thousands of years. It is hard to understand why 
 God should permit thousands of tons of food to go 
 to the bottom of the Atlantic when so many of His 
 children are starving on land. That is a problem that 
 storms present—why should God permit His mes- 
 sengers to send incalculable treasures to the bottom of 
 the sea when men are so poor on the land? 
 
 It is only when we sit down with a problem like 
 this that we begin to understand the need and the 
 value of faith. The Bible is all the time reminding 
 us that we must walk by faith and not by sight. We 
 do not always understand just what that means. A 
 storm helps us to understand it. Is there a God who 
 created the universe and who rules it? ‘There is evi- 
 dence that there is, and there is also evidence there is 
 not. Does He take interest in man, or is. He abso- 
 lutely indifferent? ‘There is evidence that He is 
 interested, there is also evidence that He is not. 
 Is He a good God, or is He a malicious God? Does 
 He take delight in blessing men, or does He take 
 delight in torturing them and killing them? There is 
 evidence that He is good, there is also evidence that 
 He is a demon. The way is open, and you must 
 choose. 
 
STORMS 81 
 
 In mathematics, we are coerced to a conclusion. 
 If you put two and two together, you have four. You 
 cannot have any other result. If you throw a:stone 
 into the air it falls—you are compelled to admit it. 
 If you put your hand in the fire it burns, there is no 
 denying it. But in the realm of religious truth it is 
 always possible for you to deny. You must walk by 
 faith, it is impossible to walk by sight. The existence 
 of storms makes this abundantly clear. The poet says 
 in one of our hymns: 
 
 “ Dark is His path on the wings of the storm.” 
 
 Yes, His path is indeed dark and nowhere is it so 
 dark as on the wings of the storm, If we listen to 
 the storm we must walk by faith and not expect to walk 
 by sight. : 
 
 This shows us why it was necessary that Jesus 
 should come. Nature is not sufficient to show us 
 God’s heart. For reasons which we do not under- 
 stand, the operations of Nature are such that the Eter- 
 nal Pity cannot be clearly revealed through them. We 
 need a more complete revelation—-we need Jesus 
 Christ. Before He comes, the scales are almost evenly 
 balanced. There are reasons for believing and there 
 are reasons for doubting. He comes, and He inclines 
 the scales toward God. He comes up out of this uni- 
 verse of mystery and darkness, and is so beautiful 
 and gentle and loving and sweet, that in spite of the 
 storms we feel ourselves justified in believing in the 
 goodness of God. 
 
 What, then, is the supreme lesson which we are to 
 get from the heart of the storm? It is the old, old 
 lesson which Job received centuries ago. You will re- 
 
82 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 member that at the end of that wonderful poem we 
 are told that God spoke to Job at last out of the whirl- 
 wind, and this is what He said: “ Look at the mys- 
 teries of the natural world. Can you understand this? 
 Can you understand that? Can you understand this 
 other? Of course not. Well, if you cannot under- 
 stand the mysteries of the physical creation, why 
 should you be surprised that you cannot understand 
 the mysteries of the spiritual universe?” It was in 
 the cyclone, in the power of it and the behaviour of 
 it that Job found the mysteriousness of the universe 
 reaching its climax, and when he thought about his 
 absolute incompetency to deal with the mysteries 
 around him, he said: “I have been talking about 
 things which are too wonderful for me, I have been 
 trying to explain things which I cannot understand. 
 I have got a new revelation of God. I had heard of 
 Him by the hearing of the ear, but now I have a new 
 revelation of Him, and therefore I abhor myself and 
 repent in dust and ashes.” 
 
Vil 
 SHADOWS 
 
 N this sermon I want to think with you about 
 
 | shadows. I like to take something that is familiar 
 
 and common, something which you have at your 
 
 door and which it is not necessary for you to travel 
 half-way round the world to find. 
 
 Shadows are the most ethereal and insubstantial of 
 all the phenomena we have thus far studied. ‘There is 
 nothing so light and so thin and so bodiless as a 
 shadow. You cannot pick one up with the fingers of 
 your hand. If you pick it up at all, it must be with 
 the fingers of your mind. A shadow weighs nothing. 
 You throw it on the scales, but you cannot weigh it— 
 it has no weight. I have often wondered what a kitten 
 thinks when, for the first time, it pounces down upon 
 a shadow thinking that it is going to catch something, 
 and suddenly discovers that there is something in this 
 world into which a kitten cannot get its claws! 
 
 And so a shadow has become a metaphor, and has 
 a fixed place in our English speech. We have many 
 words expressive of that which is infinitesimally small, 
 but when we push language to the limit, we use the 
 word shadow. A mother says to her little boy: “ You 
 had not a shadow of an excuse for doing that.” She 
 might have said: “‘ You had not an atom of an excuse, 
 or a splinter, or an iota, or a scintilla, or a trace of an 
 excuse.” But if the mother wishes to say the strongest 
 thing that it is possible to say, she uses the word 
 “ shadow.” When we have not the shadow of an 
 
 Preached, May 27, 1917. 
 83 
 
84. NATURE SERMONS 
 
 excuse we have no excuse at all. When you push 
 human thought to the vanishing point, then you fall 
 back on the word “ shadow.” 
 
 Not only is a shadow ethereal and insubstantial, but 
 it ts also evanescent. It is constantly changing. It 
 lives for a little time and then passes away. You look 
 at it and turn your head away, in a moment you look 
 at it again, and it is changed; it is longer or shorter, 
 it is thicker or more slender. A shadow cannot pos- 
 sibly remain an hour the same. A shadow 1s as 
 changeable and as fidgety as a little child. You look 
 at a shadow and go away for a season, and when you 
 come back it is gone. That shadow will not come back 
 again. It has gone for ever. A shadow is not only 
 empty but it is also fleeting. Shakespeare understood 
 the weight and worth of English words as probably 
 no other man has ever understood them. When he 
 uses a word for the expression of a certain thought 
 we may be sure that it is the best word that can be 
 chosen. ‘There is a fine and faultless fidelity in his 
 choice of words. When it dawns upon Macbeth that 
 life is empty and also transitory, what is the first word 
 which Shakespeare puts into his mouth? “ Life’s 
 but a walking shadow.” ‘That tells the whole sad 
 story. Shakespeare goes on according to his fashion | 
 piling word on word in order to deepen the impression, 
 but when he comes to the end of the sentence he can 
 say only this: “signifying nothing.” All had been 
 told in the word with which he started. 
 
 Now shadows are the children of God. They are 
 His creation, they are foreordained by Him. You 
 cannot conceive of a universe like this without shadows 
 in it. There cannot be a universe with the sun and 
 moon and stars, and the planet revolving on its axis, 
 
SHADOWS 85 
 
 and moving beings on the surface of the planet, with- 
 out shadows. ‘The Eternal planned a universe with 
 shadows init. He said: “ Let there be shadows,” and 
 shadows there were. When He looked upon the com- 
 pleted universe the writer of the first book of the Bible 
 says: ‘God saw that it was good.” ‘This means that 
 He saw that the shadows were good, they enhanced the 
 beauty of it all. And all these shadows are obedient 
 to God’s eternal law. There has never been a dis- 
 obedient shadow since the world began. All of them 
 have been obedient to the God who created them. 
 
 I love to look through books which I have no time 
 to read. Life is too short to read many books, but 
 there are many books which are worth looking 
 through. I am especially fond of books dealing with 
 mathematics. I love to look at pages of formulas, 
 great masses of stuff which I have not wit enough 
 to understand. But simply looking at it does me good. 
 It makes me feel proud to know that I belong to a 
 race which is capable of doing such wondrous things. 
 And one of the books through which I love to look 
 is a book on shades and shadows. ‘That is the sort 
 of book that an architect loves and an artist ponders. 
 In these books I find that shadows can be computed. 
 Under certain conditions shadows will be of a cer- 
 tain length and a certain breadth and a certain colour. 
 It is possible for the whole problem to be worked ‘out 
 by applying the principles of geometry. Every 
 shadow is cast according to law. If you could pick up 
 a shadow from the street and carry it into a labora- 
 tory, you would find that it would not vary a hair’s 
 breadth from what it ought to be. 
 
 In this respect, all shadows are alike. We talk a 
 good deal, in these days, about internationalism. 
 
86 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 There is an internationalism of shadows. All the 
 shadows of the world constitute one great brother- 
 hood. God has made of one all the shadows of the 
 earth. The shadows in Asia are like the shadows in 
 Africa, and like the shadows in Europe, and like the 
 shadows of both the Americas, and like the shadows 
 of Australia, and like the shadows of all the islands of 
 the sea. All the shadows, in every land, are obedient 
 to the same laws, and these laws are the laws of the 
 Eternal. 
 
 Here is a wonderfully interesting fact if you stop 
 to ponder it—that in all the thousands of shadows that 
 play in our New York streets, not one of them is 
 disobedient to the law of God. These shadows are 
 children of the Most High. They play every day in 
 our crowded streets. The automobiles run over them, 
 but they do not cry. ‘They are as deathless as the 
 Eternal, and every one is absolutely obedient to the 
 regulations of the King of heaven. Look down Fifth 
 Avenue, some day, at the proper time, and notice the 
 thousands of shadows. Every lamp-post, every pole, 
 every house, every policeman, every moving pedes- 
 trian, every carriage, every automobile, every horse, 
 casts a shadow. What a wonderful thing that law is 
 over all! The rainbow is according to law, and so is 
 the Milky Way, and so is the shadow of the little girl 
 playing on Fifth Avenue. 
 
 I was riding down one of our avenues the other 
 afternoon with a friend, in his automobile, and [| 
 suspect that he did not notice a single one of the 
 many shadows over which he passed. I was looking 
 at them all the way. I noticed them because this ser- 
 mon was in my mind, and the sermon in my mind 
 made my eye keen to observe shadows. ‘That is one 
 
SHADOWS 87 
 
 of the purposes of a Nature sermon: it makes one’s 
 eyes keen to things that would otherwise pass un- 
 noticed. All this summer through, not a person 
 reading this sermon will fail to notice more than once 
 the play and beauty of the shadows. A Nature 
 sermon adds a province to the great kingdom of our 
 observation. 
 
 Since shadows, then, are the children of the Most 
 High God, they are also His obedient servants. They 
 fulfill His will, they do the thing for which they have 
 been created. I have been looking through The Psalm 
 Book during the last week, and I am convinced that it 
 is defective. The Psalm Book has no proper appre- 
 ciation of the ministry of shadows. The Hebrew poets 
 are very sensitive to the beauty of many of the forces 
 of Nature, and when they call upon the universe to 
 worship God they name thunder and lightning and hail 
 and sleet, snow, stormy wind, hills and mountains, 
 trees and seas, sun and moon and stars, but there is 
 no Hebrew poet so far as I can now remember who 
 ever called upon the shadows to come into the Temple 
 and lift voices of praise to the King of heaven. The 
 Hebrew poet was impressed by the fact that the winds 
 could be God’s messengers, but he did not reach the 
 point at which it was possible for him to see that the 
 Divine Will can also be fulfilled by shadows. It will 
 be worth our while to think of at least three of the 
 ways in which shadows fulfill the will of God. 
 
 In the first place they enhance the beauty of the 
 world. What would a picture be without shadows? 
 Take the shadows out of any picture, and the picture 
 is for ever spoiled. ‘Take the shadows out of a land- 
 scape and it is flat and insipid. Why is it that noon is 
 the least interesting of any portion of the day? Prose 
 
88 NATURE SERMONS / 
 
 writers may talk of noon, but poets hardly ever/do. 
 There is nothing poetic in the noon. The poets sing 
 of the morning and the evening, and the reason they 
 sing of. morning and evening is because the mornings 
 and evenings are beautiful; and the reason mornings 
 and evenings are beautiful is because mornings and 
 evenings are the times of shadows. The day grows 
 increasingly beautiful as it approaches its end. Life 
 becomes increasingly rich as it draws to its close, and 
 it is largely because the shadows are lengthening. As 
 night comes on, the shadows become richer and more 
 purple, and something passes into our soul which the 
 noon cannot give. It is in the evening hours, before 
 night comes, that the heart becomes more mellow and 
 tender, and the angels of our better nature come out 
 and sing. 
 
 Who does not love the twilight? Who does not love 
 the deepening dusk? We speak sometimes of the 
 gloaming. We love the gloaming because of the rich- 
 ness of the shadows. I have many times gone to Bos- 
 ton from New York on a morning train, and the jour- 
 ney is an interesting one because it carries one through 
 the middle of the day. I am always impressed by the 
 beauty of the country. But when I start for Boston 
 at four or five in the afternoon of some lovely day 
 in June, the whole country looks like fairyland because 
 of the play of the shadows. There are shadows lying 
 across all the streams, there are shadows on the surface 
 of all the lakes. Every little pond throws a picture 
 into your eye as you pass. The only perfect time to 
 travel is during the hours immediately before the night 
 falls. When the shadows are all around you, you feel 
 that you are in a land of enchantment. 
 
 I had a friend, once, who was very sensitive to 
 
SHADOWS 89 
 
 beauty. He was one of the most delicately organized 
 men that it has ever been my fortune to meet. Like 
 many another high-strung man it was difficult some- 
 times for him to sleep, and so in order to quiet him- 
 self it was his custom to walk up and down the avenue 
 on which he lived, lined with great trees, and to study 
 the shadows on the pavement. The moon has a won- 
 derful fashion of turning pavements into silver and of 
 using leaves as so many patterns with which to em- 
 broider beautiful figures on the silver. And my friend 
 would walk up and down that avenue by the hour, 
 feasting his soul on the beauty of the shadows in the 
 street. And when he used to talk to me about this 
 feast of beauty I felt ashamed, for I had walked that 
 same avenue many times and had never noticed a soli- 
 tary shadow. In the presence of a man like that I 
 felt as much beneath him as I feel that my dog is be- 
 neath me. If it had not been for that man, the chances 
 are I should never have preached this sermon on 
 shadows. 
 
 But shadows do more than simply minister to the 
 esthetic part of our nature. They are genuinely use- 
 ful. Long before man had mechanical ingenuity 
 enough to fashion a clock or a watch, somebody had 
 wit enough to make use of a shadow by means of 
 which to tell the time of day. Nobody knows when 
 the sundial was invented, but we can trace it back 
 through many centuries. Before the days of clocks 
 and watches men could tell how the hours were going 
 simply by watching the passing of the shadow round 
 the dial. It is said that even to the present time, 
 travellers in the Arabian desert who are not the owners 
 of watches, find out what time of day it is by the length 
 of the shadow they cast upon the sand. It is neces- 
 
90 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 sary for the pious Mohammedan to pray at certain 
 times each day, and instead of consulting a watch he 
 stands up against the sun and by the length of the 
 shadow which he casts upon the sand he fae out 
 when the time of prayer has come. © 
 
 One of the most useful of all the shadows is the 
 shadow of the moon. When the shadow of the moon 
 falls upon the earth we call it an eclipse. There was 
 a time when an eclipse of the sun was one of the 
 most terrifying of all phenomena. Men cried out in 
 consternation when it came. ‘They were in an agony 
 while it lasted. Not understanding the cause of it 
 they assumed it must be the creation of some deity 
 who was angry, so they quaked and shuddered as long 
 as the shadow lay across the land. But by and by, 
 the astronomers discovered the cause of the eclipse, 
 and now it is counted one of the greatest blessings of 
 which astronomers know. The eclipse of the sun is 
 looked forward to with happy anticipation, and prepa- 
 rations are made months in advance in order to get the 
 full advantage of it. Men are willing to travel half- 
 way round the earth in order to get into advantageous 
 positions so as to study the sun and the moon when 
 the shadow falls. Many things about the sun we have 
 learned because of this shadow, and many things about _ 
 the moon, and also many things about the earth, which 
 would have remained unknown probably for ever, if 
 God had not ordained that now and then the moon’s 
 shadow should fall upon the earth. And so you might 
 say that an eclipse is a great black bag full of secrets. 
 Science has untied the string by which the mouth of 
 the bag was closed, and has poured out the secrets be- 
 fore our eyes, so that we now know things about the 
 sun and earth and moon of which the ancients never 
 
SHADOWS “OL 
 
 dreamed. All this knowledge came to us through a 
 shadow. 
 
 Shadows are also fountains of refreshment. When 
 man is hot and weary, he can cool his fevered brow 
 by bathing in a shadow. Probably the greatest orator 
 Israel ever produced was Isaiah. His literary style is 
 stiff as cloth of gold; he is full of wondrous images, 
 but not one of his images is more beautiful than this: 
 “As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” He 
 is describing the Messiah, the long-looked-for man 
 who is to bring rélief to the weary world. In the 
 Orient, they appreciate shadows as we do not do here. 
 In Palestine, the sky is often without a cloud, and the 
 sun beats down with pitiless intensity. In many parts 
 of the land there are no trees and therefore no shelter 
 from the sun at noon. In those regions the only shelter 
 obtainable is that from a great boulder in the field. 
 The weary traveller who has trudged along the dusty 
 road, hour after hour, sees the boulder in the distance, 
 and the very sight of it brings new courage to his 
 heart. When at last he arrives at it, he throws him- 
 self down in its refreshing shadow, and out of that 
 shadow receives strength sufficient to carry him to his 
 journey’s end. That is the picture that was in Isaiah’s 
 mind when looking down the years he saw the Mes- 
 siah. He was to be like “ the shadow of a great rock 
 in a weary land.” 
 
 Man is travelling across a desert, and the desert 
 is sometimes blazing hot. Mankind is always on 
 the point of withering, wilting, fainting because 
 of the intensity of the heat of the day, and the 
 Hebrew prophet thinking of the refreshment which 
 the Messiah was going to bring, could think of no 
 lovelier and more restful image than this: He shall be 
 
92 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 “as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” 
 There is a shadow which all of us are in love with— 
 that is the shadow cast by the earth. Night is but a 
 shadow, and at the end of every day, we creep round 
 and throw ourselves down in this shadow and go to 
 sleep. God takes the blanket of the night—and what 
 is the blanket of the night but a shadow?—and this 
 our heavenly Father spreads out over us and tucks 
 it carefully in round us, and says to us, “ Now, you 
 may go to sleep.” God giveth His beloved sleep, but 
 we could not sleep so well were it not that He covers 
 us with a shadow. 
 
 And if the shadow of night is our friend, we have 
 a right to believe that the shadow of death is our 
 friend. When the Hebrew poet thought of death it 
 did not affright him. He knew it was only a shadow, 
 and a shadow with refreshment in it. “Though I 
 walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I 
 will fear no evil,” because the same God that is 
 over us through the night will be with us in the midst 
 of death. After we pass into that shadow we shall 
 be refreshed. 
 
