The Jews certainly knew of no trees like them; and no trees either of their size.  There were trees among them then, probably, two and three hundred feet in height; trees whose tops were as those minster towers; whose shafts were like yonder pillars; and their branches like yonder vaults.  No king, however mighty, could have planted them up there upon the lofty mountain slopes.  The Jew, when he entered beneath the awful darkness of these cedars; the cedars with a shadowy shroud—­as the Scripture says—­the cedars high and lifted up, whose tops were among the thick boughs, and their height exalted above all the trees of the field; fair in their greatness; their boughs multiplied, and their branches long—­for it is in such words of awe and admiration that the Bible talks always of the cedars—­then the Jew said, “God has planted these, and God alone.”  And when he thought, not merely of their grandeur and their beauty, but of their use; of their fragrant and incorruptible timber, fit to build the palaces of kings, and the temples of gods; he said—­and what could he say better?—­“These are trees of God;” wonderful and glorious works of a wonderful and a glorious Creator.  If he had not, he would have had less reason in him, and less knowledge of God, than the Hindoos of old; who when they saw the other variety of the cedar growing, in like grandeur, on the slopes of the Himalaya, called them the Deodara—­which means, in the old Sanscrit tongue, neither more nor less than “the timber of God,” “the lance of God”—­and what better could they have said?

My friends, I speak on this matter from the fulness of my heart.  It has happened to me—­through the bounty of God, for which I shall be ever grateful—­to have spent days in primeval forests, as grand, and far stranger and far richer than that of Lebanon and its cedars; amid trees beside which the hugest tree in Britain would be but as a sapling; gorgeous too with flowers, rich with fruits, timbers, precious gums, and all the yet unknown wealth of a tropic wilderness.  And as I looked up, awestruck and bewildered, at those minsters not made by hands, I found the words of Scripture rising again and again unawares to my lips, and said—­Yes:  the Bible words are the best words, the only words for such a sight as this.  These too are trees of God which are full of sap.  These, too, are trees, which God, not man, has planted.  Mind, I do not say that I should have said so, if I had not learnt to say so from the Bible.  Without the Bible I should have been, I presume, either an idolater or an atheist.  And mind, also, that I do not say that the Psalmist learnt to call the cedars trees of God by his own unassisted reason.  I believe the very opposite.  I believe that no man can see the truth of a thing unless God shews it him; that no man can find out God, in earth or heaven, unless God condescends to reveal Himself to that man.  But I believe that God did reveal Himself to the Psalmist; did enlighten