It is difficult, now-a-days, to make even cultivated people understand the follies of those who, like the heathen round the Jews, worshipped many gods:  and all the more because our modern folly runs in a different channel; because we are tempted, not to believe in many gods, but in no God at all; to believe not that one god made one thing and another another, but that all things have made themselves.

When Hiram, king of Tyre, sent down timber cut from the cedars of Lebanon, to build the temple of God for Solomon; his heathen workmen, probably, were angry and terrified at what they were doing.  They said among themselves—­“These cedars belong to Baal, or to Melkart, the gods of Tyre.  Our king has no right to send them to build the temple of Jehovah, the God of the Jews.  It is a robbery, and a sacrilege; and Baal will be angry with us; and curse us with drought and blight.”

But now-a-days men say—­“The cedars of Lebanon are not God’s trees, nor are any other trees.  They belong to nature.”  Now I believe in nature no more than I do in Baal.  Nature is merely things—­a great many things it is true, but only things—­and when I add them all up together, and call them nature, as if they were one thing, I make an abstraction of them.  There is no harm in that:  but if I treat that abstraction as if it really existed, and did anything, then I make of it an idol, the which I have no mind to do.  I believe, I say, in nature no more than I do in Baal.  Both words were at first symbols; and both have become in due course of time mere idols.  But those who worship nature and not God, say now—­God did not make trees; they were made by the laws of nature and nothing else.  Well:  I believe that the so-called philosophers who say that, will be proved at last to be no more right, and no more rational, than those heathen workmen of Tyre.  But meanwhile, what the Psalmist says, and what the Bible says, is—­Those trees belong to God.  He made them, He made all things; the sap—­the mysterious life in them, by which each grows and seeds according to its kind—­is His gift.  Their growth is ordered by Him; and so are all things in earth and heaven.

Then why speak of them especially as trees of God?  Because, my friends, we can only find out that something is true of many things, by finding out that it is true of one thing; and that we usually find out by some striking instance; some case about which there can be no mistake.  And these cedars of Lebanon were, and are still, such a striking instance, which there was no mistaking.  Upon the slopes of the great snow-mountain of Lebanon stood those gigantic cedar-trees—­whole forests of them then—­now only one or two small groups, but awful, travellers tell us, even in their decay.  Whence did they come?  There are no trees like them for hundreds, I had almost said for thousands, of miles.  There are but two other patches of them left now on the whole earth, one in the Atlas, one in the Himalaya.