 Why do we have shadows? It is solely because of 
 the existence of light. If there were no light there 
 could be no shadows. The more light the more 
 shadows. ‘The intenser the light the deeper the — 
 shadows. One of the reasons why the Grand Canyon 
 in Colorado is so indescribably beautiful is because of 
 the richness of the shadows, and the richness of the 
 shadows is due to the extraordinary luminosity of the 
 heavens above the canyon. In that marvellous at- 
 mosphere the sun has a.potency which he does not 
 have in our sky, and the wonders he works far sur- 
 pass any of the wonders which we know. Not a little 
 
SHADOWS 93, 
 
 of the indescribable loveliness of the canyon is due 
 to the richness of the many-coloured shadows with 
 which it is filled. 
 
 It was once my fortune to be in the city of Athens 
 in the month of August. Athens, as you know, is a 
 city of white. The Athens sky is often without a 
 cloud, the sunlight flooding the streets of the white 
 city producing a glare which almost dazzles the eyes. 
 I was profoundly impressed, not only by the sunlight, 
 but by the intensity of the shadows. There is a shadow 
 which now lies across the world. It is a shadow cast 
 by the late war. War is nothing new in this world. 
 There has been war, so far as we know, from the 
 beginning. But never has war cast a shadow com- 
 parable in blackness with the shadow which now lies 
 on mankind. ‘There have been military generals in 
 all centuries—a thousand red-handed butchers have 
 caused the earth to run red with blood, but never 
 before has the world been under a shadow so deep 
 and so awful as the shadow which oppresses human 
 hearts to-day. How can you account for that? The 
 only explanation is because of the intensity of the light. 
 There is more of the light of the God of love that 
 shines in the face of Jesus Christ than there has ever 
 been in this world before. And it is because of the 
 intensity of that light that we have the awful black- 
 ness of the shadow. ‘The Indians once inhabited the 
 land which is now ours. They were always fight- 
 ing, but their wars cast no shadow because America 
 in those days was dark. It is only because of the 
 light that falls on us from the face of God’s only 
 begotten Son that war casts a shadow which lies like 
 a beam of night across the tortured heart of the world. 
 
 And so there are two kinds of shadows: a shadow 
 
94 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 that refreshes and a shadow that oppresses, a shadow 
 that enlivens and a shadow that deadens. Simon 
 Peter cast a shadow that healed. ‘That is a won- 
 derfully interesting incident recorded in the fifth 
 chapter of the book of The Acts, where we are told 
 that people having invalids in their homes brought them 
 out and laid them on beds and couches along the 
 streets through which Peter was to pass, hoping that 
 his shadow might overshadow them. Simon Peter 
 stood between Jesus Christ and the world. The man 
 who stands with the light of Christ on him will cast 
 a shadow that has healing in it. You and I, if our 
 attitude to the Eternal be right, will cast a shadow that 
 will bring health and strength to all on whom it falls. 
 I hope that this sermon may be a sermon casting a 
 shadow (like that of Peter’s) on you wherever you 
 go, and that out of its shadow you may derive health 
 and strength and peace. 
 
Vill 
 SOUNDS 
 
 N this sermon we take a new departure. I in- 
 | vite you to come with me into the world of the 
 ear. Our theme is “ Sounds.” 
 
 I should like at the start to divide sounds into two 
 classes—noises and tones. A noise is usually loud, 
 disagreeable and meaningless. A tone is a modulated 
 sound, and it expresses something. I wonder if it 
 would be correct to say that there are no noises in 
 Nature. Nature has only tones, while noises are con- 
 fined to the human world. For instance, the murmur 
 of a brook is a tone, one of the most soothing and 
 delicate of sounds, a dainty and exquisite form of 
 music. ‘There is no sound at all like it in a city. 
 Compare the tone of a brook with the clatter and 
 racket of an elevated train. The latter is noise. Or, 
 compare the breaking of crockery with the breaking 
 of waves. The first is discordant and disagreeable, 
 whereas the latter is soft and brings pleasure to the 
 heart. When a wave slips up on the sand and breaks 
 there, it gives forth a sound which the ear loves. Or, 
 compare the whispering of leaves with the uproar of 
 a machine-shop. ‘The clank of the machinery deafens 
 us and makes us want to get away, but there is no 
 sound more agreeable than the sound which the wind 
 makes in the tops of the trees. Nature produces tones 
 —the human world creates noises. 
 
 You are probably thinking of an exception. You 
 think of thunder, and you say: “‘ That is noise.” I 
 wonder if itis? Itis loud, but is it disagreeable? It 
 
 Preached, May 26, 1918. 
 95 
 
96 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 is disagreeable to many of us because it is associated 
 with lightning. We are afraid of lightning, and that 
 makes us dislike thunder. But if we could have 
 thunder separated from lightning, I believe we should 
 love it. It would be like a deep. bass tone of an 
 organ—it would be the rumble of the chariot wheels of 
 God along the highways of the skies. 
 
 And so men find themselves exclaiming: “ Oh, that 
 I could get out into the fields!” Why? Because of 
 the beauty there? Not entirely, but also because of 
 the quiet. We love the fields because there are no 
 noises there. “ Oh, that I could plunge into the woods 
 and stay there a whole week!” Why into the woods? 
 Because they are fragrant? ‘That is only one rea- 
 son. ‘There is a deeper reason. We love the woods 
 because of their delicious quiet. ‘There are no noises 
 in the woods. “Oh, that I could get down by the 
 sea! Give me a cottage by the sea, with the windows 
 all open day and night!” But it is noisy by the sea! 
 No it is not. ‘The sea roars. Yes, it roars, but its 
 roar is not the roar of the street. Byron was right 
 when he said: “There is music in its roar.” The 
 voice of the ocean is soft. There are no jagged edges. 
 It is huge, but it is velvety. You can lie down and 
 go to sleep with the huge voice of the ocean lying in 
 each ear. 3 | 
 
 Nature is never silent. She cannot be silent, be- 
 cause she is so intensely alive. She is always doing 
 something. She is always saying something. There 
 is no such thing as silence on the face of the earth. In 
 the book of. The Revelation John says that “ there 
 was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour.” 
 No such half an hour was ever known on earth. 
 There are always voices in the ear. I never knew what 
 
SOUNDS 97 
 
 silence is until, one day, 1 went into the Mammoth 
 Cave of Kentucky. ‘The guide left me for a minute 
 or two and I had a chance to listen to the silence. I 
 had never heard it before. At first it was wonderful, 
 then it grew to be terrible, and then it became horrible, 
 unendurable. I do not believe a man could live long 
 in absolute silence without going insane. 
 
 We are not created for silence. We live in a uni- 
 verse which is always saying something. We live, 
 and move, and have our being in an ocean of sounds. 
 We hear only an infinitesimal fraction of them all. 
 We say, of some people, that they are hard of hear- . 
 ing. We are all hard of hearing. Not one of us 
 hears a fraction of what is going on. Our senses are 
 dull. Even the eye is stupid. It cannot see a million 
 beauties which lie all around it. We see only a few 
 colours. The eye can catch light vibrations up to 
 seven hundred and twenty-seven trillions a second, but 
 beyond that it is impotent. We can see violet, but all 
 the colours above violet are beyond us. Millions of 
 colours are hidden from us. If we could come back 
 sometime with new eyes, we would not recognize the 
 old earth. It would be a billion times more beautiful 
 than we had ever dreamed. All that we see is only 
 a tiny island in a measureless ocean. ‘The ear is still 
 duller than the eye. It is exceedingly clumsy. As 
 soon as a sound passes twenty thousand vibrations a 
 second, the ear begins to balk. At twenty-five thou- 
 sand vibrations per second, most ears are out of com- 
 mission, and at thirty thousand per second, the ear 
 is completely undone. ‘There are millions of sounds 
 which the ear never reports to the mind. It cannot. 
 The truth is, we are almost deaf. All that we hear, 
 is as a small island, in the midst of a measureless sea. 
 
98 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Our civilization does not help us. Our education 
 does not carry us forward. Progress seems to 
 atrophy the ear. We do not hear so well as bar- 
 barians—not nearly so well as savages. The Indians 
 who lived here when Henry Hudson called on them 
 had ears far keener than ours. We are not even the 
 equals of the animals. We speak of the inferior 
 creatures. How they must laugh at us! ‘They can 
 see things we cannot see, and hear things we cannot 
 hear. Walk through the woods with a dog, and you 
 are at once aware of your limitations. He is alive to 
 things of which you know nothing. As compared 
 with you, he is, in certain points, a superior creature. 
 Many of us make ourselves worse than we need to be. 
 We do not cultivate our ears. Like all other senses, 
 the sense of hearing can be wonderfully improved. 
 We lose more than we know through our sins of 
 omission. We do not cultivate the auditory nerve. 
 We rob ourselves of pleasure which God intended us 
 to have. ‘I'wo men take a stroll through the woods. 
 One hears nothing but the crows. They are the end 
 men of Nature’s minstrel-troop. Their coarse jokes 
 can be appreciated even by the dullest intelligence. 
 But the man by his side can hear, not only the crow, 
 but also the thrush, and the cedar bird, and also the 
 thousands of twitterings and chirpings and gurglings 
 and purlings and murmurings and ripplings and 
 tinklings on which, as on an ocean, the whole creation 
 seems to float. Sounds are arranged in Strata. 
 There are some sounds as big as cobblestones. When 
 they strike the ear-drum, we know that they exist. 
 Under these there are sounds much sweeter, no larger 
 than little pebbles. And under these there are 
 sounds sweeter still, sounds which may be com- 
 
SOUNDS 99 
 
 pared to tiny shells, and underneath these there 
 are what ought to be called microscopic sounds, in- 
 finitesimal particles, the dust, as it were, of sound. 
 Blest is the man who in Springtime can catch up at 
 least a few of the musical vibrations which lie at the 
 basis of the world! 
 
 The sounds of Nature would deafen us if they were 
 not so soft. Lear in speaking of Cordelia said, “ Her 
 voice was ever soft, gentle and low.” We may call 
 Nature, God’s Cordelia, and Humanity is His Goneril. 
 The voice of Goneril is shrill and rasping. Cordelia’s 
 voice is ever low and sweet. The worst feature of a 
 great city is its noise. Noise is an enemy of life, 
 and it is amazing that so little has been done as yet 
 to conquer it. We have subdued a thousand enemies, 
 but this furious foe still lords it over us. You can 
 measure the civilization of a city by the noises it 
 submits to. My professor in philosophy used to deny 
 that man is a rational creature. In our self-com- 
 placent moods we like to think he is, and we pride 
 ourselves on our use of the reason. But my professor 
 did not relish such optimism. He claimed that man 
 is not yet a rational creature. He is a candidate for 
 rationality. He may become rational if he works and 
 grows, but he is not rational yet. 
 
 I have sometimes wondered if we have not gone'too 
 far in claiming to be civilized. Is not that word too 
 ambitious, too pretentious? Certainly we are not 
 civilized yet—if you give the word any worthy signif- 
 icance. If we were really civilized, we should never 
 submit to half the noises by which we are afflicted in 
 this city. No city that is truly civilized would allow 
 an elevated railroad to run through it. To compel 
 women and children to sleep along the line of such a 
 
100 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 road is an atrocity. <A civilized community would not 
 permit it. If we were civilized, the orchestras in half 
 the hotels and restaurants of this city would be sent 
 to the Tombs as disturbers of the peace. If we were 
 civilized, these loud-mouthed hucksters who scream the 
 prices of strawberries and turnips, would all be sent - 
 to Sing Sing. And if our civilization were more than 
 skin-deep, these noisy villains who shout out “‘ extras ” 
 with nothing in them at ten o'clock at night, would 
 have been incarcerated long ago. The noises which 
 we permit prove that we are yet in the lower stages of 
 barbarism. When the world becomes civilized, the 
 cities will be quiet. The cities will sit at the feet of 
 Nature and learn of her. 
 
 The sounds of Nature are soft, gentle and low. The 
 voice of water is a gentle voice. Water never stands 
 still if it can help it. It wants to run in order that it 
 may make music. A brook is always vocal. ‘The 
 poets say that a brook sings, and the poets are right. 
 A brook laughs when its feet are tickled by the im- 
 pertinent pebbles. When water gets a chance it falls. 
 A. waterfall gives forth a refreshing sound. When 
 you find, somewhere in the woods, a little waterfall, 
 you want to sit down by the side of it and listen to 
 its music. There is something in the sound of falling — 
 water which banishes care and brings refreshment to 
 the soul. Even a gigantic waterfall is restful. 
 Niagara’s voice is soft. Billions of drops of water 
 roll their tiny voices into one huge sound, but the 
 sound retains its softness. ‘The mighty cataract wraps 
 you up as ina blanket. There are no rough edges, no 
 ragged ends, nothing to scratch or cut or lacerate. 
 There is soothing in the roar of Niagara. Rain is 
 one form of falling water, and different rains have 
 
SOUNDS 101 
 
 different voices. Rain upon the roof gives forth one 
 sort of music, and rain upon a lake gives forth a 
 music that is different. And rain upon the grass 
 produces a music which is different still. 
 
 One night, last summer, I heard something in the 
 grass outside my bedroom window, and I said: “‘ Who 
 is there?”’ At once the reply came back: “It is the 
 rain. I am just watering the grass,’ and I said: 
 “Oh!” and then went to sleep. In the morning I 
 began to think of what happened the night before. I 
 thought of the humility of the rain, and its unostenta- 
 tious way of doing things. If aman wants to water 
 a few square yards of lawn, he gets a hose and squirts 
 and squirts, and makes a fearful ado over his little 
 job, ending, at last, both wet and tired. But the rain 
 will take a township or a county, or an entire com- 
 monwealth, watering thousands of acres of grass, and 
 do it easily and quietly, saying softly: “I am just 
 watering the grass.” It is the softness of it all which 
 is surprising. Nature is so gentle. She runs about 
 in velvet slippers as though she were a nurse in a 
 hospital, and one can almost hear her saying: “ Poor 
 people, I know you are tired and sick—all worn out 
 by the fearful noises of the city—and it is because I 
 know how sick you are that I make just as little noise 
 as possible!” , 
 
 The wind is no less musical than the rain. The 
 wind is the big boy of Nature. The wind is never 
 still, and the wind is always bent on having a good 
 time. The wind loves to play with everything that 
 it passes. It is especially fond of trees. To the wind 
 a tree is a big toy, and the wind loves to convert a 
 tree intoaharp. ‘The leaves are the strings, and from 
 these the wind strikes forth music. It plays with 
 
102 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 every sort of tree. Some one has suggested that if 
 our ears were only cultivated we could distinguish the 
 different tones produced by different trees. We could 
 tell the tone of an oak from an ash, and the ash from 
 the beech, and the beech from the birch, and the birch 
 from the elm. ‘The wind loves them all, and plays on 
 them all, and which one of them does he like best? 
 I wonder! All the tones are soft, and to lie in one’s 
 bed, at night, and listen to the wind in the trees is a 
 joy. 
 
 When we enter the world of animate things, the 
 variety of the sounds increases. ‘There is a vast world 
 of insects, and another vast world of birds, and in all 
 of these worlds streams of sound are perpetually 
 flowing. Spring is especially vocal. I wonder why 
 Spring is the favourite month with a majority of 
 people? Is it not because it is so rich in sounds? 
 Nature seems bursting with life, and she has more to 
 tell you than she can possibly express. A thousand 
 sounds float through the fields and the woods, and 
 many of them come from baby forms of life. Living 
 things by the million are there in their cradles, and 
 those numberless and scarcely audible melodies and 
 harmonious warblings and whisperings are the cooings 
 of the babies in the great Nature nursery. It is these 
 immeasurable and indescribably sweet cooings which 
 find the corpuscles of our blood and set them all 
 dancing. 
 
 The most musical parts of the day are morning and 
 evening. No one can afford to sleep late in the 
 country in the summer time. Every June, when I go 
 to New Hampshire, Summer meets me at the station 
 and says: “ Poor man, I see you are all cut and bleed- 
 ing. The jagged noises of the city have left you in 
 
SOUNDS 103 
 
 a deplorable condition, and I am going now to wrap 
 you in a blanket of bird-notes, and every morning and 
 every evening I am going to apply to your ear-drums 
 a poultice of beautiful pulverized sounds, and I think 
 in a short time you will be completely well again.” 
 How I love the morning! What an orchestra I have. 
 I feel like aking. I wonder sometimes in what world 
 I am. After floating on a sea of iron vibrations 
 through Autumn and Winter and Spring, I feel in 
 Summer that I am drifting on an ocean of vibrations 
 soft as gossamer. I am supported and carried on 
 by the soft and tiny notes of birds. The age of iron 
 has gone. A heavenly age has come, and the elevated 
 trains and the iron hoofs of horses cease from 
 troubling and the weary heart has a chance to rest. 
 There is only one loud voice in the morning—the 
 rooster. It stands out clear and distinct from all the 
 others. He has lived so long with people that he has 
 taken on some of their brag and strut. A rooster is 
 not a part of Nature. He is a feature of our human 
 world. His voice has been coarsened and loudened 
 by human contact. The voices of Nature’s birds are 
 all gentle, low and soft. 
 
 It is not till evening that Nature brings out her full 
 orchestra. I do not know how many pieces are in 
 it, for it is invisible. Richard Wagner, in his opera 
 house at Bayreuth, would not allow his orchestra to 
 be seen. He was an artist. He could hear as few 
 mortals have ever been able to hear. He would not 
 allow the eye to interfere with the ear. He refused to 
 permit the eye to break the illusion which the orchestra 
 was creating, and so he hid the orchestra out of sight, 
 thrusting it under the stage so that the audience could 
 not see the shirt-fronts of the first violinists or the 
 
104 NATURE, SERMONS 
 
 puffed cheeks of the men who were blowing the horns, 
 or the antics of the men who were pounding the drums, 
 or tapping the triangle. 
 
 Wagner got the hint from Nature. Nature hides 
 her orchestra. I do not know how many instruments 
 there are in the great orchestra which plays for me 
 on the evenings of July and August. A grand opera 
 orchestra has about eighty-five pieces, sometimes the 
 number is increased to one hundred, and occasionally, 
 at extraordinary functions, two or three hundred in- 
 struments are brought together. But Nature never 
 stops with such paltry numbers. She has four hun- 
 dred, five hundred, six hundred, sometimes one thou- 
 sand instruments in her orchestra. All the performers 
 play by ear, and their music is wonderfully soothing 
 and soft. It is said there are less than sixty symphony 
 orchestras in the United States. These are in the 
 large cities, and only a small fraction of the popula- 
 tion can ever hear them. But God is desirous that 
 every one shall hear music, and so He stations His 
 own orchestras all round every city, and one in every 
 village, and in every hamlet, in the neighbourhood of 
 every farmhouse throughout the land, that all His 
 children may have the culture which comes from 
 listening to good music. 
 
