I do not suppose that the author of the book of Job had ever studied geology, or mineralogy, or biology, but read him, and see whether this old prince of scientific heroes had loved, and understood, and caught the spirit of Nature.  And what a grand, free spirit it was, and what a giant it made of him.  I do not believe that Paul ever had a special course of anatomy or botany.  But if he had not pondered long and lovingly on the structure of his body, and the germination of the seed, he never could have written the twelfth and fifteenth chapters of the first letter to the Corinthians.  And time fails to speak of David and all the writers of the Psalms, and of those heroic souls misnamed the “Minor” Prophets.

Study the teachings of our Lord.  How he must have considered the lilies of the field, and that such a tiny seed as that of the mustard could have produced so great an herb, and noticed and thought on the thorns and the tares and the wheat, and watched the sparrows, and pondered and wondered how the birds were fed.  All his teaching was drawn from Nature.  And all the study in the world could never have taught him what he knew, if it had not been a loving and appreciative study.

There is one strange and interesting passage in John’s Gospel, xv. 1:  “I am the true vine.”  My father used to tell us that the Greek word [Greek:  alethine], rendered true, is usually employed of the genuine in distinction from the counterfeit, the reality in distinction from the shadow and image.  Is not this perhaps the clew to our Lord’s use of natural imagery?  Nature was always the presentation to his senses of the divine thought and purpose.  He studied the words of the ancient Scripture, he found the same words and teachings clearly and concretely embodied in the processes of Nature.  The interpretation of the Parable of the Sower was no mere play of fancy to him; it was the genuine and fundamental truth, deeper and more real than the existence of the sower, the soil, and the seed.  The spiritual truth was the substance; the tangible soil and seed really only the shadow.  And thus all Nature was to him divine.

We all of us need to offer the prayer of the blind man, “Lord, that our eyes may be opened.”  Let us learn, too, from the old heathen giant, Antaeus, who, after every defeat and fall, rose strengthened and vivified from contact with his mother Earth.  You will experience in life many a desperate struggle, many a hard fall.  There is at such times nothing in the world so strengthening, healing, and life-giving as the thoughts and encouragements which Nature pours into the hearts and minds of her loving disciples.  She will set you on your feet again, infused with new life, filled with an unconquerable spirit, with unfaltering courage, and an iron will to fight once more and win.  In every battle her inspiring words will ring in your ears, and she will never fail you.  We may not see her deepest realities, her rarest treasures of thought and wisdom; but if we will listen lovingly for her voice, we may be assured that she will speak to us many a word of cheer and encouragement, of warning and exhortation.  For, to paraphrase the language of the nineteenth Psalm, “She has no speech nor language, her voice is not heard.  But her rule is gone out throughout all the earth, and her words to the end of the world.”