smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling life,
A visible token of the unfolding love
That are the soul of this wide universe."--BRYANT.

[Page 260]
Philosophy has seen the vast machine of the universe, wheel within
wheel, in countless numbers and hopeless intricacy. But it has
not had the spiritual insight of Ezekiel to see that they were
everyone of them full of eyes--God's own emblem of the omniscient
supervision.

What if there are some sounds that do not seem to be musically
rhythmic. I have seen where an avalanche broke from the mountain side
and buried a hapless city; have seen the face of a cliff shattered
to fragments by the weight of its superincumbent mass, or pierced
by the fingers of the frost and torn away. All these thunder down
the valley and are pulverized to sand. Is this music? No, but it
is a tuning of instruments. The rootlets seize the sand and turn
it to soil, to woody fibre, leafy verdure, blooming flowers, and
delicious fruit. This asks life to come, partake, and be made strong.
The grass gives itself to all flesh, the insect grows to feed the
bird, the bird to nourish the animal, the animal to develop the
man.

Notwithstanding the tendency of all high-class energy to deteriorate,
to find equilibrium, and so be strengthless and dead, there is,
somehow, in nature a tremendous push upward. Ask any philosopher,
and he will tell you that the tendency of all endowed forces is
to find their equilibrium and be at rest--that is, dead. He draws
a dismal picture of the time when the sun shall be burned out,
and the world float like a charnel ship through the dark, cold
voids of space--the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the
world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond
consciousness. The philosopher has wailed a dirge without [Page 261]
hope, a requiem without grandeur, over the world's future. But
nature herself, to all ears attuned, sings paeans, and shouts to men
that the highest energy, that of life, does not deteriorate.

Mere nature may deteriorate. The endowments of force must spend
themselves. Wound-up watches and worlds must run down. But nature
sustained by unexpendable forces must abide. Nature filled with
unexpendable forces continues in form. Nature impelled by a magnificent
push of life must ever rise.

Study her history in the past. Sulphurous realms of deadly gases
become solid worlds; surplus sunlight