 All this suggests various piercing questions: Why 
 these sounds? Why these orchestras? I have spoken 
 of my orchestra. It plays for me, but does it play 
 for me alone? It would be flattering to my vanity 
 to say it did. One might know at once that it was a 
 man who wrote the story of the Garden of Eden, 
 because he placed man at the top. He put everything 
 under him. Even the sun and moon and stars. were 
 created to serve him. That is the way of man. It is © 
 
SOUNDS 105 
 
 natural for us to think that all the inferior creatures 
 exist for us. But I cannot bring myself to think that 
 my orchestra exists for me alone. It plays when I 
 am not there. It was playing before I was born. It 
 will keep on playing after I am dead. It is playing 
 for some one else besides me. I wonder if it plays 
 for the bird creation and the insect creation and the 
 animal creation? Does the whippoorwill enjoy the 
 bullfrog, and does the bullfrog take delight in the owl, 
 and does the owl revel in the music of the katydid, 
 and is the katydid enraptured by the music of the 
 cricket? Do these musicians play for one another, 
 and do they have ears enabling them to enjoy har- 
 monies which lie beyond our reach? 
 
 Why should it be deemed incredible that God should 
 provide for the esthetic enjoyment of all His crea- 
 tures? We have got far enough along in our re- 
 ligious thinking to see that He provides food for 
 all His creatures in due season. Why should we 
 hesitate to believe that He provides music for all His 
 creatures? It may be true for birds and insects, as 
 it is for us, that they cannot live on bread alone, but 
 must live on many words which proceed from the 
 mouth of God. It may be that the music of the 
 morning and the evening is for human beings, and also 
 for creatures which belong to a different order. Pos- 
 sibly we ought to go further and say that these or- 
 chestras play for God. He created all these creatures. 
 The orchestration is all His. He taught the musicians 
 how to play. They play for Him. He is the King. 
 We overhear. If that be true I can understand why 
 I like this music. I like it because God likes it. Iam 
 created in His image. I like the things which He 
 likes, when I am living at my best. I like the music 
 
106 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 of the evening woods and fields, and it is then I am 
 at my best. Care is rolled away—troubles no longer 
 vex me. Engagements do not call me. I can live. 
 And when I am living at my best I like the symphony 
 concert of the fields. God no doubt likes it too. We 
 enjoy it together. That is why my enjoyment is so 
 high and sweet. 
 
 And so, in the sounds of Nature, we have a revela- 
 tion of the Almighty. God is so great He cannot 
 report Himself to the eye alone. He rolls the universe 
 up to the eye-gate of the soul, but the eye cannot take 
 it all in. There are things which cannot be told to 
 the eye. The eye falls down saying—‘ Glory and 
 blessing and honour and dominion to Him who sits 
 on the throne.’’ Other things must be told to the ear. 
 When the ear receives the story, it too falls down say- 
 ing, “ Blessing and honour and glory and power to 
 Him who sits on the throne.” 
 
 A picture is a form of beauty. God lays it before 
 the eye. Music is a form of beauty. God lays it 
 before the ear. But God tells the ear something He 
 cannot tell the eye. We know that God is a God of 
 power. We can see it by looking at the ocean. We 
 know He is a God of beauty. We can see it by look- 
 ing at the flowers. We know He is a God of order. 
 We can see it by looking at the stars. But I want to 
 know more than this. I want to know if He is gentle, 
 if He is tender? ‘To know this, He must speak to 
 me. A mother can show her little child something of 
 her tenderness in her eye and in her smile. The baby 
 can catch some of her kindness through its eyes. But 
 when tenderness reaches its climax the mother speaks, 
 she hums, she sings. She can tell more of what is 
 in her heart through her voice than in any other way. 
 
SOUNDS 107 
 
 Alma Gluck tells us that when she was a little girl, 
 and all her family were poor and hungry, her mother 
 used to sing her to sleep. That is what mothers do, 
 all the way round the world. When their babies are 
 tired and fretful, they sing to them. They close the 
 gates of the day with a tone, and there is no tone 
 so sweet as that which a mother makes when she is 
 singing her baby to sleep. It has become a saying 
 in all languages: “Sweet as a mother’s lullaby.” 
 Through the sounds of Nature, God sings to us. In 
 this way He tells us of His gentleness and tenderness 
 and love. 
 
 ‘It is said that Helen Keller, when she was taken 
 for the first time into a cemetery, burst into tears. 
 She was blind and deaf. Nobody had told her about 
 cemeteries. Nobody had informed her that the car- 
 riage, on that day, was to roll into a city of the dead. 
 But when she found herself inside the gate of the 
 cemetery, she knew she was in some place where she 
 had never been before, and began to cry. Things are 
 said to us which do not pass through the ear. There 
 are sounds too ethereal for the ear to take note of. 
 They are caught up by the spirit. When I get into 
 the woods, I am sometimes so inexpressibly happy that 
 I stand in amazement at my own rapture. I cannot 
 account for it. It is not caused by the birds or the 
 trees or the wild flowers. It is not due to the fra- 
 grance or the sights or the sounds. My explanation is 
 this: Somebody is saying something to me—something 
 wonderfully pleasant. Somebody is saying: “I love 
 you!” 
 
IX 
 MISTS 
 
 “ Sounds.” In this sermon I am going to direct 
 
 your attention to something that is incapable of 
 sound. A mist has no voice, it never speaks. It is 
 a deaf mute. This is an impressive fact when you 
 remember that the mist is always moving, and that 
 nearly everything that moves makes a noise. A mist 
 moves and it gives forth no sound. A mist can move 
 down one of the streets of our city without letting 
 you know, so far as your ears report, that it is present. 
 It is many times the size of a furniture van, and yet 
 it can glide over the cobblestones without making a 
 noise. A little motor cycle puffs and snorts and makes 
 a great ado as it goes on its way, but a mist as high 
 as the Singer Building can travel from Harlem River 
 to the Battery without making a sound. It seems al- 
 most human, and says: “ Poor New York, you are 
 plagued enough already by your noises, I will not 
 add another sound to your bedlam.” 
 
 Mists walk through our streets in velvet slippers. 
 A mist makes no noise upon the water. Nothing else 
 can move upon the water without making a sound. A 
 ferry-boat splashes and churns the water into foam. 
 It cannot move without making a sound, nor can a 
 tugboat move three yards without announcing the 
 fact to both banks of the river. A submarine can- 
 not move even below the surface of the sea without 
 making a noise. That is what led to the defeat of 
 Preached, June 8, 1919. 
 
 N my previous sermon we were thinking about 
 
 108 
 
MISTS 109 
 
 that little devil. Its propellers always made a noise, 
 and so the Allies improvised ears for their destroyers, 
 so that every time a submarine moved a destroyer 
 could tell where it was. If the Germans had only 
 known how to make a silent U boat the outcome of 
 the war might have been different from what it was. 
 If Germany had been able to get rid of the vibrations 
 of the propellers, then the stream of war might have 
 been turned into a new channel. ‘The mist can travel 
 from Sandy Hook to Albany and not make a sound. 
 
 Mists are also silent in the fields. They travel 
 across the meadows, through the valleys, up the hills 
 without making the slightest noise. I have got up at 
 night often to see them from my window, and have 
 been deeply impressed by their noiselessness. ‘They 
 climb over a stone fence without dislodging a stone, 
 they move under the boughs of the apple trees with- 
 out crackling a twig, they walk over the tops of the 
 trees without bending a leaf. ‘They seem almost like 
 ghosts, spectral spirits of some other world. ‘There is 
 something uncanny in their silence. ‘‘ Where are you 
 going?” I have sometimes called after them, but I 
 never received any reply. This fact becomes all the 
 _ more impressive when you remember that it is a fact 
 old as the world. Mists are among the oldest of the 
 earth’s inhabitants. Mists were made before man. 
 Possibly you have forgotten the second chapter of 
 Genesis. In one verse we are told that a mist went 
 up from the earth, and in the next verse we are told 
 that man was created. In other words, the mist was 
 made first, and then man. ‘The mist was permitted to 
 stand at man’s cradle, but it stood there dumb. Job 
 says that when the cornerstone of the earth was laid 
 the morning stars sang together. There is no Bible 
 
110 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 writer that has ever suggested that the mists ever sang. 
 Millions of them have existed on the earth, and the 
 earth, perhaps, has existed millions of years, and yet 
 from the Creation to the present hour, no mist has 
 ever given forth a sound. 
 
 This is all the more remarkable when you bear in 
 mind that water everywhere is vocal. Water likes to 
 speak. Water will speak whenever it has a chance. 
 Rain, for instance, always makes a sound. A dash- 
 ing rain makes a large sound, a rain falling upon a 
 tin roof is easily heard, a rain falling upon blades of 
 grass, upon the leaves of trees, also gives forth a 
 sound. Rain-drops falling on the petals of roses make 
 a sound. You may call that the whisper of water. 
 Is there a sweeter whisper in all the world? A brook 
 is always full of sound. If a brook did not speak 
 the poets would not like it. It prattles, it babbles, 
 Tennyson says it chatters. It will coo and prattle ail 
 the day long like a baby in a cradle. A brook that 
 does not speak is abnormal. Rivers also are vocal, 
 especially when they leap from a precipice. When 
 they leap they laugh or they shout. The Montmorency 
 River, for instance, laughs when it jumps. The Yel- 
 lowstone River shouts when it jumps. A river in the 
 act of jumping always seems to cry out at the top of its 
 voice—* Look at me, I am leaping!” 
 
 The ocean, also, is vocal. It is never content to be 
 still. On hot summer afternoons, as it glides up on 
 the sand, it hums a soothing tune. It bellows and 
 thunders and roars whenever a storm teases it. Now 
 a mist is a form of water, but water in the form of 
 mist never speaks. 
 
 Moreover, you cannot compel it to speak. If you 
 poke a fire it sputters, if you throw a stone in a lake 
 
MISTS III 
 
 you make a splash, if you strike any metal you bring 
 out a sound. You cannot bring out a sound from 
 a mist. You may stab it, club it, trample upon it, 
 and still it is silent. ven when the wind shoves it 
 to the right and the left, harasses it and insults it, 
 it still remains dumb. ‘The wind may tear it to pieces, 
 but it makes no reply. 
 
 The impressiveness of the silence of the mist be- 
 comes almost tragic when you bear in mind what the 
 voice of water is. The Beloved Disciple, when he 
 sought for a symbol to picture the voice of the om- 
 nipotent Jesus, chose the voice of water. The exile 
 on Patmos listening to the music of the Divine Voice 
 heard it and said that it reminded him of water. Of 
 all the thousands of sounds on the face of the earth 
 the only sound which was chosen as the fittest symbol 
 for expressing the timbre of the voice of the Eter- 
 nal, was the voice of water. A mist, although water, 
 cannot speak. It would almost seem as though God 
 had pronounced a curse on the mist. ‘The Bible says 
 that God pronounced a curse on the serpent: “ You 
 shall go on your belly,” He said. To the mist He 
 said: “‘ You shall wander round the world, but never 
 shall you be permitted to speak.” 
 
 Now let us pause long enough to find out what a 
 mist is. According to the dictionary, a mist is water- 
 vapour suspended in the air and visible. There is 
 much water-vapour in the air which is not visible. 
 Water-vapour that cannot be seen is not mist, but 
 whenever the water-vapour which is suspended in the 
 air becomes visible, we have a name for it, and the 
 name is “mist.” Now there is a family of mists, and 
 each member of the family is called by a different 
 name. Some morning on going down the street you 
 
112 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 say: “ How hazy it is!”” Haze is a mist, a thin mist. 
 Some other morning on going out of the front door 
 you say: “ How foggy it is!” Fog is a mist, a thick 
 mist. Here then we have three sisters—haze and 
 mist and fog. ‘The first is thin, the second is medium, 
 the third is thick; but all are mists. [here is an- 
 other member of the family, and this fourth member 
 of the family does not live on the earth, it lives in the 
 sky. A cloud is a mist, and it differs from a haze and 
 a fog in the fact that it inhabits the regions of the 
 upper air. You might say that a mist is a cloud that 
 has fallen upon the earth. You might say that a 
 cloud is a mist which has ascended into heaven. We 
 are interested, however, just now, not in the cloud; 
 we are interested in the three sisters who make their 
 home on the earth. 
 
 First of all, let us think of the beauty of a mist. 
 There is a wide variety of colours. Some mists are 
 white and some are green, some black, some blue, 
 some purple, and some crimson—all the colours of the 
 rainbow are exhibited in the world of mists. Mists 
 are also of different textures. Some mists are coarse 
 and others are fine. ‘The London mist, for instance, 
 is often exceedingly coarse and black. ‘The mist that 
 fills the streets of Edinburgh is a fine mist, entirely 
 different in texture from the mist of the English 
 metropolis. ‘The forms of the mists are beautiful, and 
 moreover they are always changing. ‘The Greeks had 
 a god whom they called Proteus. The wonderful 
 thing about him was, that whenever anybody laid hold 
 of him, he immediately changed his form. ‘That is 
 what a mist is always doing. Whenever the wind puts 
 its hand on it, it immediately assumes a different 
 shape. But all the forms of the mist are picturesque. 
 
MISTS 113 
 
 What do you suppose the mists are for? I some- 
 times think that they are the playthings of God. Has 
 it ever occurred to you that our Heavenly Father is a 
 playing God? I think we are entirely justified in as- 
 suming that He is. ‘The play instinct is deep-rooted 
 in animal nature. It is an inseparable part of our 
 human nature. All young animals play. Little chil- 
 dren do nothing else. Now Jesus says, “ Unless you 
 become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom 
 of God.” Unless you know how to play, then you 
 are out of place in God’s universe. That would indi- 
 cate to my mind that the Head of that universe takes 
 delight in playing. One of the interesting chapters of 
 our modern civilization deals with the attention which 
 is being paid to the play-instinct. We are coming to 
 see that children not only may play, but must play. If 
 they do not play they become physically stunted, mor- 
 ally paralyzed. Playgrounds are just as essential to a 
 great city as our churches and schools. 
 
 I, for one, believe that God loves play, and that He 
 plays Himself. I think that some of His playthings 
 are mists. You have all seen children playing with 
 blocks. They take delight in building them in different 
 forms: they build a pagoda, and when it is built they 
 tear it down in order to build a castle. When a castle 
 is built they throw it over in order to build a cottage. 
 When the cottage is built they demolish it in order to 
 make room for a railroad-station. The pleasure lies 
 in building one thing after another. That is the way 
 God acts with the mists. I have often watched Him 
 on summer mornings. He never grows weary of 
 making new things out of the mists. One minute He 
 is making a lake, five minutes later He is making a 
 river, five minutes later He is making a mountain, a 
 
114 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 little later He is making a bank of snow, a little later 
 He has made a great city with domes and towers and 
 minarets. I know He enjoys it for it is something He 
 has been doing since the Creation. 
 
 God also makes use of mists as decorations. He 
 adorns the old, prosaic earth and makes it look poetic 
 and mystical. ‘There are artists who claim that Lon- 
 don is never so beautiful as it is when it is buried in 
 mist. ‘The mist tones down the discords of clashing 
 colours, it transfigures the bleakness of the prosaic. 
 A city loses much of its sordidness if you can only 
 half-cover it with mist. The dullest and most unin- 
 teresting city becomes dreamy and fascinating when 
 you clothe it in robes of vapour. San Francisco is 
 one of the most picturesque of American cities. Its 
 picturesqueness lies in the fact that it is built largely 
 on hills. The mists love hills, and that city is never 
 so beautiful as when God has dressed it in mist. 
 Somebody has said that the city looks like a Francis- 
 can friar with his robe of gray, another, that it looks 
 like a beautiful girl clothed in a garb of drab. The 
 hillsides never look so charming as when the mists lie 
 on them, and the houses on the tops of the hills never 
 
 look so much like palaces, as when they are half-hidden 
 
 in the fog. 
 
 I presume it would be correct to say that Nature 
 is a daughter of God. At any rate, we always as- 
 sume she is a woman. Nobody, when referring to 
 Nature, ever uses the pronoun “ he”; and the reason 
 we assume Nature to be a woman is undoubtedly due 
 to the fact that she is so beautiful. Now if we wish 
 to speak of mists in terms of a woman’s wardrobe, 
 then we may say that mists are veils. A haze is a 
 thin veil, whereas a fog is a thick one. Nature changes 
 
MASTS ot) 115 
 
 the thickness of her veil, from time to time, in order 
 to escape monotony. To change the figure we may 
 say that a mist is a shirt-waist which Nature puts on, 
 on summer mornings, in order to enhance her loveli- 
 ness. Sometimes the shirt-waist is opaque, sometimes 
 it is exceedingly thin. It would seem that the AI- 
 mighty takes delight in changing the aspect of Nature 
 in order that we may never get tired of her. We do 
 not want a woman to look for evermore the same. 
 The human heart loves variety, and we insist that a 
 woman shall look different at different times. God 
 does not permit Nature to be for evermore the same. 
 He changes her appearance by robing her with 
 different varieties of mists. She isa sort of Cleopatra 
 in the powers of her fascination, and we can say of 
 her, what Shakespeare said of the Queen of Egypt: 
 
 “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
 Her infinite variety.” 
 
 Did you ever think of the strength of the mist? 
 When we think of power, we naturally think of the 
 
 _ wind, or the water, or of chemical explosives, but there 
 
 is not one of them that has greater power than the 
 mist. The mist can go into the biggest city of the 
 world and turn all the lights down. What other 
 power under heaven can do that? London has a Lord 
 Mayor and a Court of Aldermen. They are supposed 
 to have control over the city, but a mist can come in 
 and turn down the lights in all the public buildings, 
 and in every private home of the world’s metropolis. 
 It is an interesting fact that mist has a peculiar an- 
 tipathy to electric lights. A gas-jet will throw a beam 
 farther into the mist than will an arc-lamp. It would 
 seem as though the mist had a malicious pleasure in 
 
116 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 saying: “I do not care anything for your new-fangled 
 light, I will put it out.” And so lighthouses are of 
 little value in a mist. Almost every year some mighty 
 steamer goes to wreck right under the eyes of a light- 
 house. There is something in a mist that defies the 
 piercing power of electricity. 
 
