at the hour of his ascension.  Beautiful as they seem, they are never mere poetic adornments.  The occasions of their appearing are grand.  The reasons are weighty.  Their demeanor suggests and befits the highest conception of superior beings.  These are the very elements that a rude age could not fashion.  Could a sensuous age invent an order of beings, which, touching the earth from a heavenly height on its most momentous occasions, could still, after ages of culture had refined the human taste and moral appreciation, remain ineffably superior in delicacy, in pure spirituality, to the demands of criticism?  Their very coming and going is not with earthly movement.  They suddenly are seen in the air as one sees white clouds round out from the blue sky, in a summer’s day, that melt back even while one looks upon them.  They vibrate between the visible and the invisible.  They come without motion.  They go without flight.  They dawn and disappear.  Their words are few, but the Advent Chorus yet is sounding its music through the world.

* * * * *

=_John McClintock,[18] 1814-1870._=

From a Sermon on “The Ground of Man’s Love to God.”

=_52._= THE CHRISTIAN THE ONLY TRUE LOVER OF NATURE.

It is not too much to say that the only true lover of nature, is he that loves God in Christ.  It is as with one standing in one of those caves of unknown beauty of which travellers tell us.  While it is dark, nothing can be seen but the abyss, or at most, a faint glimmer of ill-defined forms.  But flash into it the light of a single torch, and myriad splendors crowd upon the gaze of the beholder.  He sees long-drawn colonnades, sparkling with gems; chambers of beauty and glory open on every hand, flashing back the light a thousand fold increased, and in countless varied hues.  So the sense of God’s love in the heart gives an eye for nature, and supplies the torch to illuminate its recesses of beauty.  For the ear that can hear them, ten thousand voices speak, and all in harmony, the name of God!  The sun, rolling in his majesty,—­

  “And with his tread, of thunder force,
  Fulfilling his appointed course,”—­

is but a faint and feeble image of the great central Light of the universe.  The spheres of heaven, in the perpetual harmony of their unsleeping motion, swell the praise of God; the earth, radiant with beauty, and smiling in joy, proclaims its Maker’s love; and the ocean,—­that

  “Glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
  Glasses itself in tempests,”—­

as it murmurs on the shore, or foams with its broad billows over the deep, declares its God; and even the tempests, that, in their “rising wrath, sweep sea and sky,” still utter the name of Him who rides upon the whirlwind and directs the storm.  In a word, the whole universe is but a temple, with God for its deity, and the redeemed man for its worshipper.