[Footnote 17:  A Baptist divine of much distinction:  a native of South Carolina but long settled in Baltimore.]

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=_Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-_= (Manual, p. 480.)

From the “Star Papers.”

=_47._= A PICTURE IN A COLLEGE AT OXFORD.

I was much affected by a head of Christ.  Not that it met my ideal of that sacred front, but because it took me in a mood that clothed it with life and reality.  For one blessed moment I was with the Lord.  I know him.  I loved him.  My eyes I could not close for tears.  My poor tongue kept silence; but my heart spoke, and I loved and adored.  The amazing circuit of one’s thoughts in so short a period is wonderful.  They circle round through all the past, and up through the whole future; and both the past and future are the present, and are one.  For one moment there arose a keen anguish, like a shooting pang, for that which I was; and I thought my heart would break that I could bring but only such a nature to my Lord; but in a moment, as quick as the flash of sunlight which follows the shadow of summer clouds across the fields, there seemed to spring out upon me from my Master a certainty of love so great and noble as utterly to consume my unworth, and leave me shining bright, as if it were impossible for Christ to love a heart without making it pure and beautiful by the resting on it of that illuming affection, just as the sun bathes into beauty the homeliest object when he looks full upon it.

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=_48._= FROST ON THE WINDOW.

But the indefatigable night repairs the desolation.  New pictures supply the waste ones.  New cathedrals there are, new forests, fringed and blossoming, new sceneries, and new races of extinct animals.  We are rich every morning, and poor every noon.  One day with us measures the space of two hundred years in kingdoms—­a hundred years to build up, and a hundred years to decay and destroy; twelve hours to overspread the evanescent pane with glorious beauty, and twelve to extract and dissipate the pictures....  Shall we not reverently and rejoicingly behold in these morning pictures, wrought without color, and kissed upon the window by the cold lips of Winter, another instance of that Divine Beneficence of beauty which suffuses the heavens?

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From “Lectures to Young Men.”

=_49._= NATURE, DESIGNED FOR OUR ENJOYMENT.

The necessity of amusement is admitted on all hands.  There is an appetite of the eye, of the ear, and of every sense, for which God has provided the material.  Gaiety of every degree, this side of puerile levity, is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the morals.  Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments.  The magnitude of God’s works is not less admirable than its exhilarating beauty.  The rudest forms have something of beauty; the ruggedest strength is graced with some charm;