 We have heard a great deal within the last quarter 
 of a century about the tremendous power of com- 
 merce. Panegyrics innumerable have been sounded in 
 regard to its ever-extending dominion. New York 
 City is the greatest commercial city in the New World, 
 but we are absolutely helpless in the hands of a mist. 
 Every now and then you awaken in the morning to 
 the sound of the sirens and whistles and fog-horns 
 of the Hudson River. Every vessel on the river is 
 shouting at the top of its voice: “ We are all-in con- 
 fusion out here. The mist has taken us by the throat 
 and will not let us go.”’ What other power is there 
 in the world that will retard all the traffic in the Hud- 
 son and throw it into confusion? But the East River 
 is equally helpless. The Fall River boats are mighty 
 vessels. They have little fear of a storm. But when 
 a heavy mist settles down on the East River then the 
 Fall River boats lie tied up at their piers. They dare > 
 not try to make their way through Hell Gate in a 
 mist. Even our harbour becomes dangerous. When 
 a fog comes in, great ocean liners remain below quar- 
 antine afraid to venture to their docks. Great steam- 
 ships lying at their docks eager to start out for Europe, 
 are afraid to venture out until the mist announces 
 that they may go. That is an amazing spectacle—the 
 traffic of the metropolis of the New World under the 
 dictation of a mist. We would not allow Germany to 
 dictate to us when our ships should come in, or when 
 
‘ MISTS iit? 
 
 they could go out again, and yet we bow in meek 
 submission to the autocracy of the mist. A mist is 
 one of God’s traffic squad, and when it holds up its 
 finger all the great ships stop on their courses, and 
 when the mist gives another signal the great ships 
 proceed on their way. 
 
 A traveller soon comes to put a new emphasis upon 
 the authority of a mist. Some of the keenest disap- 
 pointments that a traveller knows are due to the in- 
 terference of the mist. Some of you have gone to the 
 top of Mount Washington to secure a lovely view, 
 but there was no view because of the mist. Some of 
 you have gone to the top of Mount Pilatus. You 
 had read for years about that famous view. Your 
 fellow-travellers had told you much about it, but when 
 you arrived at Lucerne, you discovered that it was 
 impossible to see anything from the top of the famous 
 mountain. I travelled all the way to Alaska, once, 
 to see the famous Muir glacier, but when I got there 
 a mist put its broad hand over the face of the glacier 
 saying-—‘‘ Not to-day!” A mist speaks as one hav- 
 ing authority, and not like the wind or the waves. 
 
 One of the greatest dangers of ocean-travel is the 
 mist. You waken some morning, to hear the steam- 
 whistle blowing. On looking out, you discover there 
 is a mist. The ship is not afraid of a storm. The 
 modern ship rather likes a storm. As soon as she 
 sees a storm she stiffens herself and almost leaps for- 
 _ ward to meet it. But as soon as a ship sees a fog 
 the ship is frightened. Up to this time she has been 
 an ocean greyhound, now she degenerates into a tor- 
 toise before the fog. She had held her head high, 
 but now she goes down on her knees. A mist is the 
 terror of the sea because there is no telling when it 
 
118 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 may have an iceberg wrapped up in its gossamer folds. 
 Why do you suppose the heart is so disquieted by 
 that regular blowing of the ship’s whistle at an in- 
 terval of a few seconds? The ship is saying: “I am 
 afraid. I am afraid! I am afraid!” and the fear 
 communicates itself to the soul. Birds do not fly in 
 a fog, nor do birds sing in a fog, nor do birds issue a 
 callina fog. The fog makes them afraid. Here, then, 
 is a remarkable fact, that one of the servants of God 
 with fingers that are spectral—not even skeleton 
 fingers because skeleton fingers are solid, but with 
 nothing but phantom fingers—can take the world by 
 the throat, and hold it fast. 
 
 In some respects, we might say that the mist is an 
 enemy of the human race. There are many acts of 
 destruction which it commits upon the land. When 
 a great fog lies for weeks upon London it lowers the 
 vitality of the whole city. It snuffs out human lives 
 by the thousand. If you have ever looked at the vital 
 statistics of London/through the years of great fogs, 
 you have noted how the death rate has leaped for- 
 ward during the period when the fog was densest. 
 A fog of two or three months in London is like a 
 great battle—when the fog has lifted you find a great — 
 field that is strewn with the wounded and the dying 
 and the dead. Not only is a fog destructive of life, 
 but it is also destructive of money. It is said that 
 London spends twenty-five million dollars a year in 
 extra gas-bills which are the direct result of fogs. 
 
 It is needless to dwell upon the colossal losses oc- 
 casioned by fog on the sea. Nor is it necessary, at 
 this time, to call attention to the long continued and 
 heroic efforts which have been put forth to conquer 
 the mist. 
 
MISTS 119 
 
 When Hawker and Grieve achieved the phenomenal 
 feat of flying across the Atlantic, the papers were 
 careful to inform us about the behaviour of the mist. 
 Hawker said that in ten minutes his airship got into 
 a fog, and that after they once rose above it they 
 hardly saw the ocean again. Grieve said that only for 
 a few seconds was it possible for them to see the 
 ocean through a hole in the fog. When at last they 
 came down they found themselves two hundred miles 
 out of their course, all because the mist would not 
 allow them to see. That, then, is an interesting fact 
 that in the twentieth century when men are attempt- 
 ing to do a marvellously heroic thing, this old servant 
 of God, the mist, comes out and throwing itself on 
 the track, says: “‘ You cannot succeed unless you first 
 conquer me.” The whole world has thus been brought 
 face to face with the almightiness and the tremendous 
 importance of mists. They have threatened to block 
 the progress of the world. 
 
 The mist is an enemy to be conquered. It is go- 
 ing to be conquered in the air by the aviator soaring 
 above it. When the great trans-Atlantic routes are 
 laid down along which the airships are to travel, we 
 shall find that these routes are all established above 
 the level of the mist. But when it comes to dealing 
 with mists in great cities, the problem is not so easy. 
 We have learned how to cart away the snow; in the 
 future we must learn how to cart away the mist. 
 Just how we are going to do it it is, as yet, im- 
 possible to say. Some experts say that we are going 
 to do it by the creation of currents of air. The air 
 will take the mist on its back, and run off with it. 
 Others think that the miracle is going to be wrought» 
 by the electrification of the air. The mist, as you 
 
120 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 know, is due to the presence in the air of an infinite 
 number of dust-particles. It is upon these dust-parti- 
 cles that the water-vapour condenses. Bits of soot 
 and smoke act as nuclei. If, in some way or other, 
 you could get rid of the solid particles of the air, 
 then you would get rid of the mist. It is claimed 
 that it will be possible, some day, for us to generate 
 mighty electrical currents causing a precipitation of 
 the dust in the air. This suggestion opens the way 
 for a vast deal of dreaming. It may be, that in the 
 future, we are going to have engineers of the air. 
 
 For the last hundred years we have been building 
 our railroads, dealing with the mountains and the 
 rivers and the chasms; in the hundred years that lie 
 ahead of us we are going to grapple with the rivers 
 and mountains and chasms in the air. Just as our 
 locomotives on the trains in the West have mighty 
 snow-ploughs attached to the cow-catchers, enabling 
 them to make their way through the snow-drifts that 
 Winter piles on the track, just so it may be that ships 
 of the future are going to be supplied with fog- 
 apparatus, so that each ship may be able to tunnel its 
 way unharmed through the fog. No matter how the 
 obstacles shall be overcome, there is no doubt of the 
 ultimate victory. The Hebrew poet made no mistake | 
 when he said: “Thou hast made him [man] a little 
 lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory 
 and honour. ‘Thou madest him to have dominion over 
 the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under 
 his feet.” 
 
 My sermon was suggested by the present condition 
 of the world. We are at present in the midst of a 
 fog. It is the densest fog that has ever wrapped this 
 earth. ‘There is a darkness that can be felt, and all 
 
MISTS — 121 
 
 the lights are impotent to pierce it. It is a remark- 
 able fact that there is not upon the earth to-day a 
 piece of apparatus that will enable us to penetrate the 
 gloom. We have many different kinds of lights, but 
 no light has as yet been invented that will enable us 
 to see more than a few feet ahead of us. We talk 
 about our great lights in the Church, in the univer- 
 sity, in business, but none of these great lights are able 
 to tell us what is going to happen five years from 
 now, or two years, or one year, or six months, or 
 even three months from now. ‘That is certainly an 
 amazing thing that there is not a man upon the earth 
 who is able to see one month ahead of us. The lights 
 have all failed us, and this is the day for bell-buoys 
 and fog-horns sounding warnings. We hear voices 
 saying: “ Here is a reef,’ and “ There is a reef,’ .“’ Do 
 not come here,” “ Do not go there.”’ But as for the 
 reefs that lie ahead of us, these are hidden in a mist 
 that is impenetrable. 
 
 What then is our consolation? Here is one: fogs 
 are shallow. All fogs are shallow. The foggiest of 
 the London fogs are very broad and long, and nearly 
 always shallow. A man going up into the Observatory 
 at Greenwich, and looking out across London can see 
 the tops of the buildings in the city bathed in sun- 
 light. Sometimes the fog is so thick that one cannot 
 see across the deck of a ship in the Thames, while at 
 the same time the topmasts are wrapped round with 
 sunbeams. Let us remember then that the fog, to- 
 day, is shallow; it does not extend all the way to the 
 stars. Above the fog is the wide-open eye of the 
 Eternal. He sees us all. He knows what He is doing. 
 
 In the second place, fogs are transient; they come 
 and go. The longest-lived fog extends only for a 
 
122 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 little while. The mists of the summer morning are 
 exceedingly evanescent. JI have seen a mist walking 
 with the sun across the meadows, up a hill, but when 
 near the top of the hill I have seen the mist vanish 
 in the twinkling of an eye. It made me think of 
 Enoch. He walked with God, and then was not, be- 
 cause God took him. The mist and the sun walked 
 together, and then the mist was not because the sun 
 took it. The transitoriness of mists has always made 
 an impression on the human imagination. A New 
 Testament writer compares our human life to the mist. 
 “What is your life?’ asks James. ‘‘ You are but a 
 vapour that appears for a little time, and then vanishes 
 away. James Moffat, one of the greatest living New 
 Testament scholars, translates this passage thus: 
 “What is your life? You are but a mist.” The fog 
 is dense to-day, but it will not be on us always. By 
 and by, we shall be out under the sun again. 
 
 The third consolation is that fogs are the servants 
 of the Almighty. The Hebrew poet was right when 
 he said: “Fire and hail, snow and vapour, stormy 
 wind fulfilling his word.” A book could be written 
 filled with the story of how God in human history has 
 compelled the mists to serve Him. In the tenth chap- 
 ter of Exodus, we are told how, at a certain crisis in. 
 Egyptian history, a darkness thick enough to be felt 
 settled down upon the land, lasting for three long days. 
 Scientists tell us that that darkness was due to mist. » 
 By means of the mist the King of heaven endeavoured 
 to bend the will of the Egyptian monarch. All of the 
 American historians in describing the battle of Long 
 Island, tell us how after that disastrous American de- 
 feat the outlook for the colonists was exceedingly 
 dark. There seemed to be no escape for the retiring 
 
MISTS 123 
 
 fugitives. The British sentinels were placed up and 
 down the shore. But God, in His mercy, flung upon 
 the East River one of the thickest of His mists, and 
 in that mist twelve hundred American soldiers made 
 their way across the river under the very noses of the 
 sentinels of the British fleet. 
 
 But we need not go back to history to find ways in 
 which God makes use of mists. Every Spring and 
 every Autumn He uses mists to keep off the frost. 
 When water-vapour condenses it gives off vast 
 measures of latent heat, and this latent heat poured 
 into the air saves the buds and fruits. Why should 
 we doubt that God will use this present world-fog for 
 the advancement of His glory? If you should ask me 
 the cause of the fog that to-day covers the world, I 
 should say that it is caused by the meeting of two 
 currents of intellectual air: one from the sordid, selfish 
 past, and the other from the idealistic Christian future. 
 The two currents meet, and there is a vast amount 
 of dust in the air thrown there by the vast upheaval 
 of the Great War. And now, in this mist, God is 
 striving to bend our will to His. Who knows but 
 that in this darkness we may escape from many of 
 the tyrants that have held us fast? Who knows but 
 what this mist is keeping the world warm, hastening 
 the budding of a million flowers of Paradise? ‘The 
 old experiences recounted in Genesis may be repeated. 
 The first mist spoken of turned out to be the medium 
 of God’s blessing. Let me read you the sentence as 
 it stands: “There went up a mist from the earth, and 
 it watered the whole face of the ground.” When the 
 whole face of the ground had been watered, then the 
 earth was ready for a new manifestation of the power 
 of God. There is a mist now going up from the 
 
124 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 earth, and it will water the whole face of the ground, 
 and after this preparation who knows what new and 
 beautiful thing the Almighty will dot 
 
X 
 SPRING 
 
 WANT to think with you in this sermon about 
 
 Spring. I have chosen this topic because every- 
 
 body for the last three months has been talking 
 about Spring. They have been talking about her in 
 the South and also in New England, and also as far 
 west as Ohio. ‘The whole nation, so far as I know, 
 has made Spring the subject of its daily conversa- 
 tion. People have been talking about Spring, not be- 
 cause she is beautiful or wonderful, but because she 
 is so late. We expected the Spring to arrive at a cer- 
 tain date, and when she did not come we were dis- 
 appointed. We looked at the clock and saw that 
 Spring was due, but when we looked out of the win- 
 dow and saw that Spring had not arrived, we were 
 more or less provoked. We had the disposition of a 
 school-teacher ; we treated Spring as though she were 
 our pupil, and we were nettled because the pupil was 
 tardy. We do not like Spring when she 1s dilatory. 
 Moreover, when Spring comes late, it upsets our plans. 
 We had made up our mind about when the furnace- 
 fire should go out. Spring did not come and so we 
 had to keep the furnace-fire in. The gardener got out 
 his implements ready to go to work, waiting for Spring 
 to give a signal, and when Spring gave no signal the 
 gardener had to go in and sit down by the fire again. 
 The farmer got out his plough and wanted to go to 
 work. He waited for Spring to blow her whistle, 
 but the whistle did not blow, and all the farm oper- 
 
 Preached, May 30, 1920. 
 125 
 
126 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 ations were retarded. Nobody likes Spring to be 
 late. 
 
 Moreover, Spring has been so peculiar. She did not 
 seem to have arrived at all—she came with snowflakes 
 in her hair. We have our ideal as to what Spring 
 ought to be, and when she does not measure up to 
 our expectations, we feel that we have been mis- 
 treated. We carry in our mind the pattern of what 
 Spring ought to be, and when she arrives, cut after 
 a different pattern, we fall into a faultfinding mood. 
 We are very free in our criticisms, and we do not 
 hesitate to condemn the seasons. But Spring is here, 
 full-orbed and full-toned, and so we say to her, “ All 
 hail!” 
 
 I ask you to think about the coming of Spring. We 
 have been talking about it, but, possibly, we have not 
 thought about it. It is remarkably easy to talk about 
 things without thinking about them. A great deal of 
 our talk has very little thought in it. It is possible to 
 look at a thing without seeing it. We have looked 
 at Spring; I wonder how many of us have seen her?’ 
 We never see anything unless we put the mind behind 
 the eye. When we put the mind behind the eye, the 
 mind gives the eye a push toward an object, then we 
 see that object. And so I ask you to put your mind 
 behind your eye, and give it a strong push in the direc- 
 tion of Spring. Let us all make an honest effort to 
 see Spring. 
 
 What a mystery it is that we have any Spring at 
 all. We are surprised that Spring was late. Whata 
 surprise we should have had if Spring had stayed 
 away indefinitely! There are many human beings 
 who have never seen Spring. ‘There are men and 
 women in the Arctic and the Antarctic regions who 
 
SPRING 127 
 
 have never known what Spring is. They have had 
 Winter all the time. They have had nothing but ice 
 and snow every day, of every week, of every month, 
 of every year. ‘That is all they have known from 
 babyhood. ‘That is all they will ever know until they 
 close their eyes in death. There are people in the 
 Tropics who have never known anything but Sum- 
 mer—flowers and birds every day of the year from 
 the first day of their life to the last. Think of a 
 summer extending through a million years, fragrant, 
 beautiful, musical all the time! ‘There are other 
 human beings who enjoy two seasons, Winter and 
 Summer! 
 
 But we fortunate mortals who live in the temperate 
 zone are permitted to make use of four seasons. We 
 are millionaires when it comes to seasons. We have 
 all the wealth there is. No human beings, anywhere 
 upon this planet, have more seasons than you and I 
 enjoy. Indeed, it is difficult to know how we could 
 use more than we have—four. Our mind is so con- 
 structed that it does not easily think of what a fifth 
 season would be like. For instance: if the fifth sea- 
 son should arrive, what should we call it? What ex- 
 citement there would be when all the magazines offered 
 five-hundred-dollar prizes for the best name to give to 
 the new arrival! The name of a new season would be 
 far more interesting and exciting than naming a new 
 baby. And after we had named the new season, what 
 would we do with it? We have already all the sea- 
 sons that it is possible for us to use. If God should 
 thrust a fifth season on us it would only be an ele- 
 ment of confusion. It would necessitate a recon- 
 struction of our dressmaking establishments, and up- 
 set the whole world in innumerable ways. But there 
 
128 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 is no likelihood that God will add to the number of 
 the seasons. ‘The number is complete, and that num- 
 ber is four. , 
 
 There are just as many seasons as there are Gospels 
 in the New Testament. It is hard to see what we 
 should do if there were five. We could not possibly 
 dispense with one of the four. If a reporter should 
 steal two of them away we would protest; if some 
 one should take three of them we should cry out in 
 pain. We would all feel like paupers if we had but 
 a single Gospel. Because we are in possession of all 
 four, our joy is complete. Why should we not think 
 of the seasons as so many gospels? Why should we 
 not say, sometimes, to ourselves—“ the good tidings ac- 
 cording to Summer!” “the good news of Christ ac- 
 cording to Autumn!” “ the good news of the heavenly 
 Father according to Winter?” The four seasons are 
 so many a neeliee and all of them convey a message 
 from the heart of God. 
 
 _ The Spring is a miracle. When you go to the dic- | 
 tionary in search of a definition of a miracle you are | 
 ‘told that it is an event which cannot be accounted for | 
 ‘by the known forces of Nature. Well, Spring is an 
 event which cannot be accounted for by any of the © 
 known forces of Nature. When I was a school-teacher 
 years ago, I used to take great delight in telling the 
 boys and girls in the High School just how it hap- 
 pened that we have four different seasons. I told 
 them that it was due to the varying of the inclina- _ 
 tion of the earth’s axis of rotation to the plane of the 
 ecliptic. I took great satisfaction in giving my pupils 
 this information for I felt sure it would explain to 
 them quite fully the cause of Spring. Yet, after all, 
 what does that learned jargon say to you? Does that 
 
_ SPRING 129 
 Hho oa 
 
 decslainatie glory Ke Spring? The scientists declare 
 that Spring is due to the angle at which the rays of 
 the sun strike the earth. When the sunbeams strike 
 the earth quite obliquely we have Winter; when the 
 sunbeams strike the earth quite vertically we have 
 Summer; when the sunbeams strike the earth some- 
 where between the angle of the sunbeams in Winter 
 and the angle of the sunbeams in Summer, then we 
 have Autumn or Spring. 
 
