ld in a field
or wood. You admire its beautiful colours, or if it is fragrant, its
sweet scent. Now, why was that flower put there? You may answer, "to
please me." My dear friends, I should be the last person to deny that.
I can never see a child picking a nosegay, much less a little London
child, born and bred and shut up among bricks and mortar, when it gets
for the first time into a green field, and throws itself instinctively
upon the buttercups and daisies, as if they were precious jewels and
gold;--I never can see that sight, I say, without feeling that there are
such things as final causes--I mean that the great Father in heaven put
those flowers into that field on purpose to give pleasure to His human
children. But then comes the question, Of all the flowers in a single
field, is one in ten thousand ever looked at by child or by men? And yet
they are just as beautiful as the rest; and God has, so to speak, taken
just as much pains with the many beautiful things which men will never
see, as with the few, very few, which men may see. And when one thinks
further about this--when one thinks of the vast forests in other lands
which the foot of man has seldom or never trod, and which, when they are
entered, are found to be full of trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, so
beautiful and glorious, that anything which we see in these islands is
poor and plain in comparison with them; and when we remember that these
beautiful creatures have been going on generation after generation, age
after age, unseen and unenjoyed by any human eyes, one must ask, Why has
God been creating all that beauty? simply to let it all, as it were, run
to waste, till after thousands of years one traveller comes, and has a
hasty glimpse of it? Impossible. Or again--and this is an example still
more strange, and yet it is true. We used to think till within a very
few years past, that at the bottom of the deep sea there were no living
things--that miles below the surface of the ocean, in total darkness, and
under such a weight of water as would crush us to a jelly, there could be
nothing, except stones, and sand, and mud. But now it is found out that
the bottom of the deepest seas, and the utter darkness into which no ray
of light can ever pierce, are alive and swarming with millions of
creatures as cunningly and exquisitely formed, and in many cases as
brilliantly coloured, as those which live in the sunlig