asionally, to look forth from this little world of custom and
convenience we ourselves have constructed, into that which bears the
impress of the Almighty's hand--is still as it was left from His forming
strength, and brings us into immediate communion with His Infinite mind.
Let us, at least, listen to the notes of David's lyre on the creative
Majesty.

After an invocation to the heavenly host, the Psalmist calls first on the
forms of inanimate and inorganic existence. These things, of which he
enumerates a few, praise the power of God. The crags and headlands, jarred
and worn by the billows they breast; the granite peaks, bald and grey,
under light and tempest, with the silent host of rocky boulders, swept, we
know not by what convulsions, from their native seat, stand up as the
first rank in the choir of the Maker's worship; and infidelity and atheism
are hushed and abashed by their lofty praise.

Organized, but still unconscious existence takes the next station in this
universal chorus. The solemn grove lifting its green top into the heavens,
beside that motionless army of ancient stones, adds a sweeter note than
they can give to the great harmony. It is a note, speaking not alone of
the Creator's power, but of His wisdom too. Here is life and growth. Here
are adaptations and stages of progress. From the minutest germination,
from the slenderest stem, from the smallest trembling leaf to the hugest
trunks and the highest overshadowing branches, this vegetable
organization, verdant, pale, crimson, in changeable colors, runs; stopping
short only with Alpine summits or polar posts, swiftly and softly clothing
again the rents and gashes in the ground made by the stroke of labor or
the wheels of war--blooming into the golden and ruddy harvest on the stalk
and the bough, even overpassing the salt shore, to line the dismal and
unvisited caves of the deep with peculiar varieties of growth; and forth
into our hands from the foaming brine delicate and strangely beautiful
leaves and slight ramifications of matchless tints and proportions.

But the Psalmist summons a third order of beings to contribute its
melodious share to this hallelujah; and that is the living and conscious,
though irrational tribes. This sings not of power and wisdom alone, but
more complex and rich in adoration, sings of goodness also. God has not
made the world for a dead spectacle and mere picture for His own eye. How
full and crowded with life, and hap