 But you cannot account for the Spring by measur- 
 ing the angle at which the sunbeams strike the earth. 
 The sunbeams fall upon the earth at a certain angle 
 and the earth suddenly grows green. Why should it 
 grow green? “How do you account for that? You 
 say it is because the angle is what it is. Well, let the 
 angle be what it was, and let the same sunbeams fall 
 upon a tree, and the tree grows white, let them fall 
 upon another tree and that tree grows pink, and let 
 them fall upon another tree and that tree grows red. 
 What a miracle that is! Let the same rays fall, at 
 the same angle, upon a bush and the bush grows beau- 
 tiful, but has no fragrance. Let the same rays fall 
 upon another bush and the bush has beauty and 
 perfume also. What a mystery that is! Now let the 
 same sunbeams fall upon the back of a bird, and the 
 bird sings. What a miracle that is! Will you al- 
 low me to suggest a definition of the Spring: It is a 
 vast complex of tiny grass-blades, blossoms, fra- 
 grances, bird-notes all caught-and held in a mesh of 
 sunbeams. Only God Almighty can create beautiful 
 things like that. It may be that some one who reads 
 these lines has been in the habit of turning up his 
 nose at the miracles recorded in the New Testament. 
 If you find those miracles incredible then close the new 
 
130 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Bible and look at the miracles recorded in the old 
 Bible. There is no miracle recorded in the New Testa- 
 ment half so amazing, so inexplicable, so wonderful as 
 the miracle of Spring! 
 
 Spring is a miracle of beauty. She is associated in 
 all our minds with the beautiful. The poets have 
 been singing about Spring for a thousand years. In- 
 deed there is a peculiar style of poetry which is known 
 everywhere as Spring poetry. To be sure, all the sea- 
 sons of the year are beautiful, but Spring has a 
 beauty which is unique. She has a different beauty 
 from that of Autumn, or Summer. There is a del- 
 icacy of tint and a subtlety of shadow and a fresh- 
 ness of loveliness in Spring which we find in no 
 other season of the year. There is a certain sparkle 
 and jubilancy and rush of life in Spring which the 
 other seasons do not know. ‘Where does all this beauty 
 come from? It comes from God, and therefore God | 
 must be an artist. God is a lover of the beautiful | | 
 and the creator of it. Do you ever think of God as | 
 an artist? Do you ever pray to Him as to an artist? 
 One of the reasons why we do not love Him more 
 is because we have such narrow notions of Him. 
 
 John Fiske in his little volume entitled The Idea 
 of God tells us about his idea of the Almighty when 
 he was a boy five years old. God, he thought, lived 
 in a narrow office in which there was a standing desk. 
 On the desk there were a number of ledgers bound 
 in coarse leather. God was tall and slender and, He 
 wore spectacles. There was a pen over one of His 
 ears. He also held a pen in His fingers. By His 
 side there stood an attendant angel who also was busy 
 writing. ‘The walls of the office were rather low so 
 that God and the angel could look over these walls 
 
SPRING 131 
 
 and take note of what all men and women and boys 
 and girls were doing. Everything that was done was 
 entered in one of these ledgers, and little John Fiske 
 knew that God was writing down things about him 
 which would face him at the Judgment Day. I fear 
 there are many people well advanced in years who 
 have never got very far beyond that conception of 
 the Almighty. There are multitudes who retain the 
 conception held by Michael Angelo, that God is a 
 mighty Judge, seated on a throne hurling thunder- 
 bolts at rebellious sinners. 
 
 Of course it is impossible for one to speak with 
 gladness to the God of John Fiske’s imagination, or 
 to the God of the great Italian painter. Why not think 
 of God, now and then, as a poet? Mrs. Browning 
 was right when she said: “God Himself is the great 
 poet, and the real is His song.” We have no dif- 
 ficulty in believing that God teaches the birds to sing; 
 why should it be difficult for us to believe that it is 
 God who teaches poets to sing? ‘Tennyson says in /” 
 Memoriam: 
 
 “T do but sing because I must, 
 And pipe but as the linnets sing.” 
 
 . Alexander Pope says: “I lisp’d in numbers, for the 
 numbers came.” There would be no poetry on the 
 earth if there were no poetry in the heart of the Eter- 
 nal, Corot painted his landscapes because God is a 
 painter, and Turner painted his sunsets because God, 
 from the beginning of the world, had painted sunsets. 
 God is the Great Musician, the universe is an organ 
 with ten thousand keys, and God brings music from 
 every key. God, too, is an architect. What is Spring 
 but an enchanted palace on whose walls are hung 
 
132 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 lovely pictures and through whose corridors there 
 flow delicious odours? It is a palace that goes up 
 without the sound of a hammer. It is a palace which 
 only the Infinite can build. It is the Palace Beauti- 
 ful. It is an interesting fact that John, on Patmos, 
 when he wished to symbolize humanity perfected, 
 transfigured by the indwelling glory of God, made use 
 of a girl dressed for her wedding. It is also interest- 
 ing that Botticelli, when he wished to symbolize 
 Spring, made use of a girl with blossoms round her 
 neck and in her hair. The whole world agrees that 
 Spring is beautiful. 
 
 Spring is likewise a miracle of power. In none of | 
 the battles of the Great War were such tremendous 
 forces exhibited as are exhibited in the Spring. The 
 earth dies every winter. For months it lies stiff 
 and cold. When it is in this condition it is impossible 
 to bring it back to life again. We are wonderful be- 
 ings and we are capable of making use of tremendous 
 forces. Wecan manufacture different kinds of flame, 
 but it is not possible for us to kindle fires enough to 
 create Spring in December. Every winter the Hud- 
 son River valley lies in a great sarcophagus—abso- 
 lutely dead. There is not heat enough in all the fur-_ 
 naces of the world to bring the Hudson River valley 
 back to life until One higher up speaks the word. 
 When Lazarus lay within the tomb he made no re- 
 sponse to the weeping of his sister Martha, nor did 
 he pay attention to Mary’s piteous appeal. It was 
 only when an Omnipotent Voice cried: “‘ Come forth!” 
 that the dead man rose again. 
 
 In Winter this earth of ours dies, and for a long 
 time it lies motionless and silent, and then One who 
 is invisible says: “Come forth!” and the dead earth 
 
SPRING 133 
 
 rises in glory. There are people who are sorely 
 troubled by the story of the Resurrection, as recorded 
 in the New Testament. I hardly see why any one 
 should be troubled by a story such as that. It is in- 
 deed wonderful, but it is not a whit more wonderful 
 than the rising of.the earth in Spring. Spring is the 
 angel of the Resurrection. When Spring blows her 
 trumpet the dead earth stands upon its feet and sings. 
 
 I recently attended the funeral service of a dear 
 friend of mine. The day was almost ideal. The win- 
 dows were open and the air was fragrant. In the 
 chapel and out of it there were flowers. I found my- 
 self in the midst of a flower-garden, and it was easy 
 to say: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, 
 where is thy victory?’ Who could doubt the fact oi 
 the Resurrection in the month of May! 
 
 Spring is a revelation of God’s love. It reminds us 
 of the breadth of His generosity. Jesus, one day, in 
 a discourse to Galilean peasants asked them to note 
 how the sunbeams fell upon the evil and the good, 
 and how the rain descended upon the just and the 
 unjust. These phenomena of the natural world sym- 
 bolize the breadth of God’s eternal mercy. Spring is 
 constantly reminding us that God is no respecter ,of 
 persons and that He has a generous heart. He pours 
 out the beauty of Spring without stint upon us, and 
 He pours it out upon every one. When you ride 
 along the roads in Spring you pass mansions of the 
 rich, and you also pass little cottages of humble 
 farmers, and you notice that into the front yard of 
 the humblest cottage, Spring has found its way. This 
 beautiful servant of the Most High visits the rich and 
 the poor alike. There is no one so poor or so humble 
 ‘that he cannot enjoy the fragrance of Spring. 
 
134 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Spring also symbolizes God’s unchanging love. The 
 pictures which God paints do not fade. Leonardo da 
 Vinci’s Last Supper is a wreck, and so, also, is his 
 celebrated Mona Lisa. ‘The most exquisite things 
 which Leonardo da Vinci painted into that face have 
 been scrubbed out by the hands of chemicals. Rem- 
 brandt’s Night Watch is a wreck, and so, also, is 
 Titian’s famous Assumption. So, also, is Correggio’s 
 Holy Night. ‘The masterpieces of the great masters 
 all are faded. ‘Titian’s reds are becoming dark, and 
 his yellows are becoming white. Even Turner’s skies 
 are becoming lemon-yellow and chalky-white. Mun- 
 kacsy, who painted only yesterday, has left pictures 
 which are already growing rapidly black. God is the 
 only Master whose masterpieces are fadeless. .The 
 colours of Spring in this year of grace are as fresh 
 and beautiful as were the colours in the first Spring 
 that ever greeted the eye, and down through all the 
 ages we are sure of this—that Spring will be no less 
 beautiful than what it has been from the beginning. 
 From everlasting to everlasting, God is God. He is 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 
 
 T must not close this sermon without reminding you © 
 of Decoration Day, a day on which we think of our 
 heroic dead. It is fitting that Memorial Day should 
 be a day in Spring, and it is also fortunate that it 
 should be a Spring day located close up to the door 
 of Summer. Decoration Day has on it the freshness 
 and the bloom of Spring. It stands at the threshold 
 of Summer amid the blossoms and the bird-notes and 
 the fragrances of Spring at her climax. It is easier 
 to say of the dead now than at any other season of 
 the year: “ They are not here, they are risen! ” 
 
XI 
 ODOURS 
 
 HROUGH this series of sermons I have 
 conducted you, chiefly, through the realm of 
 the eye. Objects of sight are comparatively 
 
 easy to deal with. We love the things that we see. 
 In one instance I made a new departure and carried 
 you into the domain of the ear. My subject then was 
 “Sounds.” In my last sermon I combined the two, 
 taking “ Spring” for my subject, which is a complex 
 of sights and sounds. Here, I make a radical depar- 
 ture, and ask you to follow me into the kingdom of the 
 Nose. My subject is “ Odours.” 
 
 I count this the most difficult of all the subjects with 
 which I have, thus far, attempted to deal. There is 
 no doubt that the sense of smell is a disparaged sense. 
 Everybody would agree in saying that it stands at the 
 bottom of the list. ‘The sense of sight stands first. 
 People are always saying: “ What an awful thing it is 
 to be blind! How I should hate to lose my sight!” 
 Next to the eye stands the ear. “Isn't it terrible to 
 be deaf?” is a question which is often propounded. 
 Next to that, probably, comes the sense of touch; 
 although some, no doubt, would put the sense of touch 
 at the top. What would life be if our sense of touch 
 were destroyed? And then comes the sense of taste, 
 and, last of all, at the end of the procession, comes the 
 sense of smell. If some one should say: “ It is neces- 
 sary for you to give up at least one of your senses, 
 which one shall it be?” there is no doubt you would 
 swiftly answer—‘“ Let it be the sense of smell.” 
 Preached, May 29, 1921. 
 
 135 
 
136 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 It is difficult to say interesting things about the nose. 
 The nose does not lend itself easily to romance. ‘There 
 is nothing poetic about it. You can work the eye into 
 poetry and also the ear, even the hands and the feet, 
 but it is difficult to make anything either romantic or 
 poetic out of the nose. Educators have never paid 
 much attention to the sense of smell. All of our other 
 senses are assiduously cultivated in the schools. 
 Within the last twenty-five years many persons have 
 emphasized the importance of cultivating the hand. 
 It is claimed that the brain cannot be fully developed 
 unless the hand is cultivated. It is by doing things 
 with our hand that we learn to think straight with 
 our mind. We have heard endless talk about the im- 
 portance of the cultivation of the eye. The art of 
 observation is highly extolled. Boys and girls are 
 urged to cultivate the powers of observation, and a 
 deal has been said in regard to the importance of 
 cultivating the sense of hearing. It is counted tre- 
 mendously important that boys and girls should learn 
 to discriminate notes and appreciate the highest forms 
 of music. It is somewhat remarkable that hardly any- 
 thing has been said in regard to the importance of 
 cultivating the sense of smell. The eye and the ear 
 are highly prized, and the cultivation of them is con- 
 stantly insisted on, but the power of discriminating 
 odours, or analyzing a mixture of perfumes, that is 
 not to be found among the list of educational fads. 
 Educational reformers have looked in every other 
 direction for new fields to conquer, except in the 
 direction of the nose. 
 
 In society hardly anything is said about the sense of 
 smell. In Japan they have a game in which a person 
 brings into the room perhaps twenty kinds of incense 
 
ODOURS 137 
 
 on atray. These forms of incense are mingled, two 
 and three at a time, and each member of the company 
 is asked to guess which kinds of perfume have been 
 mingled. ‘The person who guesses right, the largest 
 number of times, is the person who wins the game. 
 No such game as that is heard of in all America. 
 We do not find pleasure in cultivating the power of the 
 nose. I have read, somewhere, of a person who at- 
 tempted to give a concert of perfumes, but it was 
 universally conceded that the concert was not a suc- 
 cess. It is impossible for us to do anything with 
 - odours in society. Even the scientists have not done 
 as much with the sense of smell as they have done 
 with the sense of sight and hearing. Some years ago 
 when the Encyclopedia Britannica came out, some- 
 body counted the number of pages devoted to sound, 
 and found twenty-two. The attention given to sight 
 covered sixteen pages, whereas all that was said about 
 the sense of smell covered only a page and a half. 
 Physicists, physiologists and psychologists have done 
 a deal of work in this kingdom, but, as yet, they are 
 only children playing on the shore, picking up a pebble 
 now and then, while the great ocean of truth lies all 
 undiscovered before them. 
 We have banished the nose from public worship. 
 This is quite interesting when one bears in mind that, 
 in all the pagan religions of antiquity, the nose was 
 given a prominent place. The Egyptians were espe- 
 cially fond of fragrance, and all their religious 
 ceremony was carried on in an air freighted with 
 incense. Moses was instructed in all the science of 
 the Egyptians. And that is no doubt the reason why 
 incense was given a place in the Jewish Church. In 
 Exodus and Leviticus we read again and again of 
 
138 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 how incense is to be burned. ‘The sense of smell was . 
 given its proper place in the worship of Jehovah. In 
 the second century an effort was made to introduce 
 incense into Christian worship, but there were many 
 objectors and the progress was slow, but at last those 
 who favoured incense were victorious, and in the third 
 century A. D., the use of incense became an estab- 
 lished feature of Christian worship. In both the 
 Greek and the Roman Churches, down to the present 
 hour, the sense of smell is made use of in the ritual. 
 
 In the sixteenth century the Reformers drove out 
 incense, with many other things, and for the last 
 four hundred years we have had no incense in our 
 Protestant churches. It is interesting that for some 
 reason or other we are willing to use only the ear. 
 We all acknowledge the utility of music, we feel that 
 music is an indispensable part of a completed wor- 
 ship. But as for the eye we are not interested in 
 it. We have gone a short distance in the direction 
 of the eye, but the distance is short indeed. In some 
 of our churches we have beautiful stained-glass 
 windows, but it is not until you come into the Roman 
 Catholic Church that you find a feast that is spread 
 for the eye. There you will find not only pictured 
 windows, but you will find paintings and statues and 
 gorgeous robes. And not only is a place given to the 
 eye but also to the touch. The Roman Catholic 
 makes use of the crucifix and the rosary and the holy 
 water, and he makes use of the sense of taste in the 
 Sacrament, and in order to increase his joy in wor- 
 ship he fills the air of his church with incense. The 
 Roman Catholic summons all the five senses to take 
 part in the worship of God. This is one of the 
 explanations of the wonderful grip which the Roman 
 
ODOURS 139 
 
 Catholic Church has upon so many millions of human 
 beings. She maintains this grip on the mind because 
 she makes such free use of the bodily senses. 
 
 People who live in cities are especially prone to 
 disparage the sense of smell. In the city the word 
 “smell” comes to mean a “ disagreeable smell.””’ We 
 do not ordinarily speak of odours in a city unless they 
 are disagreeable and we wish to express our dis- 
 pleasure. It is in the city that we smell garbage cans 
 and gasometers and, now and then, get a stench out 
 of the open mouth of a sewer. We feel, sometimes, 
 that it would be far better if we had no nose at all. 
 Happiness would be increased if we could dispense 
 with the sense of smelling. 
 
 And so from many reasons throughout the civilized 
 world, the sense of smell has become a neglected sense. 
 The inventors have passed it by. They have made 
 spectacles for the eyes, microscopes and telescopes, 
 but they have not made any instrument to assist the 
 nose. ‘They have done their best to help the ear, they 
 have created the stethoscope, and I know not how 
 many other instruments. During the World War 
 they devised an apparatus by means of which it was 
 possible to hear the movement of the propeller of a 
 U boat at the bottom of the sea. The inventor has 
 manufactured artificial ear-drums, and has supplied us 
 with ear-trumpets and acousticons, but nothing has 
 yet been created to heighten the sense of smell. We 
 put infinitesimal particles of matter on a glass slide 
 and magnify the size of them for the eye, but there 
 is no instrument yet devised which can magnify the 
 potency of an odour. 
 
 The neglect of the sense of smell is recorded even 
 in our language. When a person cannot see we have 
 
140 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 an adjective ready made to express it—“ He is blind! * 
 we say. When a person cannot hear, we say at once 
 —‘‘He is deaf!” But if a person cannot smell there 
 is no adjective with which to describe him. We have 
 never thought it worth while to coin one. 
 
 The result of all this is, that the sense of smell is 
 a decadent sense. Somebody has called it a fallen 
 angel. It does not stand so high as it stood thousands 
 of years ago. What its future is going to be it would 
 be hazardous to conjecture. We know that the savage 
 is far superior to the civilized man in the development 
 of the sense of smell. Savages can hunt game by 
 means of their nose. Peruvian Indians are said to be 
 able to distinguish a foe in the dark, and tell from 
 what tribe the foe has come from his own particular 
 odour. But the savages are inferior to the animals 
 when it comes to the sense of smell. What a won- 
 derful creature a dog is in the realm of odours! We 
 call him an inferior animal, and he must smile at us, 
 and think us conceited. While he hes at our feet 
 he is taking in bits of information from the surround- 
 ing universe of which we have no knowledge. We 
 sometimes think he is asleep because his eyes are 
 closed, but he is not asleep. If you will notice his nose 
 you will discover he is intensely awake. He is receiv- 
 ing wireless messages from all directions, and the re- 
 ceiving station of the messages is his nose. A dog 
 can pick up a scent from the ground and follow it 
 for miles through the woods. ‘There are probably a 
 thousand odours near the ground, but the dog can pick 
 up the scent which he wants. It may be that of a 
 fox, or a rabbit, or the boots of his master, and he 
 can follow it for miles until at last it brings him out 
 to the place where he wants to be. 
 
