n and
stars over our heads, and to the meanest weed and insect under our feet;
the Lord and Giver of life alike to matter and spirit, soul and body,
worm and man, and angel and archangel before the throne of God. I hope
it is so. I trust it is so. For we never had more need than now to
believe with all our hearts in the living God; to take into all our
hearts the teaching of the 104th Psalm. For now that we have given up
believing in superstitions, we are in danger of going to the other
extreme, and believing in nothing at all which we cannot see with our
eyes, and handle with our hands. Now that we have given up believing in
the fabled supernatural; in ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, and such-
like: we are in danger of giving up believing in the true and eternal
supernatural, which is the Holy Spirit of God, by whom the whole creation
is kept alive and sound. We are in danger of falling into a low, stupid,
brutish view of this wonderful world of God in which we live; in danger
of thinking of nature--that is, of the things which we can see and
handle--only as something of which we can make use--till we fall as low
as that poor ruffian, of whom the poet says:

A primrose on the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.

Lower, that is, than even our own children, whom God has at least taught
to admire and love the primroses for their beauty--as something precious
and divine, quite independent of their own emotions about them. Men in
these days are but too likely to fall into the humour of those poor
savages, of whom one who knows them well said to me once--bitterly but
truly--that when a savage sees anything new, however wonderful or
beautiful, he has but two thoughts about it; first--Will it hurt me? and
next--Can I eat it? And from that truly brutish view of God's world, we
shall be delivered, I believe, only by taking in with our whole hearts
the teaching of the 104th Psalm; which is indeed the teaching of all Holy
Scripture throughout.

The Psalmist, in the passage which I have chosen, is talking of the
circulation of water on the earth; how wisely and well it is ordered; how
the vapours rise off the sea, till the waters stand above the mountain-
tops, to be brought down in thunder-storms--for in his country, as in
many hot ones, thunder was generally needed, at the end of the dry
season, to bring down the rain; how it forms springs in the highland, and
flows down f