The sun, as he unlocks the rosy gates of the east, and comes forth to run his glad journey across the sky, diffusing light and warmth upon the vegetable world beneath, moves with the utmost regularity, giving to each succeeding year, “the seasons and their changes.”

The gentle moon, as she sheds her borrowed light from the blue chambers of the sky, throwing her silver mantle overnight’s sable form, performs her varied evolutions without “variableness or shadow of turning.”  Every planet and every star has its fixed place assigned it, and even the fiery comet has its appointed orbit, and the man of science can tell the exact time of its appearance, and the course it will run, and now it is accounted for by the laws of nature, rather than regarded as a fearful herald of war or devastation; and even the meteor flash, that glares for a moment and then disappears forever, is awakened into action by the density of the atmosphere, and regulated by the same common laws.

The portentous thunder clouds that emit the vivid lightning’s flash, and the deep-toned thunder reverberating through the sky, speak of the sublimity of their Author, and perform their destined missions of purifying the air and increasing the health of man.

The sea, the deep blue sea, too, has its bounds that it cannot pass.  Its tides may ebb and flow, its bounding waves make music on their winding shore, or heave in their giant strength, and dash their foam and spray before the raging tempest, but they are curbed by that Eternal fiat, which says, “So far shalt thou go and no farther,” or hushed by the same voice saying, “Peace, be still!”

Rivers run in their destined courses, and pay constant tribute to old ocean, and even the sparkling brook that bubbles over its pebbly bottom, dances not in vain, for the grass upon its margin assumes a deeper green and marks the threading of its silver current.

The gentle dew that distils upon the tender herbage in the deep silence of midnight, of the mist that rises from the bosom of the earth, are not without design.  The mountain rising in its magnificence, the gently sloping hill and verdant vale, are so arranged as to fill the mind of the beholder with satisfaction, while the eye gazes upon the perfect harmony that pervades great nature’s works.

Every thing that is beautiful, every thing that is sublime, is depicted in the order and perfection of the natural world, where each has its appropriate sphere and fulfils its appropriate destiny.

This is a theme upon which the most powerful mind may expand itself, stretching from thought to thought, and from object to object, without grasping half the amazing whole.  When we contemplate the forest standing in silent grandeur, the tree, the shrub, the flower in all its beautiful varieties, the rock, the precipice, the foaming cataract that has thundered on for ages with the same deafening roar, and all the ten thousand varied objects of inanimate creation, and observe the nice regulations in which they are placed, we can but remark with reverential awe, “In wisdom hast thou made them all.”