d
in every process of the husbandman's toils. On a large scale and in the
long run the question of his success depends absolutely on his
comprehension and observance of those laws. The progress of man's
knowledge of nature is really a progress in the mastery of the variable
element in the problem of his labour. A thousand accidents, which baffle
the ignorant and careless husbandman, obey the control of the
intelligent and strenuous. The order is rigid. There is an awful
sternness in its certainty; but it grows benign to him who has mastered
its secret. It obeys him as a servant, it helps him as a friend; and the
certainty with which he can calculate its action is one essential
element of its friendliness. If he could not weigh the materials and
measure the forces which are constantly around him, if he could not
count on their known relations and actions with the same calm certainty
with which he expects the sunrise to light him to his daily toils, his
life would be one of miserable dependence; he would live the serf of
nature, and not her king. It is the unalterable fixity of relations and
forces which God has given him the power to discover and to employ,
which constitutes the royalty of his rule over nature; if that be
destroyed or shaken, his crown rolls in the dust. The constancy of the
relations and forces of the universe, their impassibility to the force
which man's will can bring to bear upon them, of which his husbandry
gives him full experience, is an essential element, perhaps we might say
_the_ essential element, in that higher culture which they offer to his
spirit; it is this which makes the life of even the workman something
higher than a lottery, and the toils of earth an education for the works
and the joys of heaven.

3. The writer of this book, while he sees this grand, calm, and constant
order very clearly, and appreciates its ministry to man, has a dark, sad
vision of the uncertainties which cross it--the strength and magnitude
of the variable element in nature and in life, which perplexes and
baffles the strenuous workman, keeps him constantly on the tenter-hooks
of anxiety, and not seldom rends his heart with anguish, and lays his
fairest and proudest achievements in ruins in the dust. A certain order
is there, all men can see it. Yes, men say,--and especially orientals,
in whose climate the destructive agencies often run riot; but there is a
dire disorder, and the disorder triumphs. Who knows the