le, there must be some one to fill this station, and lead, in
behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old
man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part
of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a
reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God ... and I call on you
to join the same song." Works, book i. ch. xvi., Carter-Higginson
(translation) abridged.

"The universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand years
ago: and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with
which our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of
the world. We see what all our fathers saw. And if we cannot find God
in your house or in mine, upon the roadside or the margin of the sea;
in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night
musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of
life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I
do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of Eden, or
beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the
want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are
allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far
spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God's hand is,
THERE is miracle: and it is simply an indevoutness which imagines that
only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs
of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its
anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired,
than the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to
repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any
morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet
and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in
Paradise. It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place; but
only the loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can reawaken the
Eternal from the sleep within our souls: that can render him a reality
again, and reassert for him once more his ancient name of 'the Living
God.'"[319]

[319] James Martineau: end of the sermon "Help Thou Mine Unbelief," in
Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page
the extract from Voysey on p. 270, above, and those from Pascal and
Madame Guyon on p. 281.

When we see all things in God,