ODOURS 141 
 
 But even the animals, wonderful as they are, are 
 inferior to the insects in their power of smell. Ants 
 are said to be deaf, but their power of smell is 
 phenomenally acute. Bees use their eyes, but it is their 
 sense of smell which is the guide of their conduct. 
 Insects do not care for the colour of the flowers. 
 Insects live in a universe of odours. Is it not strange 
 that there should be millions of creatures for whom 
 the universe is not, as for us, a mass either of colour 
 or of sound, but a vast mass of odours? It is said 
 that the moth can detect the presence of another moth 
 within the radius of a mile. 
 
 In the history of the race it is interesting to note 
 how within the last three thousand years the sense of 
 smell has deteriorated. Among the peoples of antiq- 
 uity the most cultivated were the Greeks. No other 
 race rose higher than they. There are scholars, to- 
 day, who declare that the Greeks were as much 
 superior to us as we are superior to a low grade of 
 barbarians. They were the leaders in philosophy and 
 science and art, and it was one of their characteristics 
 that they cultivated the sense of smell. They were 
 lovers of perfume. They kept their clothing in 
 scented chests. While they were eating at their ban- 
 quets the air was filled with the odour of fragrant 
 woods. Often the fountains played with perfumed 
 waters. You will remember how in The Iliad the 
 gods in Olympus were delighted with the odour that 
 came up from the burning oxen, and you will not 
 forget how in The Aincid Venus, as she walked, ex- 
 haled a delicious fragrance. Even the gods and the 
 goddesses of the pagan world were fragrant. 
 
 After the Greeks came the Arabs. ‘They were 
 leaders in science and philosophy and art, and they 
 
142 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 also developed the sense of smell to an astonishing 
 degree. It is said that an Arab can detect smoke at 
 a distance of forty miles. All through the Middle 
 Ages there was a great commerce in spices and gums 
 and fragrant woods. In the Renaissance both men 
 and women carried receptacles about with them 
 which contained perfume. At the end of the 
 eighteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte every morning 
 poured cologne water over his shoulders and hands. 
 There is a vast use of perfume even to-day, but to 
 many persons it has become disagreeable. If we have 
 it at all it must be exceedingly faint, and moreover 
 it oftentimes awakens suspicion, for, not infrequently, 
 a beautiful odour is only an embroidered veil thrown 
 over the face of a dirty smell. But no matter how 
 far this angel may have fallen, it is safe to say that 
 it will not fall completely out of existence. 
 
 Let us think about it for a little while, and follow 
 out some of the questions which it naturally suggests. 
 ‘Let us begin with the undeniable fact that the sense 
 of smell is a gift of God. God created man in His 
 own image, and when He created man He gave him 
 the sense of smell. When He made the brain He 
 made the olfactory lobes. When He was fashioning 
 that organ of thought He set aside a certain section 
 of it for the discrimination and enjoyment of odours. 
 This is the Lord’s doing and it ought to be wonder- 
 ful in our eyes. ‘The same God who made the solar 
 system made also the nervous system, and one is fully 
 as wonderful as the other. In the nervous system 
 there are nerves known as the olfactory nerves, nerves 
 whose special business it is to carry to the brain those 
 sensations which are produced by odours. When Job 
 ‘ooked at the heavens and the earth he exclaimed: 
 
 | 
 
 
 

 
 ODOURS 143 
 
 “These are parts of his ways.” And so you and I 
 when we look at the structure of the brain and the 
 arrangement of the nervous system can say when we 
 look at the olfactory lobes and the olfactory nerves— 
 these are a part of His ways. 
 
 Why did the Lord God Almighty create the olfac- 
 _tory lobes and the olfactory nerves? It was because 
 He had decided in the counsels of eternity that the 
 universe should be a scented universe. In His wisdom 
 He had planned a perfumed cosmos, in His goodness 
 He had decreed that all created things should be 
 fragrant. When, therefore, you stand face to face 
 with odours, you are standing face to face with one 
 of the works of the Most High. When God made 
 the human temple He decided there should be five 
 gates: the eye-gate, the ear-gate, the touch-gate, the 
 taste-gate, and the gate of smell; and through the 
 last of the gates it was decreed there should be 
 carried treasures not to be carried through any other 
 gate for the pleasure and delight of the soul. 
 
 The sense of smell is an amazing gift of God. 
 What a mysterious gift it is! It is just as wonder- 
 ful as the gift of sight. If it does not seem so 
 wonderful it is because we have not thought of it 
 enough. Everything becomes the more wonderful the 
 longer you think of it. We are all the time praising 
 the eye. We say it is a delicate organ, and so it is, 
 and yet it is not so delicate as the sense of smell. 
 The eye is one of the toughest of our organs. It will 
 work hour after hour, day after day through the 
 years, hardly flinching, seldom fainting. But the 
 sense of smell is so delicate that you can exhaust it 
 in a few moments. Put a rose to your nostrils and 
 the scent of it is exceedingly sweet. Bring the rose 
 
144 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 near you again, the scent is sweet, but it is fainter. 
 Bring it again and the scent is fainter still. Keep on 
 bringing it, and very soon the rose has no odour at 
 all. What has happened? The sense of smell has 
 become exhausted. It is so fatigued that it is no 
 longer able to carry impressions to the brain. ‘That, 
 you see, is a wonderful protection against odours 
 that are disagreeable. When you see a man work- 
 ing in a sewer, you wonder how he can endure the 
 odour. He endures it because he does not smell it. 
 The sense of smell, at the very beginning, grew weary, 
 and refused to tell the brain what the odour was. 
 
 We boast much about the wonderful power of the 
 eye, the long distance through which it will travel, but 
 the nose will travel immeasurably farther. In the 
 Eastern Archipelago there are islands known as the 
 Isles of Spices. Travellers on shipboard become con- 
 scious of the presence of the islands when as yet they 
 lie below the curve of the sea. The eye cannot see 
 them, but the sense of smell takes hold of them. They 
 report themselves to the nose before they stand before 
 the eye. 
 
 The sense of smell is one of the most independent 
 of all our senses. ‘The eye is dependent absolutely on 
 light. Without the sun and the moon and stars it 
 cannot do anything. ‘The eye carries us successfully 
 through all the hours of the day, but when night falls, 
 if the clouds cover the moon and the stars, then we 
 stumble and fall. But the nose does not weary. ‘The 
 nose goes heroically on; into the night it travels. ‘The 
 darkness and the light are both alike to it. ‘The night 
 shines round about it as the day. 
 
 The sense of smell is the finest-fingered of all our 
 senses. We find it difficult sometimes to pick up a 
 
 
 
ODOURS 145 
 
 needle from the floor, we are so awkward, our fingers 
 are so clumsy. But think of what the sense of smell 
 can do. It will pick up an atom of musk in the at- 
 mosphere—a particle of musk so small that scientists 
 say it is no more than two one-millionths part of a 
 milligram, so small that it is impossible for the eye 
 to take hold of it. Only the sense of smell has fingers 
 fine enough to pick up a thing like that. When you 
 hold a rose before your face the eye can take hold of 
 the colour and the form, but those are coarse-grained 
 things compared with the odour of the rose. ‘That is 
 its essence, that is its spirit, its soul, its ethereal nature, 
 and only the sense of smell can lay hold of that. 
 
 The sense of smell is the most intimate of all our 
 senses. It is the sense of the imagination. It is the 
 sense of memory. It is wonderful how odours will 
 call back old associations. They have a magic way 
 of striking the electric chain by which we are darkly 
 bound. ‘The sense of smell runs down into the very 
 centre of the soul. There are odours that cause a 
 headache, and there are odours which cause people to 
 fall into a faint. There are odours which bring on 
 a hemorrhage; occasionally an odour has caused death. 
 A man has died, before now, under the blow of an 
 odour. 
 
 Whenever we deal with Nature we are impressed 
 by the infinite variety of whatever it is we are study- 
 ing. The wonderful thing about the stars is there are 
 so many of them, and the birds that they are so 
 numerous, and the flowers that they are so countless. 
 Whenever you go into the workshop of the Infinite you 
 are amazed by the abundance of the treasures which 
 you find there. I wonder how many odours there 
 are? ‘They are as innumerable as the sands of the sea- 
 
146 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 shore. Some of us, in our ignorance, speak only of 
 the odours of flowers. We do not grant even to all 
 the flowers the gift of fragrance. We say there are 
 odourous flowers and non-odourous flowers. But you 
 ought to be careful when you say a thing like that in 
 the presence of an insect. A flower is non-odourous 
 to you because your nose is so stupid. ‘There are no 
 non-odourous flowers. Everything in the realm of 
 the flowers is to the insect perfumed. 
 
 But fruits are no less odourous than flowers. It is 
 not simply with the taste that we enjoy fruit, it is 
 also with the nose. How delicious is the smell of 
 an apple or of a peach. Next to the pleasure of eat- 
 ing a melon is the pleasure of smelling one. I often 
 envy the men who spend their lives working with 
 fruit. There is an incense constantly burning on the 
 altar; they must feel always that they are in the home 
 of the gods. But trees also are odourous, ‘The roots 
 have one odour and the bark another, the wood still 
 another, the leaves still another, and the seeds another 
 still. A tree might be defined as a complex of odours. 
 A tree when it is cut down exhales a most wonderful 
 perfume, and even when it is dead and sawed up into 
 planks, the sawdust under your feet is fragrant. But 
 to me there is nothing in the realm of odours more 
 delicious than the smell of burning autumn leaves. 
 
 I love to ride through Westchester County in the 
 afternoon of autumn days when the gardeners have 
 gathered the leaves together and are burning them, 
 here and there in piles. ‘There is no sort of incense 
 that I know anything about that is diviner than that. 
 
 Of all the shops in which men work there is no 
 shop so attractive to me as a carpenter shop, and the 
 feature that makes it supremely attractive is the smell 
 
ODOURS 147 
 
 of the shavings. In the shavings I get the breath of 
 the tree. When you walk through the woods if you 
 are sensitively organized, there is a wonderful ex- 
 hilaration in your soul, and the explanation of it is 
 that you are being played upon by so many sights 
 and sounds and odours. Nature is throwing you 
 bouquets; some bouquets are for the eyes, others are 
 for the ears, and still others are for the nose. There 
 is an infinite number of delicate odours that you can- 
 not distinguish one from the other, but which will 
 give you a pleasure which you cannot describe. 
 Odours from the flowers and odours from the mosses, 
 and odours from the bark of trees and odours from 
 the ground. A forest is a great aggregate of per- 
 fumes. No wonder that when one walks through the 
 woods he feels that he is being cleansed and lifted into 
 heavenly places. 
 
 One of the great attractions of a farm is its odours, 
 and it is difficult to say which odour is the most 
 pleasant, whether it be that of a meadow in the morn- 
 ing, or whether it be of the grass that has just been 
 mown, or whether it be the breath of acow. When we 
 go to the seashore, one of the loveliest of its attrac- 
 tions is not the beauty of the water but the smell of 
 the salt. Just one whiff of the sea acts as a tonic and 
 makes the heart beat. All of the seasons are per- 
 fumed and each one has a perfume different from all 
 the others. If you were blind you could tell the dif- 
 ference between Summer and Spring, and between 
 Spring and Autumn, and between Autumn and Win- 
 ter. If you had no eyes nor ears you could say as 
 the seasons pass by: “ This is Spring, this is Summer, 
 this is Autumn, and this is Winter.” E;ven Winter is 
 odourous. One of the recent Russian novelists in de- 
 
148 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 scribing his heroine says: “‘ She came in to her lover’s 
 room after a walk through the crisp, wintry air and 
 stood at the table, and while she stood there her jacket 
 radiated the fresh sweet smell of the cold.” One of 
 the delightful features of Winter is the fresh, sweet 
 smell of the cold. 
 
 I cannot close my list of delightful odours without 
 speaking of one that is especially pleasant to me. It 
 is not an odour of Nature, but an odour of an in- 
 stitution created by man—the odour of the library. 
 I like the smell of books. On my first trip through 
 Europe, I was alone and, sometimes, got very home- 
 sick. And in every one of the capitals that I visited 
 I made a practice of going for a half-hour into a 
 library and sitting down, not to read the books but to 
 smell them. The odour carried me home, and I left 
 the place renewed and comforted. 
 
 Whether an odour is disagreeable or not depends 
 upon the person. How true it is that there is no 
 arguing about taste! We like the thing that we like, 
 and we dislike the thing which we dislike. "To some 
 there is no smell more disagreeable than the smell of 
 tobacco, to others it is exceedingly sweet. Some will 
 tun away from it, and others would like the odour in 
 their nostrils all the time. ‘There are people who are 
 sickened by the smell of apples, and others who dis- 
 like intensely the smell of roses. ‘There are some who 
 dislike the smell of a rocky shore at low tide and 
 there are others who love it much. To some the 
 exhalations of a dunghill are exceedingly disagree- 
 able, and to others they are highly pleasant. God 
 makes a variety of odours in order that each one may 
 find those which give him the highest pleasure. 
 
 What a mystery this world of odours is! How 
 
ODOURS 149 
 
 many questions one can ask which no one can answer! 
 How, for instance, can Nature manufacture such 
 subtle and beautiful perfumes as she does? Chemists 
 can manufacture artificial perfumes, but they are poor, 
 shabby imitations. ‘They never come up to the per- 
 fumes which Nature makes. When you go into the 
 laboratory of the chemist you are impressed by his 
 vast and intricate apparatus. When you open his 
 books you are dumbfounded by those long and mys- 
 terious formulas. Anybody can take a handful of 
 soil and rain-drops and set up in his backyard 
 a laboratory, and can have the sweetest of the per- 
 fumes which man knows. In the same little garden- 
 plot will grow violets and pansies and verbenas and 
 flox and mignonettes and primroses and hyacinths and 
 roses, each one with its own distinct and peculiar 
 fragrance, every fragrance perfect and unapproach- 
 able by anything created by man. How does the 
 Supreme Chemist work His miracle? We ask the 
 question and then stand dumb. 
 
 If you ask why this world of odour, and why this 
 sense of smell? my answer is that odours must have 
 been created for enhancing the pleasure of man. We 
 do not have a nose for the purpose of finding’ food. 
 We can find food without it; nor do we have a nose 
 for the purpose of protecting ourselves against our 
 foes, for in civilized society the nose is no protection 
 against enemies. ‘The sense of smell has been granted 
 us for the purpose of increasing the scope and the 
 volume of our joy. God wants us to be happy, and 
 so He spreads the table for the eye and also for the 
 ear, and also for the nose. He spreads the table before 
 us. Our cup runneth over. He has given us all 
 things richly to enjoy. When Jesus said: “ I am come 
 
150 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly,” 
 He was voicing the deepest wish in the heart of God. 
 It is God’s desire for every one of us that we may 
 have His joy, and that our joy may be full. Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson in his little poem Each and All says 
 that at one time in his life owing to the evanescent 
 nature of beauty he came to the conclusion that 
 beauty was something to be cast aside in order that 
 the soul might devote itself exclusively to the con- 
 templation of truth: 
 
 “Then I said, ‘I covet Truth; 
 Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat,— 
 I leave vt behind with the games of youth.” 
 
 But the universe at once began to enter its protest: 
 
 “As I spoke, beneath my feet 
 The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath. 
 Running over the club-moss burrs.” 
 
 Beauty bubbled up under the poet’s feet: 
 
 “T inhaled the violet’s breath; 
 Around me stood the oaks and firs; 
 Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground.” 
 
 That was beauty of a different sort! 
 
 “ Over me soared the eternal sky, 
 Full of light and of Deity;” 
 
 That was beauty different still. 
 
 “Again I saw, again I heard, 
 The rolling river, the morning bird ;—” 
 
 That was beauty of still another variety: And then 
 
 “ Beauty through my senses stole, 
 I yielded myself to the perfect whole.” 
 
XII 
 THE LANDSCAPE 
 
 m® Y subject in this sermon is “The Land- 
 scape.” Let me begin with a definition. 
 
 am Of course, we all know what a landscape 
 is when we see one. Possibly some of us have never 
 made an effort to write a definition of one. What 
 would you think of this as a definition? “A land- 
 scape is a piece of the earth’s surface which the eye 
 can carry,’ or, “A landscape is as much of the earth’s 
 surface as one can see at one time.’’ In other words 
 —“ A landscape is an eyeful of the earth’s surface.” 
 “An eyeful.” Let us meditate on that. We some- 
 times speak of a handful, and we know just what that 
 is. Our hand is a good-sized organ, and we can ex- 
 tend the dimensions of it by stretching the fingers; 
 but no matter how big we make our hand, it does not 
 hold much. If any one should ask you to thrust your 
 hand down into a bag of twenty-dollar gold pieces, 
 telling you that you could keep as many of the gold 
 pieces for yourself as you could pull out with one 
 hand, you would be quite doleful to discover how few 
 of them you could hold. A handful is only a small 
 bit, and so also is a mouthful. Every boy has often 
 
 
 
 _ been rueful because his mouth would hold so little. 
 
 But when we come to an eyeful, we pass into a dif- 
 ferent realm. There is no comparison between it and a 
 handful or an eyeful and a mouthful. Your eye cavity 
 is very shallow, not nearly so deep as the mouth, and 
 the retina is hardly larger than the nail of one’s thumb, 
 and yet see how much the eye can contain. It can 
 
 Preached, May 27, 1923. 
 I51 
 
/ 
 / 
 / 
 / 
 
 152 NATURE SERMONS’ 
 
 take in all these fields, that yonder range of hills ind 
 the mountain that towers beyond them. Fields, hills 
 and mountain—all can be packed in the eye, and still 
 there is room! Here on the right is a river, and over 
 on the left is a lake, and there is a waterfall on the 
 side of the hill flashing amidst the green. And all 
 these forms of water can be packed in the eye, and 
 still there is room! Here is an orchard, and yonder 
 is an oak-grove, and yonder on the side of the 
 mountain is a forest of spruce. All of these trees 
 can be packed in the eye. Here in one field there are 
 probably twenty cows, and yonder on the hill is a 
 flock of sheep, and over the grove a flock of crows is 
 flying *round and ’round. These can be driven into 
 the eye, for the eye is a sort of Noah’s ark, and can 
 hold all sorts of birds and beasts and creeping things. 
 There is a farmhouse, and there is a barn, and over 
 yonder on the bank of the river is a sawmill. The 
 landscape is not only the land but everything that man 
 has put on the land. Here in the field are a number 
 of men working. One of them is swinging a scythe. 
 Over here I see a man jogging along in a cart, and 
 over in yonder meadow I see a little girl, with a red 
 hat, playing with her dog. All these are held in the 
 eye, and still there is room! Yonder in the distance, 
 I see the gleam of the ocean. ‘The ocean is immense, 
 but even it can go into the eye. And over all is the 
 sky. ‘The sky is also a part of the landscape. Every 
 landscape painter knows that. You cannot have a 
 landscape without the sky. The sky is the element 
 which envelops all. Here, then, is what we mean by 
 a landscape. It is as much of the earth’s surface, and 
 the sky over it, as you can gather up at one time in 
 your eye. 
 
