e-eminent beauty of moral goodness
revealed only in the spiritual nature of the Supreme. The first is one
of the natural resources of fallen man in his search for happiness.
The second was man's joy in his primeval innocence. The third is the
inheritance of man redeemed. It is folly to place these on the same
level. It is greater folly to worship either or both of the first
without regard to the last. It is true wisdom to aspire to the last,
and to regard nature as the handmaid of piety, art as but the handmaid
of nature.

Nature to the unobservant is merely a mass of things more or less
beautiful or interesting, but without any definite order or
significance. An observer soon arrives at the conclusion that it is a
series of circling changes, ever returning to the same points, ever
renewing their courses, under the action of invariable laws. But if he
rests here, he falls infinitely short of the idea of the Cosmos, and
stands on the brink of the profound error of eternal succession. A
little further progress conducts him to the inviting field of special
adaptation and mutual relation of things. He finds that nothing is
without its use; that every structure is most nicely adjusted to
special ends; that the supposed ceaseless circling of nature is merely
the continuous action of great powers, by which an infinity of
utilities are worked out--the great fly-wheel which, in its unceasing
and at first sight apparently aimless round, is giving motion to
thousands of reels and spindles and shuttles, that are spinning and
weaving, in all its varied patterns, the great web of life.

But the observer, as he looks on this web, is surprised to find that
it has in its whole extent a wondrous pattern. He rises to the
contemplation of type in nature, a great truth to which science has
only lately opened its eyes. He begins dimly to perceive that the
Creator has from the beginning had a plan before his mind, that this
plan embraced various types or patterns of existence; that on these
patterns he has been working out the whole system of nature, adapting
each to all the variety of uses by an infinity of minor modifications.
That, in short, whether he study the eye of a gnat or the structure of
a mountain chain, he sees not only objects of beauty and utility, but
parts of far-reaching plans of infinite wisdom, by which all objects,
however separated in time or space, are linked together.

How much of positive pleasure does that man los