Who can contemplate the great mysterious workings of nature without a feeling of wonder and amazement?
How the greatness of God is seen in comparison with the littleness of man, In the wonderful workings of the natural world. Silently and without interruption the great machinery moves on in it’s restless course, with lightning like rapidity toward an unknown future.
The sun rises each day and pursues his westward course, tinting one flower pink another deep scarlet and bleaching a third to perfect whiteness. The snows of winter melt at his glance, the waters which have been bound with icy bands flow again. The birds which have long kept silent, sing their merry songs and back once more in genial rays.
The grass springs up, the trees bud and blossom, the fruit matures and the grain ripens with unfailing precision showing infinite wisdom of a great and holy God.
From the sun is derived the greatest and most useful elements in nature. Light and heat. It warms alike the home of the peasant and the palace of the king. It lights the window of the castle and the cell of the prison. I t ripens the fruit of the tropics and the sturdy grains of the north. Upon the just and the unjust, he shines alike.
Nature, like a great book of revelation, unfolds one by one the mysteries of the world. To the geologist the bowels of the earth are a mine of untold wealth and a book of ancient history.
To the philosopher is revealed the great laws of mechanics, and the various forces by which the vast machinery is moved and governed.
To the chemist, the whole natural world is a great laboratory, and the air we breath is made sub-servient to his will.
While the astronomer, lifting his eyes far above the earth, and peering into space reads the history of the unknown worlds and as it were casting aside the veil of futurity open by the light of the glimmering stars the book of second prophecy.
The sciences revealed by nature are like the links of a great chain reaching from earth upward far into the starry heavens connecting the finite with the infinite. Each link growing stronger and brighter, till the final links are lost in space or seen only by the light of the distant stars.
How perfect in the smallest detail are the arrangements of the natural forces and laws. Like a well oiled machine, perfect in all it’s appointments and functions, the great universe rolls on through the lapse of centuries. The years come and go with unfailing precision and the ever-recurring seasons take their places with un-varing exactness.
With continual tread the great host of human beings travel on, keeping step ws it ere with their throbbing hearts which are beating funeral marches to the grave. Generation after generation are swept away by the invisible reaper and others spring up to take their places. Nations are born in a day, and as quickly pass away. Empires rise and fall, and yet time continues his ceaseless march oblivious to the fact that his pathway is strewn with the tottering ruins of the pomp and glory of unnumbered centuries.
But how insignificant, in comparison with the works of God, are the most brilliant triumphs of man’s genius and skill. With all boasted progress he has failed to produce the smallest of God’s created objects.
The combined workshops of the world cannot makes so much as a blade of grass, a flower or a grain of sand. I t seems but fitting that man, who the last and most wonderful masterpiece of the Divine hand should take a low and humble seat and exclaim with the inspired psalmist, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.”