cheme.

I approach a profound and terrible mystery. We can see how in the
pre-Adamic ages higher should have succeeded lower dynasties. To be low
was not to be immoral; to be low was not to be guilt-stained and
miserable. The sea anemone on its half-tide rock, and the fern on its
mossy hill-side, are low in their respective kingdoms; but they are,
notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God
who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are
startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,--an
inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of
responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a
lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in
the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom moral
evil can have no place? The subject is one which it seems not given to
man thoroughly to comprehend. Permit me, however, to remark in reply,
that in a sense so plain, so obvious, so unequivocally true, that it
would lead an intelligent jury, impannelled in the case, conscientiously
to convict, and a wise judge righteously to condemn, all that is evil in
the present state of things man may as certainly have wrought out for
himself, as the criminals whom we see sentenced at every justiciary
court work out for themselves the course of punishment to which they are
justly subjected.

It has been well said of the Author of all by the poet, that, "binding
nature fast in fate," he "left free the human will." And it is this
freedom or independency of will operating on an intellect moulded after
the image and likeness of the Divinity that has rendered men capable of
being what the Scriptures so emphatically term "fellow-workers with
God." In a humble and restricted sense, as I have already
remarked,--humble and restricted, but in that restricted sense obviously
true,--the surface of the earth far and wide testifies to this fact of
fellowship in working. The deputed lord of creation, availing himself of
God's natural laws, does what no mere animal of the old geologic ages
ever did, or ever could have done,--he adorns and beautifies the earth,
and adds tenfold to its original fertility and productiveness. In this
special sense, then, he is a fellow-worker with Him who, according to
the Psalmist, "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for
the service of man, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man