“Does it ever occur to you, brethren, how we waste truth?  Have you ever felt what a sad thing it is that so little of the vast accumulation of inspiring knowledge should reach our deepest, our religious sentiments, to kindle and feed them?  The most certain knowledge which men now hold is that which is gathered from the sky.  Astronomy, dealing with objects thousands of millions of miles away, and with forces that rule through limitless space, is the most symmetrical and firm of all the structures of science which have been reared by the human mind.  Immeasurably more than David could have known, the heavens, as Herschel reads them, declare the glory of God.  Yet how seldom do we think of the splendors and harmonies which a modern book of astronomy unveils as part of God’s appeal to our wonder; how seldom does the solemn light from the uppermost regions of immensity, the light of nebulae which science has broken up into heaps of suns, converge upon a human soul with power enough to stimulate devout awe and make the heart bend before the Creator of the universe.”

A few days at Lake Tahoe, when not a hundred white men had visited its shores, inspired a sermon long remembered by those who heard it, and today, after numerous nature-sermons by the world’s most gifted preachers, this discourse remains an almost perfect example of what such a sermon should be.  The following single excerpt must suffice to suggest its beauty: 

“I must speak of another lesson, connected with religion, that was suggested to me on the borders of Lake Tahoe.  It is bordered by groves of noble pines.  Two of the days which I was permitted to enjoy there were Sundays.  On one of them I passed several hours of the afternoon in listening, alone, to the murmur of the pines, while the waves were gently beating the shore with their restlessness.  If the beauty and purity of the lake were in harmony with the deepest religion of the Bible, certainly the voice of the pines was also in chord with it.

“The oracles of Greece are connected with the oak.  And the lightness, the gaiety, the wit, the suppleness, of the Greek mind find in the voice of the oak their fit representatives; for the oak, though so stubborn and sinewy in its substances, is cheery and gay in its tone when the wind strikes it.  But the evergreen trees, though so much softer in their stock, are far deeper and more serious in their music; and the evergreen is the Hebrew tree.  The Cedar of Lebanon is the tree most prominent when we think of Palestine and the clothing of its hills.  As I lay and listened to the deep, serious, yet soft and welcome sound of those pines by the lake shore, I thought of the inspiration of old which had wakened such lasting and wonderful music from the great souls of Israel.  When we want knowledge or the quickening of intellect, we enter the groves of Greece; when we would find quickening, when we would feel the deeps of the soul appealed to, we enter the deeper and more