THE LANDSCAPE 153 
 
 Now, the first proposition I wish to lay down is 
 this—that all landscapes are beautiful. Some of you 
 may be inclined to deny that. You think at once of 
 landscapes which are far from beautiful. You prob- 
 ably can think of landscapes that are positively ugly 
 —bare and monotonous landscapes, from which all 
 loveliness has been banished, landscapes that depress 
 you, and from which you wish to make an escape. 
 But in spite of your protest, I must insist upon my 
 proposition, that all landscapes are beautiful. They 
 may not all be beautiful to you, but they are beautiful 
 to someone. Every landscape is beautiful to one who 
 has eyes to discern its beauty. We are men of dif- 
 ferent tastes. We like different kinds of music and 
 different kinds of poetry and different kinds of paint- 
 ings. It is not surprising that we should like different 
 kinds of landscapes. Some of us care nothing for a 
 landscape unless it is rugged and wild. We want 
 jagged rocks and mountain-peaks and deep, purple 
 valleys and primeval forests. But others do not like 
 that kind of landscape at all. They want a domesti- 
 cated landscape, a humanized landscape, a landscape 
 in which the hand of man is evident. They want 
 beautiful lawns and flower-gardens and trees that are 
 set in rows and carefully trimmed. ‘They want the 
 porch and the summer pavilion. No landscape can 
 satisfy their heart which does not bear upon its face 
 the stamp of the hand of man. 
 
 some of us count no landscape beautiful that does 
 not contain some form of water. ‘There must be a 
 river or a lake or a waterfall, or, at least, a little 
 pond. The heart remains unsatisfied unless the eyes 
 fall on water. Some of us are never awake to scenery 
 until we reach the seacoast. The inland water does 
 
154 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 not satisfy us. Show us the seacoast with its ro¢ks 
 and its sand and the surf of the incoming tide, and 
 then the heart sings. Some of us see no beauty at 
 all in old salt-marshes near the sea, or in stretches of 
 country that are desert and flat, but that is because 
 we are blind. If we have turned our back upon a 
 landscape as containing in it nothing worth seeing, an 
 artist comes along and exclaims: “ Ah! this is what 
 I have been looking for!” He promptly sets up his 
 easel and goes to work. When you pass through an 
 art gallery, you turn your back on this painting and 
 that and the other, saying: “I do not care for that. 
 I see nothing in that.” But the artist sees something 
 in it. ‘There is a beauty there which causes his soul 
 to glow! He that hath eyes to see—sees! 
 
 The landscape is continually changing. God is a 
 great artist, and He is always showing His work under 
 different lights. He throws a thin cloud over the face 
 of the sun, and then says: “‘ Now look at the land- 
 scape and tell Me how you like it.” A little later He 
 throws over the face of the sun a thick cloud and 
 asks: ‘‘ How do you like that?’ The landscape never 
 remains the same, two consecutive hours. It is a vast 
 colour scheme, and the colours are constantly changing. 
 
 Here, in the city, our journalists get out afternoon 
 editions. There is a three o’clock edition, a four 
 o'clock, a five o’clock and a six o’clock edition. 
 Every edition tells us of some new robbery, some new 
 murder, some new accident. What a pleasure to read 
 the afternoon editions of God! He gets out a new 
 edition of the landscape every hour, and He prints 
 them on the clouds. He loves to print hills and dis- 
 tant trees upon the clouds. The three o’clock edition, 
 it may be, He prints on silver, and the four o’clock 
 
THE LANDSCAPE 16s 
 
 edition, He prints on lavender, the five o’clock edition 
 He prints on vermilion, the six o’clock edition He 
 prints on violet or on gold. Not only does He give 
 us those daily editions of the landscape, but He gives 
 us a mew sort of landscape in each of the four seasons. 
 The Spring landscape is not at all the landscape of the 
 Summer, and in the Autumn you have a different land- 
 scape still, and the Winter landscape is different far 
 from all the others. 
 
 To each country God gives its own particular land- 
 scape. Great Britain is a little country, but how 
 varied are its landscapes! The landscape of England 
 is one thing, the landscape of Wales is another thing, 
 the landscape of Scotland is different still, while the 
 landscape of Ireland differs from all the others. This 
 does not mean that you have only one kind of land- 
 scape in each of these four little countries, for you 
 have a hundred kinds in each country. The land- 
 scape of the south of England is not like the landscape 
 of the north, and the landscape of Essex is far dif- 
 ferent from the landscape of Devonshire. What a 
 contrast between the landscape of Lincolnshire and the 
 landscape of the Lake country! All the landscapes of 
 all countries are beautiful. When you pass to the 
 Continent, you have a series of contrasts. The land- 
 scape of Holland and the landscape of Switzerland, 
 how far the two are apart! Some people say there is 
 no scenery in Holland, but they do not know what 
 they say. There is as much scenery in Holland as 
 there is in Switzerland, but it is of a different kind. 
 Who that has ever looked out upon those far-extended 
 fields, with their cattle and their canals, could ever 
 forget Holland? No wonder the artists all love to. 
 paint her. But when you pass into Switzerland, there 
 
156 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 is beauty of another type. ‘The scenery of Norway is 
 far different from the scenery of Belgium, and the 
 scenery of Spain is not at all like the scenery of Italy. 
 The scenery of Russia is different from the scenery 
 of Turkey, and the landscape of Palestine is far re- 
 moved from the landscape of Egypt. ‘To every coun- 
 try God gives landscapes in abundance, and all His 
 landscapes are beautiful. 
 
 This has been a great comfort to me as I have 
 travelled from country to country. It has brought me 
 relief of heart in Mohammedan countries, where every- 
 thing human is more or less depressing. Moham- 
 medan government is nearly always a blunder and a 
 farce, but in all Mohammedan countries, God has 
 spread out exquisite landscapes, and it has solaced me 
 to know that Mohammedans, if they are deprived of 
 the blessings of good government, are still permitted 
 to feed their souls on the beauty of the masterpieces 
 of God. 
 
 But one need not travel in Europe to see land- 
 scapes. We have an abundance of them here at home. 
 No country is richer in scenery than our own. It 1s 
 worth while for an American to travel from New 
 York City to San Francisco simply to gaze on the 
 landscape. ‘There is a film created by the Almighty 
 three thousand miles long. No more wonderful film 
 has even the Infinite ever created. It is not a land- 
 scape, but a series of landscapes, one landscape fol- 
 lowing another in swift succession. Now you are on 
 the plain. Now you are in the mountains. Now you 
 are in a valley. Now you are on the prairie. Now 
 you are in the desert. Now you are in great forests. 
 But wherever you are, you are in the midst of beauty. 
 The only blot on the landscape is the city and town. 
 
——— 
 
 THE LANDSCAPE 157 
 
 Our locomotives have a fashion of running into the 
 backyards of towns, where the traveller sees piles of 
 tin cans and rubbish-heaps and discarded kettles and 
 pots—where he sees multitudinous clothes-lines, from 
 which underclothes of all shapes and sizes are flutter- 
 ing in the wind. MHere indeed is ugliness, but it is 
 the ugliness created by man. After you have spent 
 hours with the landscapes, and come to a stop in the 
 city, there blows in upon you a soot-storm—every 
 flake of soot in the shape of a newspaper containing 
 the story of some new divorce suit or some recent 
 defalcation. But no matter what we think or see of 
 the cities, there is only one fair judgment of the 
 country—the landscape is beautiful. And the Ameri- 
 can who travels from New York Harbour to the 
 Golden Gate is in a good mood at the end of his 
 journey to sing: 
 
 “My country! ’tis of thee, 
 Sweet land of liberty, 
 Of thee I sing.” 
 
 If he has never been able to sing it before, he will 
 sing it now, with a glow of the heart: 
 
 “T love thy rocks and rills, 
 Thy woods and templed hills, 
 My heart with rapture thrills 
 
 Like that above.” 
 
 It is a consolation to know that the landscape be- 
 longs to us all. The Declaration of Independence says 
 that “‘ All men are created equal.” There are many 
 times when this does not seem to be true. But when 
 it comes to the landscape, we feel that all men are 
 indeed equal. One of the brightest things Ralph 
 
158 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Waldo Emerson ever said is the remark he made 
 in his essay Nature published nearly ninety years 
 ago. He is speaking of the landscape and says: “It 
 is made up of twenty or thirty farms. Mr. ‘A’ owns 
 this one, Mr. ‘B’ that one, Mr. ‘C’ the other one; 
 but no one of them owns the landscape.” The land- 
 scape belongs to every one who can enjoy it, and the 
 men who own the land have to pay taxes on it. Every- 
 thing now is taxed but the landscape. ‘That is yours, 
 and you pay no tax on it. All sorts of property have 
 to be kept up, but no one has to worry about keep- 
 ing up the landscape. If you own land, you may have 
 a lawsuit, because some other man may push his 
 boundary line over on yours, but there are no law- 
 suits over the landscape. The landscape is a free gift 
 of God, which He offers to us all. 
 
 It is an interesting fact that each one of us has a 
 landscape of his own. The landscape of each one of 
 us differs from the landscape of everybody else. I 
 do not know what your landscape is like. Nor do 
 you know what mine is like. I do not know 
 how many colours you see, nor do you know 
 how many I see. I do not know how piercing 
 your eyesight is. It may be you see more tints than 
 I do—more shades and grades of colour. It may be 
 I see more than you. How many of the details of 
 the landscape make an impression on you, I do not 
 know. Some men see only masses. ‘They have not 
 an eye for detail. Whether I see more detail than | 
 you, we shall never know. ‘To each one of us is a 
 landscape given, particularly our own. I love to won- 
 der what the landscape must have been to men who 
 have had keener eyes than mine. I wish I could have 
 seen the landscape that Ruskin saw. The Alps swept 
 
THE LANDSCAPE 159 
 
 Ruskin off his feet. He fell on his knees and prayed. 
 I am mightily impressed by the Alps, but they have 
 never swept me off my feet. I wish | could have 
 seen the landscape that Wordsworth saw. It is im- 
 possible, for I do not have Wordsworth’s eyes. Sir 
 Walter Scott saw much in Nature, but he did not see 
 the colour that was seen by William Black. William 
 Cowper saw many beauties in the landscape, but he 
 had no such eyes as Alexander Humboldt. There are 
 some men so sensitive and impressionable that they 
 have feared to give themselves up to Nature, feeling 
 that they would be swept completely away. Lacor- 
 daire, the great preacher of Notre Dame in the early 
 part of the nineteenth century, wrote one day: “I have 
 said ‘ good-bye’ to the oceans and the rivers and the 
 mountains.” He said it in a tone of exultation. He 
 
 had found himself, I presume, more and more under 
 the control of natural beauty, and he wanted to keep 
 his soul free for the enjoyment of spiritual loveli- 
 ness. He deliberately turned his back on Nature, in 
 order to stand face to face with his moral ideal. 
 William Blake, the English artist and poet, always de- 
 nounced Wordsworth as an idolater. He accused 
 him of worshipping Nature. Blake looked upon 
 Nature as “an illusion of Satan.” He determined to 
 keep himself free from the fascination of natural 
 beauty, in order that he might give himself unre- 
 servedly to the adoration of the beautiful in the spirit 
 world. 
 
 One always sees the landscape through himself. 
 There is no other way to see it. That is the reason 
 the landscape sometimes seems to be sad, and at other 
 times it seems to be glad. It depends upon the mood 
 of the soul. There are times when the landscape 
 
160 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 laughs, and there are times when it cries, and whether 
 it laughs or cries depends upon our own heart. There 
 aré landscapes inexpressibly dear to us, because we 
 see them through the memories of childhood. Who 
 could ever forget the landscape upon which his boyish 
 eyes feasted. When he goes back, no matter how 
 many years have elapsed, he finds in the old landscape 
 a beauty which he can find nowhere else in all the 
 world. He finds himself walking in music, and the 
 music is caused by the vibration of memories’ chords. 
 They are being played upon by the beauties of the 
 earth and sky. There are spots on the earth’s sur- 
 face for ever sacred, and their loveliness has in it 
 something supernatural, because of the mighty events 
 which took place there. 
 
 I think, just now, of three great battlefields. The 
 battlefield of Waterloo is beautiful beyond descrip- 
 tion; and who can look at it without thinking of the 
 men who fought and died there? The battlefield of 
 Gettysburg, how it smiles! But I never see it smile 
 that I do not see women weeping because their sons 
 are dead. Last summer I stood upon the battlefield 
 of Verdun. Beauty stretches out in all directions. 
 Over all sweeps the eternal sky, full of light and of 
 Deity. At my feet the poppies blossomed. But as I 
 looked, I thought of the 400,000 French boys who 
 gave up their life upon that field, and the whole land- 
 scape became dabbled in blood. We must always look 
 upon the landscape through ourself—through what we 
 know, through what we have suffered, through what 
 we are. 
 
 We have artists known as sculptors. They chisel 
 marble into forms of beauty. God Himself is the 
 Great Sculptor. He fashions the landscape by means 
 
THE LANDSCAPE 16r 
 
 of thousands of workmen of His own selection. He 
 has chiselled the mountains and the hills, the ridges 
 and the valleys, after a plan of His own. What is 
 the landscape but a piece of sculpture—the handiwork 
 of the Eternal Artist? We have landscape gardeners. 
 The only reason that we have them is because God 
 Himself is the Great Landscape Gardener. 
 
 The world, if rightly seen, is still the Garden of 
 Eden, and in the cool of the day, you can still walk 
 with God. We have landscape painters, but we 
 would not have them if God Himself were not a 
 landscape painter. He painted the picture first, and 
 all our landscape painters are only interpreters and 
 copyists. Herbert Spencer used to say: “ No matter 
 where we are, we are in the presence of the Infinite 
 and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” 
 Certainly all must feel, in the midst of the landscape, 
 that “all of this beauty has come from the Infinite 
 Mind and Heart.” A man who has spent a day in 
 feasting his soul upon its loveliness is ready to say 
 with new confidence and gladness, ‘I believe in God, 
 the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” 
 
XIII 
 LAKES 
 
 W HAT is a lake? It is not easy to say just 
 what it is. We all know what it is, and 
 yet we cannot readily define it. That is a 
 singular thing—that we can know a thing and yet 
 not tell it. We cannot say that a lake is a large 
 body of water, because an ocean is that, and a lake 
 is not an ocean, nor is an ocean a lake. We cannot 
 say that a lake is a small body of water, because a 
 puddle is a small body of water, and a puddle is not 
 a lake, nor is a lake a puddle. Somebody has said 
 that “it is a considerable sized body of water,” but 
 that will not do. Lake Erie is a considerable sized 
 body of water, but Lake Mohonk is small, and yet 
 both Erie and Mohonk are lakes. Lakes are of all 
 sizes, some are big, some are so very big that we re- 
 fuse to call them lakes at all. The Caspian Lake, for 
 instance, is so immense that we call it a “sea.” The 
 Mediterranean Lake is so enormous that no one 1s 
 willing to call it a lake. For centuries it has been 
 known as a “sea.” And yet a lake can be very large 
 and still be called a “lake.” Lake Superior is as large 
 as all New England, with the exception of Maine, but 
 we never call it a “‘ sea,” we call it a “lake.” Lakes, 
 then, can be very large, and they also can be small. 
 When they reach a certain degree of smallness we call 
 them ponds or pools. But how small must a lake be 
 to be called a “pool” ? There is a pool in Africa 
 known as “ Stanley’s Pool,” which is twenty-five miles 
 
 Preached, May 25, 1924. 
 162 
 
 
 
LAKES 163 
 
 long and sixteen miles wide. How proud it must be 
 to be the biggest pool in the world! A little lake is 
 called a pond. ‘The most famous lake in Massachu- 
 setts is called a “ pond’”’—*“ Walden Pond.” Henry 
 Thoreau lifted that pond to immortality by loving it. 
 And, therefore, if you want to define a lake at all, 
 you might say “it is a body of water somewhere be- 
 tween a puddle and a sea.” 
 
 There are two traits, however, which enable us to 
 tell a lake from any other body of water: A lake is 
 standing water. A lake does not flow. In this re- 
 spect it differs from a river—a river is always going 
 somewhere. It has an engagement to keep with some 
 other river further down, or possibly with the ocean. 
 The Hudson is never willing to stand still. If you 
 compel a river to stop, it ceases to be a river. Say 
 “halt!” and it lies down and dies, and is transmuted 
 into something else. A river cannot stop and remain 
 itself. The Hudson is a river, and therefore it is 
 always going on. If you could hear it talking, you 
 would hear it saying: “I have an engagement with 
 the Atlantic off Sandy Hook, and so I cannot tarry.” 
 That is quite different fromalake. Lake Placid never 
 goes anywhere—always stays where itis. Lake Placid 
 is content. It has no engagement with any river or 
 with any ocean. A brook also is never still—it 
 hastens on “to join the brimming river,” but a lake 
 has no such disposition. Lake Saranac is not dream- 
 ing of joining any river. Lake Saranac wants to be 
 where it is. It says: “I cannot leave my little sister 
 to marry any river. I am going to stay just where 
 I am always.” ‘That, then, is one mark of a lake—it 
 is standing water. 
 
 You always know where to find it. Another mark 
 
164 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 of a lake is that it is silent. Water is always vocal 
 when it has a chance, except in lakes. ‘The ocean is 
 noisy. When a storm slaps it in the face it roars like 
 a lion that is angry, but even when the ocean is in a 
 gentle mood, it is everlastingly talkative. When you 
 leave the city and go down to spend a night on the 
 coast you go to bed in your cottage or your hotel, 
 and hear the ocean talking. It will talk to you all 
 night long. It is worse than an elevated train. The 
 train comes and goes, but the ocean is with you every 
 minute. Waterfalls thunder. The greatest of them 
 thunder so loud you can hear them several miles. 
 Even brooks are noisy. ‘The poets say that the brooks 
 “babble.” An English poet, who was very fond of 
 brooks, did not hesitate to say that they “ chatter.” 
 All the poets have been glad to say that brooks “ sing.” 
 But a lake never sings, never chatters, never babbles, 
 never thunders, never roars. A lake is always silent. 
 It believes with Carlyle, that silence is golden. To be 
 sure, a lake can be made to say something. Ifa storm 
 strikes it hard, and strikes it repeatedly, it can compel 
 a lake to speak, but that is not its nature. It will 
 speak for only a little while, and then sink down into 
 silence again. And so, if you want to converse with 
 a lake, you must carry on conversation without words. 
 Here, then, we arrive within sight of a definition: 
 “A lake is a standing, silent body of water, some- 
 where between a puddle and a sea.” 
 
