True:  in the words in which I have purposely put it.  But not in the words in which the Psalmist puts it; and which I purposely left out, to shew you just the difference between even the soundest science, and faith.  He brings in another element, which is the true cause of the circulation of water; and that is, none other but Almighty God.

This is the way in which the inspired Psalmist puts it; and this is the truth of it all; this is the very kernel and marrow and life and soul of it all:  while the facts which I told you just now are the mere shell and dead skeleton of it—­“Thou sendest the springs into the rivers.”

Thou art the Lord of the lightning and of the clouds, the Lord of the highlands and of the lowlands, and the Lord of the rainfall and of the drought, the Lord of good seasons and of bad, of rich harvests and of scanty.  They, like all things, obey Thine everlasting laws; and of them, whatever may befal, poor purblind man can say in faith and hope—­“It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good.”

Yes.  He was not of course a man of science, in the modern sense of the word, this old Psalmist.  But this I know, that he was a man of science in the soundest and deepest sense; an inspired philosopher, as well as an inspired poet; and had the highest of all sciences, which is the science and knowledge of the living God.  For he saw God in everything and everything in God.

But—­he says—­the trees of the Lord are full of sap; even the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted.  Why should he say that specially of the cedars?  Did not God make all trees?  Does He not plant all wild trees, and every flower and seed?  My dear friends, happy are you if you believe that in spirit and in truth.  But let me tell you that I think you would not have believed that, unless the Psalmist, and others who wrote the Holy Scriptures, had told you about trees of God, and rivers of God, and winds of God, and had taught you that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.  You do not know—­none of us can know—­how much we owe to the Bible for just and rational, as well as orthodox and Christian, notions of the world around us.  We, and—­thank God—­our forefathers for hundreds of years, have drunk in Bible thoughts, as it were, with our mother’s milk; till much that we have really learnt from the Bible we take as a matter of course, as self-evident truths which we have found out for ourselves by common sense.

And yet, so far from that being the case, if it had not been for the Bible, we might be believing at this moment, that one god made one tree, and another another; that one tree was sacred to one god, and another flower to another goddess, as the old Greeks believed; and that the wheat and barley were the gift, and therefore the property, of some special deity; and be crying now in fear and trembling to the sun-god, or the rain-god, or some other deified power of nature, because we fancied that they were angry with us, and had therefore sent us too much rain and a short harvest.