* * * * *
=_John McClintock,[18] 1814-1870._=
From a Sermon on "The Ground of Man's Love to God."
=_52._= THE CHRISTIAN THE ONLY TRUE LOVER OF NATURE.
It is not too much to say that the only _true_ lover of nature, is he
that loves God in Christ. It is as with one standing in one of those
caves of unknown beauty of which travellers tell us. While it is dark,
nothing can be seen but the abyss, or at most, a faint glimmer of
ill-defined forms. But flash into it the light of a single torch, and
myriad splendors crowd upon the gaze of the beholder. He sees long-drawn
colonnades, sparkling with gems; chambers of beauty and glory open on
every hand, flashing back the light a thousand fold increased, and in
countless varied hues. So the sense of God's love in the heart gives an
eye for nature, and supplies the torch to illuminate its recesses of
beauty. For the ear that can hear them, ten thousand voices speak, and
all in harmony, the name of God! The sun, rolling in his majesty,--
"And with his tread, of thunder force,
Fulfilling his appointed course,"--
is but a faint and feeble image of the great central Light of the
universe. The spheres of heaven, in the perpetual harmony of their
unsleeping motion, swell the praise of God; the earth, radiant with
beauty, and smiling in joy, proclaims its Maker's love; and the
ocean,--that
"Glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests,"--
as it murmurs on the shore, or foams with its broad billows over the
deep, declares its God; and even the tempests, that, in their "rising
wrath, sweep sea and sky," still utter the name of Him who rides upon
the whirlwind and directs the storm.
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