 But why bother about a definition at all? Defini- 
 tions are man-made institutions. They have their 
 uses, but they are a great nuisance. Nature does not 
 believe in them—she has no definitions. What dif- 
 ference does it make what a lake is, provided you know 
 what itis? Nature cares nothing for names. Names 
 
LAKES 165 
 
 are all man-made. ‘There are no names in the great 
 book of Nature. You remember it is said in Genesis, 
 that after God had created all living things, He turned 
 them over to man, saying: “You may name them.” 
 One might infer that He meant to say: “I have no 
 time for such an occupation as that. I do not care 
 to name things. You may coin what names you 
 please.” And therefore a man can enjoy Nature with- 
 out knowing any names at all. I am so glad I do 
 not have to know the names of the stars, or the names 
 of the trees, or the names of the flowers. They are 
 all what they are, and I want nothing to do with 
 mere names. Names are a great network of imperti- 
 nences and nuisances which man has spread over the 
 form of Nature. I advise you to tear the whole net- 
 work away, and deal with Nature without names. A 
 rose is sweet no matter what you call it, and a lake 
 is beautiful no matter what its name. You may call 
 it “ pond ”’ or “ pool,” “mere” or “tarn,” “loch” or 
 “lake,” it makes no difference. A lake is what it is, 
 and that is what we are thinking of in this sermon. 
 
 It is a strange fact that the larger the lake, the less 
 impressive it is. A lake to be impressive must be 
 small. ‘That is not true of anything else. It is cer- 
 tainly not true of buildings—the larger the building 
 the more we are impressed by it. A cathedral im- 
 presses us largely in proportion to its magnitude. St. 
 Patrick’s Cathedral is the most impressive church in 
 New York, because it is the largest. Everybody, on 
 visiting New York, wants to see St. Patrick’s. When 
 the Cathedral of St. John The Divine is completed, 
 every one will want to see that. It will be the third 
 largest cathedral in the world, and as soon as visitors 
 arrive we shall want to take them to see it. St. 
 
166 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 Peter’s, in Rome, has for centuries held the eyes of 
 the world, not because of the material of which it is 
 built, but because of its vastness. It is the largest 
 temple ever erected by man to the glory of the Son 
 of God. 
 
 Even skyscrapers are impressive according to their 
 height. We have little skyscrapers, but they make no 
 impression. Everybody wants to see the Woolworth 
 Building, because that is the highest of all. And if we 
 ever get another skyscraper still higher, then every- 
 body will want to see that! As with buildings so with 
 mountains. We are impressed by Mount Washing- 
 ton, because it is the highest of the White Mountains, 
 and we are impressed by Mounts Whitney and Shasta, 
 because they are the greatest masses of granite on the 
 Pacific Coast. “Mont Blanc is the monarch of 
 mountains. ‘They crowned him long ago.” Why did 
 they crown him? Because he is so big. Men are 
 willing to travel thousands of miles to see Monte Rosa 
 and the Matterhorn, because they press their icy heads 
 against the blue. The greater the mountain the more 
 impressive it is, but not so with a lake. We are not 
 fond of large lakes. | 
 
 When I announced to you that I was going to talk 
 about lakes, you did not think of the Great Lakes. 
 You did not expect me to talk about those. They 
 hardly seem lakes at all. They are vast bodies of 
 water that have been commercialized, they are engaged 
 in trade, they are carriers—beasts of burden. They 
 carry potatoes and pig-iron, copper-ore and wheat. 
 They are associated in our minds with corporations 
 and factories and shipping. Men write big books on 
 the commerce of the Great Lakes. We are not in- 
 terested in great lakes; only small lakes cuddle close 
 
LAKES 167 
 
 to the heart. When I said I was going to talk about 
 lakes, you thought at once of some little body of water 
 that is dear to you. A lake to be really enjoyable 
 must be so narrow that you can see across it. Unless 
 you can see across it, it is not an ideal lake. You 
 must be able to see the trees and the farms and the 
 cliffs, and the hills on the other side. And you. must 
 also be able to see from one end of it to the other, 
 or what seems to you to be the other end. For it 
 is an interesting fact that a lake seems to know that 
 it must look small, and therefore when it is long, it 
 hides its length by one of two tricks. It either winds 
 or it develops islands. Nature covers up the length 
 of a lake in those two ways, by islands and wind- 
 ings. For instance, Lake Como is thirty miles long, 
 which is altogether too long for an ideal lake, and 
 so Nature has cut Como into three sections, and when 
 you come to what looks like the end of the lake, it 
 suddenly opens out into another lake, and when you 
 come to the end of that, it opens out again, giving you 
 a delightful surprise. 
 
 Lugano is only twenty miles long, but that is too 
 long for an ideal lake, and so Nature employs the same 
 trick, converting Lugano into several lakes, making 
 each one look short. Maggiore is still longer, but in 
 this case Nature scatters the surface of the lake with 
 islands, so that no matter where you go, a shore lies 
 in your eye. Our own Lake George is too long to 
 be beautiful. Thirty-six miles are too many, and 
 therefore Nature at one point draws in the shores, 
 making it seem that the lake there ends. Moreover, 
 Nature has scattered two hundred islands over the sur- 
 face of Lake George, so that no one can see just how 
 long the lake is. ‘Take away its islands, and Lake 
 
168 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 George would lose much of its beauty. That is one 
 thing which the heart insists on—a lake must be small. 
 If a lake persists in being big, then the heart feels it 
 has been wronged. Sometimes Nature becomes des- 
 perate in its efforts to make a lake of the proper 
 length. A long while ago there was a lake in Switzer- 
 land which the Divine Artist thought too long to fit 
 the scenery, and so He cut the lake in two. On one 
 side of Interlaken you have the Lake of Brienz. On 
 the other side you have the Lake of Thun. They are 
 now two lakes, but there was a time when these two 
 were one. 
 
 If you ask for an explanation of this, I presume 
 the only explanation is that when we look upon a 
 lake, we demand beauty. A lake must be beautiful 
 or we are not satished. And there are times when 
 we want grandeur and sublimity, but we do not want 
 these all the time. There are moods in which we 
 hunger for the illimitable—the unbounded—the in- 
 finite. We find this in the ice fields of the North, 
 in the prairies of the West, in the deserts of Africa, 
 and best of all in the great sky overhead. But it is 
 an astonishing fact, that the immeasurable does not 
 satisfy us. We want something else. Grandeur is 
 too exciting. Sublimity leaves us still hungry. We 
 want the beautiful. The sky sometimes oppresses. 
 The sky full of stars sometimes well-nigh crushes us. 
 We want the limited and the bounded, the confined, 
 the snug, something that will come close to the heart. 
 We find this in a lake. And so when people talk 
 about lakes, you will find them often using the word 
 “lovely,” or “ pretty,” or “beautiful.” We grade 
 lakes by their beauty, as some men grade women. It 
 is impossible to get people to agree on what are the 
 
LAKES 169 
 
 most beautiful lakes. That is a subject often dis- 
 cussed by tourists. ‘The question is: Which are the 
 most beautiful, the Irish lakes or the Scottish, the 
 Scottish lakes or the English, the English lakes or 
 the Norwegian, the Norwegian lakes or the Swedish, 
 the Swedish lakes or the Swiss, the Swiss lakes or 
 the Italian, the Italian lakes or the Canadian? 
 
 There are many modest Americans who claim that 
 our own lakes are the most beautiful of all. It isa 
 question which can never be settled. In the realm of 
 esthetic judgment men must forever differ. Every- 
 thing depends upon the eye and the mind which lies 
 behind the eye. 
 
 What is the most beautiful lake in the world? ‘That 
 is as futile a question as the question—who is the 
 most beautiful woman in the world? It is impossible 
 to give an answer. To some people, Lake Lucerne is 
 the most perfect of all lakes, but to others it is Lake 
 Taho in California. To others, it is Lake Chelan in 
 Washington. To others, it is Lake Louise in the 
 Canadian Rockies. To others, it is Lake St. Mary in 
 Glacier Park in Montana. To others, it is Lake 
 George. ‘There are multitudes who believe that God 
 has never made a lovelier lake than our own! Lake 
 George. It is an interesting fact that when Sir 
 Walter Scott wanted to charm the soul with a scene 
 of ideal loveliness, he pictured a beautiful woman on 
 a beautiful island, in a beautiful lake. The Lady of 
 the Lake is one of the deathless heroines of mankind. 
 
 Perhaps it is because God loves the beautiful that 
 He makes so many lakes. Lincoln used to say that 
 God must love common people because He makes so 
 many of them. And if that is a fair line of argu- 
 ment, there is no doubt that God loves lakes. ‘There 
 
170 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 are so many that no one can count them. In the 
 single State of Minnesota there are at least ten thou- 
 sand lakes, and in all America they are numbered by 
 hundreds of thousands. There are other hundreds of 
 thousands in Europe, and other thousands in Asia. 
 They are found everywhere. ‘They are on all the 
 continents and on nearly all the islands. God tucks 
 them in wherever He has a chance. Sometimes He 
 puts a lake below the level of the sea; sometimes He 
 puts one on a mountain side; sometimes high up on 
 a mountain side; sometimes on a mountain top, above 
 the clouds. ‘There are many men who can never see 
 the sea, and so God compensates them for their loss 
 by giving them a lake to look at. God is the Great 
 Artist, and He shows His talent by His method of 
 making lakes. He cannot make many oceans. This 
 is only a hall bedroom of a planet. You cannot get 
 many large pieces of furniture in, but there is room 
 for many lakes, and so God makes them in great 
 variety. He makes them of all shapes and sizes, and 
 in each one He brings together all the possible forms 
 of beauty. The shores of a lake, how endlessly 
 various they are! Not content with these, God is al- 
 ways laying islands on the surface of a lake, and He 
 makes them with all the care with which He makes 
 a continent. Have you ever studied the shore line of 
 an island in a lake, and noted the little capes and 
 promontories, the miniature creeks, and bays, and in- 
 lets with here and there an isthmus, as though God 
 took delight in making a replica of a continent—a 
 reduced model of the world? Because God likes them 
 we like them too. Our love for them came from Him. 
 
 The world is usually lovely around a lake, and 
 seems to take delight in showing forth new varieties 
 
LAKES 171 
 
 of loveliness. Grass, for instance, is not afraid of a 
 lake. It is afraid of the ocean. It will not go near 
 the ocean. Grass blades are frightened by the ocean, 
 and will lie down and die when they come within sight 
 of it. But grass is not afraid of a lake. It will grow 
 right up to the water’s edge. The grass blades will 
 even play with the ripples. They will play with them 
 all day, and keep on playing through the night, and 
 never grow weary. Flowers are not afraid of a lake. 
 They will grow up to the edge of it, and some kinds 
 of flowers will even wade out into the water, and when 
 they get there, they are so happy that they are never 
 willing to come back. They live and bloom there in 
 the water. Even the soil at the bottom of a lake 
 seems to be instinct with beauty, for when the mud 
 of the lake comes to the surface, it blossoms! 
 
 Trees are all fond of a lake. They will come down 
 to the shore and grow there, and sometimes they will 
 ' lean out over the water. It was in that way that I 
 first discovered that trees are vain. I saw them stand- 
 ing by the hour looking at themselves! A lake is 
 the vanity-case of a tree. But one can see in a lake 
 more than trees. One can see the clouds. All of 
 the clouds are reproduced in the lake. The loveliness 
 of heaven is brought to the earth by the magical power 
 of a‘lake. What is more soothing than to look at 
 a lake—to gaze on its surface so full of iridescent 
 reflections! How interesting to note the playing of 
 the breezes and the zephyrs, scampering hither and 
 thither playing tag, perhaps, leaping into the air, and 
 then falling back upon the lake again, disturbing it 
 just a little, mixing up the reflections. Now and then 
 a gust comes along—a sort of ruffian of a zephyr—a 
 boorish and ill-mannered breeze, who is so rough 
 
172 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 that it smashes the reflections. But the lake does not 
 mind it much. The gust speedily disappears, and the 
 lake is its own tranquil self again. 
 
 From the earliest times men have been drawn to 
 lakes, not at first by their beauty, but by their offer 
 of protection. You will find in the libraries many 
 books on Lake Dwellers—those strange people who 
 lived ages ago, and who drove piles into lakes, upon 
 which they built their houses. We have lake dwellers 
 to-day, but of a different sort. They do not live upon 
 the lakes, but around the lakes. Every lake in New 
 England has a cluster of people around it. ‘They have 
 come from all sections of the country to build there 
 their summer homes, and through the summer months 
 they drink in the strength and refreshment which the 
 lakes have to give. They are the lake dwellers of 
 the twentieth century. Those little lakes have a genius 
 for taking the fever out of the brow, and the fret 
 out of the heart. If there is no lake in the landscape, 
 we feel that we have been robbed. If a man ts rich 
 enough to own a thousand acres, and if on those 
 thousand acres there is no lake, then the rich man is 
 almost sure to make one. His estate is not complete 
 without a lake. Nor is a park an ideal park without 
 a lake. You cannot make a park out of trees and 
 rocks and flowers alone, you must have a sheet of 
 water. What would our Central Park be without its 
 lakes? 
 
 Have you ever thought how much a lake is like a 
 human being? You might think sometimes of a lake 
 as a little baby in a cradle. God has put it in a 
 cradle—a cradle made of granite. He chiselled it out 
 of the solid rock by means of chisels made of ice. He 
 has decorated the crib just as mothers decorate the 
 
LAKES 173 
 
 cribs of their children. Over the sides of the crib 
 He has spread lichens and ferns and mosses. Unlike 
 all other babies this baby does not cry, but like other 
 babies it must be fed. God feeds it on brooks; just 
 as He fed Elijah by means of the ravens, so He feeds 
 a lake by means of brooks, and the brooks come down 
 out of heaven. So that we might say God feeds a 
 lake upon manna, a form of food that comes out of 
 the skies. And sometimes He. feeds lakes in other 
 ways—by springs at the bottom, as it were upon 
 hidden manna. He feeds us in ways which the world 
 knows not of, and so He often feeds lakes from 
 sources which the world does not see. 
 
 A lake breathes. There are learned books written 
 on the respiration of lakes. A lake takes a long breath 
 in the Spring, and another deep breath in the Autumn; 
 but we must not go into that, for that would make 
 my sermon technically scientific. A lake, like a human 
 being, decays. All the lakes now upon the earth are 
 dying. Many lakes are already dead. The geologists 
 take delight in studying their remains. A lake like a 
 human being can write. Every lake writes its biog- 
 raphy. It writes it in the rocks. Our Great Lakes 
 have written a series of wonderful biographies, and 
 the geologists are now translating them. When the 
 translation is completed, they will make the most 
 fascinating books ever published. But the Great 
 Lakes are dying. So are all the lakes in New Eng- 
 land. Lake Moosehead is decaying. Lake Winne- 
 pesaukee will some day vanish. Lake Sunapee is only 
 for a little time. Lake George is doomed. All the 
 lakes are on their death-bed, and therefore I urge you 
 to enjoy them while you can! 
 
 I do not mean to intimate that they will die before 
 
174 NATURE SERMONS 
 
 you do. Itis with a lake as it is with God. A thou- 
 sand years are as one day, and a day as a thousand 
 years. But although a lake may live for a long time, 
 it is mortal, and its goal is the tomb. It is possible 
 to kill lakes. They are killing them at present in 
 Wisconsin. ‘They kill them there as they used to kill 
 snakes. They want the land for corn and potatoes, 
 and therefore they are putting some of their lakes 
 out of the way. Itis possible to murder a lake. There 
 is only one river on the earth which I hate, and that is 
 the River Rhone. I hate it because it is murdering 
 the Lake of Geneva. It is slowly taking the life out 
 of that beautiful lake. I have often wished that 
 somebody would catch that river and chain it in a 
 dungeon in the Castle of Chillon! 
 
 Because lakes are so beautiful, they make a pro- 
 found impression upon the human spirit. If a man 
 cannot be impressed by any other form of Nature, 
 he is hard hearted indeed if he does not respond to 
 the beauty of a lake. It is an interesting fact that 
 the man who, more than any other man who has lived 
 within the last hundred years, taught humanity to love 
 Nature, was a man who grew up among a few little 
 lakes. William Wordsworth has rightfully been 
 called “ The High Priest of Nature.” It was he who 
 led mankind into a deeper appreciation of the bloom 
 and wonder of the natural world. When a boy of 
 eight, he was taken to live on the shore of a little 
 sheet of water, known as “ Esthwait.’”’ It is only two 
 miles long and just a few hundred yards wide. 
 Around that lake he played. In that lake, in summer 
 time, he swam. Over that lake in! winter time he 
 skated. He loved it, and the lake passed into his soul. 
 When he became a man he made his home near two 
 
LAKES ! 175 
 
 other lakes—Grasmere and Rydal. Grasmere is only 
 a mile and a quarter long. Rydal is only half a mile 
 long. They are so small that you and I would call 
 them ponds. Around these two English ponds this 
 poet sauntered for fifty years, and by his poetry, in- 
 spired by these lakes, he opened for millions of men 
 a new fountain of enjoyment. He led mankind into 
 a deeper appreciation of the beauties of the natural 
 world by way of the lakes. 
 
 The world’s greatest religious teacher, Jesus of 
 Nazareth, lived by a lake. He was not born near a 
 lake, nor did He spend His childhood near a lake, but 
 as soon as He entered upon His public career, He 
 changed His home and removed to the shore of a 
 lake—the Lake of Galilee. The men whom He chose 
 to be His intimate friends were, with the sole excep- 
 tion of Judas Iscariot, men who lived within sight of 
 that lake. Most of His teaching was uttered near 
 that lake. Sometimes He would sit on a hill and 
 preach, looking now and then at the lake. At other 
 times He would sit on the shore, with the lake rippling 
 at His feet while He taught the people. At other 
 times He would push out upon the surface of the 
 lake and speak to the people from a boat. He loved. 
 the lake, and I wonder if something of the beauty of 
 the Gospels is not due to the sparkle of that lake. The 
 Gospels are amazingly refreshing, and possibly some- 
 thing of their power comes from the bewitching loveli- 
 ness of the Lake of Galilee. John, the Disciple whom 
 Jesus loved, grew up near this lake. He loved it, 
 and when he was an old man and looked into heaven 
 from the Isle of Patmos, he saw up close to the throne 
 of God “a sea of glass mingled with fire.’ I wonder 
 if that were not the Lake of Galilee, glorified! 
 
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