derive from such continued and faithful investigation of the revealed word as has been thus far contemplated. Let one caution, however, be ever borne in mind, that whatever may be the case with the mere sceptic, the Christian believer must ever approach these pages with reverence, and open them under the guidance of that Spirit by whom they were at first inspired. The Bible is light and life and salvation only to those who seek it as such. To others it is indeed the mere historic record, the mere national literature which they expect and desire to find. It is when we come athirst, that we learn. how refreshing these waters are, and the hungry will best know the true taste of this heavenly bread. In nature, in the depths of the human soul, in the written word, God reveals himself to those who seek, and to those that knock, he has said, it shall be opened.

This plea for a more general, more profound, and earnest study of the Bible may well conclude with those warning words of our Saviour, addressed to a class well versed in the sacred history of their own nation, and ready at quoting both law and prophets, when it served their turn, but who with all their knowledge, were yet far enough from entering into the spirit of those holy writings. The words are old, yet ever new: "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me."

ARTICLE IV.

GOD IN VEGETABLE LIFE.

To the devout student of God's operations in the material world, the act of creation never ceases. It is true, that speaking after the manner of men, at the end of six days, whether natural or figurative, the Creator rested from his works. But, that he then left them, as the builder leaves the completed house or edifice, we can not for a single moment entertain the thought. That the countless worlds which he then set in mo

tion, that the systems which he then arranged, have been wheeling in space for these thousands of years, from the impulse then imparted; that the changes which have transpired. among the heavenly bodies have all resulted from the blind physical laws then enacted; that the universe moves on, like a complicated piece of machinery then wound up, and that the great First Cause has since had no personal agency or concern in it, is little better than rank atheism.

The same at

A thing created still inheres in the Creator. tributes are necessary for its continuance, as its inception. The existence of a thing created, implies the existence, the active existence, of its Creator. Man makes, and leaves what he has made. He puts none of his genius, none of his vital energy, into the structures which he erects. Man dies; but the books he has written, the deeds he has achieved, remain unimpaired. But dependent upon God's being and attributes are all things which he has ever created. They live in God.

Correctly interpreted, therefore, each morning, when the rising sun falls upon the eyelids of a sleeping world, God says, "Let there be light !" and each evening, when the stars appear, the blue vault is lighted up by his omnipotent hand; each spring, when, in the forest, the growing grass begins to lift the dead leaves, the sap courses up through trunk and branch and twig, the buds swell with their tender greenness, and the exiled birds return to their forsaken haunts, God repeats again the old mandate: "Let the earth bring forth grass and herb and tree;" and it is so. The same Being, whose biting frosts lately drove man into his habitation, who lately filled the air and covered the earth with snow crystals, silvered the window-panes, hushed the purling brooks beneath sheeted glass, and flung fetters across the waterfall, now enters another department of his works; invites man forth from behind his double doors and double windows; calls back the sun from his journey to the tropics; warms and quickens the grateful soil, and makes the earth teem with the products of his wisdom and love and power.

In winter, it seems almost as though God had forsaken his works; had allowed the cold stillness of death to pass upon them; had covered them with the pall of death, and left them forever. The fields that lately waved with the golden grain,

and echoed the song of the harvesters, are a desolate waste, bristling with stalks and stubble. Pastures, lately vocal with the lowing herds or bleating flocks, present only trackless acres of white, blank and unbroken. The woods, lately so full of birds, and insects, and the inferior quadrupeds, seem entirely forsaken. But like the sleep of man, the sleep of nature, though similar to death, is not death itself. As soon as God utters his fiat, the slumbering roots begin to perform their suspended offices, the leaves appear as if by magic, and plants and trees are speedily covered with bloom; while every department of his material works, lately so cold and uninviting, overflows with life and beauty.

There is something very wonderful in the endless variety of the products of the soil, even in a single latitude. By what alchemy the same senseless earth can furnish the suitable elements for stalk and leaf and petal; where the different colors are mixed, that tint the foliage and the flower; what are the ingredients of the simplest fragrance, with which our senses are regaled, the wisest man of science would not undertake to tell. But the wonder is infinitely increased, when we pass from latitude to latitude, and discover new varieties of vegetable life, new colors, new fragrance; each adapted to its own locality, and to the wants and happiness of bird and insect, of man and beast.

