he finds himself illuminated and strengthened; and
if there be revelation of divine things on earth, it is when the hidden
secrets of nature are disclosed to the sincere and self-denying seeker
after truth.

Yes, that is true. The more you look into the world around you, and
consider every flower, and bird, and stone, the more you will see that a
Mind planned them, even the mind of God; a Mind like yours and mine; but
how infinitely different, how much deeper, wiser, vaster. Before that
thought we shrink into the nothingness from whence He called us out at
first. The difference between our minds and the Mind of God is--to what
shall I liken it? Say, to the difference between a flake of soot and a
mountain of pure diamond. That soot and that diamond are actually the
same substance; of that there is no doubt whatsoever; but as the light,
dirty, almost useless soot is to the pure, and clear, hard diamond, ay,
to a mountain, a world, a whole universe made of pure diamond--if such a
thing were possible--so is the mind of man compared with that Mind of the
ever blessed Trinity, which made the worlds, and sustains them in life
and order to this day.

My friends, it is not in great things only, but in the very smallest,
that the greatest glory of the ever blessed Trinity is seen. Ay, most,
perhaps, in the smallest, when one considers the utterly inconceivable
wisdom, which can make the smallest animal--so made as to be almost
invisible under the strongest microscope--as perfect in all its organs as
the hugest elephant. Ay, more, which can not only make these tiny living
things, but, more wonderful still, make them make themselves? For what
is growth, but a thing making itself? What is the seed growing into a
plant, the plant into a flower, the flower to a seed again, but that
thing making itself, transforming itself, by an inward law of life which
God's Spirit gives it. I tell you the more earnestly and carefully you
examine into the creation, birth, growth of any living thing, even of the
daisy on the grass outside; the more you inquire what it really is, how
it came to be like what it is, how it got where it is, and so forth; you
will be led away into questions which may well make you dizzy with
thinking, so strange, so vast, so truly miraculous is the history of
every organised creature upon earth. And when you recollect (as you are
bound to do on this day), that each of these thin