Vegetation is a perpetual miracle. It is very common for us to speak of vegetable life and growth, as though they were not very remarkable things. We fill a flower-pot with earth, drop in a few seeds, set it in the sunshine, and when the tender spire breaks upward to the light, we do not reflect that this is one of the most marvellous processes in the universe. This very phenomenon of life itself, what is it? It is just as incomprehensible in this plant, as it is in any of us. And who lodged in that dry, unsightly seed, a principle which, under favorable conditions, exhibits this phenomenon? Who legislated for it, determining the conformation and texture of its leaves, the time of its flowering, the shape and shade of its petals, its stamens, and its pistils? And who so guides and controls its development, as progressively to realize the original idea? Out of this little earthern pot that sits in your casement, appears a new cre

ation, linked backward, indeed, to a previous creation, but to you just as inexplicable as though it were one of the individuals which God first commanded the earth to bring forth.

Magnifiers and telescopes have discovered to us worlds of inquiry in two opposite directions. Through their aid we can count the feet of the centipede, the down of the caterpillar, the particles of gold-dust on the wing of the butterfly. We can count also the rings and satellites of Saturn, and sweep fields of heavenly bodies wholly beyond the reach of the naked eye. But we have sometimes thought that we have around us undiscovered worlds, which we need no powerful glass to penetrate or reveal. The life and growth of a single plant are full of unappreciated mystery and beauty. Here is a vegetable being that feeds itself more unerringly from a soil made up of various different elements, from an atmosphere constantly changing in purity and temperature, than the very creature that God has made in his own image, and constituted an earthly sovereign over all his works. What color of human eye or cheek is like the blue of the violet, the redness of the rose? What skill of human hand, what perfection of human art, has ever equalled the velvet surface of the pansy? What artist has ever put upon canvas such blendings and contrasts, as this vegetable life develops upon every twig and stem? And yet of how many, to whom these sights are so familiar, might it be said, as Wordsworth said of another,

"A primrose by the river's brim,

A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more"?

To them these vegetable wonders are as so many weeds. There is no mystery or beauty in them. Their language is not of God, his wisdom, his skill, his love.

The Ayreshire ploughman, Burns, found poetry enough to make his name immortal, in the

"Wee, modest, crimson-tippéd flower,"

which his rude ploughshare crushed into the rough soil of his native Scotland. And another poet has said:

Have passed away, less happy than the one

That by the unwilling plough-share died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love."

And were it not for the atheism of human nature, and the commonness of such sights, the awakening of the earth in the spring-time, the swelling bud, the blossom, the leaf, the most familiar manifestation of vegetable life, would be a constantly repeated miracle, a perpetual Gospel setting forth afresh and with new emphasis, the attributes of our Maker and Father. We need magnifiers and telescopes, less than a stronger faith. We walk with indifference and insensibility among as great wonders, as we gather into our cabinets from the subterranean vaults beneath us, or discover in the firmament over our heads. We look for God only in the structure that is too intricate for our. unaided apprehension and analysis, or too stupendous for our limited powers of achievement; while the very sod beneath our feet throbs with his life, and he carefully compounds every cubic foot of air that we inhale.

A stranger from the Arctic regions, who should listen to a description of the change to be wrought in these latitudes by the advent of spring, would pronounce the statement fabulous ; and this, because he had never witnessed anything analogous to it. That the same sun whose oblique rays scarcely visited his native regions, should have power to break the icy fetters of winter, and liberate the earth from her prison-house; that his genial rays could quicken the frozen soil, until it was clothed with greenness, and blossomed in beauty, he would pronounce a thing incredible. But the wonder is none the less, the power to accomplish it, all the greater, because we behold its annual realization. The uniformity with which this great transformation takes place, while to eyes familiar it may decrease its marvellousness, is really one of the elements of marvellousness by which it is distinguished. For twenty, thirty, forty, sixty years, some of us have seen this periodic change pass upon the whole outward world; these unrecognized miracles wrought at our feet. Is God any the less in them? Because in his journey southward, the sun does not transcend the limit of his golden chain, and leave us to unbroken winter; because at the season when seeds must germinate in order to reach maturity in