waste truth? Have you ever
felt what a sad thing it is that so little of the vast accumulation of
inspiring knowledge should reach our deepest, our religious sentiments,
to kindle and feed them? The most certain knowledge which men now hold
is that which is gathered from the sky. Astronomy, dealing with objects
thousands of millions of miles away, and with forces that rule through
limitless space, is the most symmetrical and firm of all the structures
of science which have been reared by the human mind. Immeasurably
more than David could have known, the heavens, as Herschel reads them,
declare the glory of God. Yet how seldom do we think of the splendors
and harmonies which a modern book of astronomy unveils as part of
God's appeal to our wonder; how seldom does the solemn light from the
uppermost regions of immensity, the light of nebulae which science has
broken up into heaps of suns, converge upon a human soul with power
enough to stimulate devout awe and make the heart bend before the
Creator of the universe."

A few days at Lake Tahoe, when not a hundred white men had visited its
shores, inspired a sermon long remembered by those who heard it,
and today, after numerous nature-sermons by the world's most gifted
preachers, this discourse remains an almost perfect example of what such
a sermon should be. The following single excerpt must suffice to suggest
its beauty:

"I must speak of another lesson, connected with religion, that was
suggested to me on the borders of Lake Tahoe. It is bordered by groves
of noble pines. Two of the days which I was permitted to enjoy there
were Sundays. On one of them I passed several hours of the afternoon
in listening, alone, to the murmur of the pines, while the waves were
gently beating the shore with their restlessness. If the beauty and
purity of the lake were in harmony with the deepest religion of the
Bible, certainly the voice of the pines was also in chord with it.

"The oracles of Greece are connected with the oak. And the lightness,
the gaiety, the wit, the suppleness, of the Greek mind find in the voice
of the oak their fit representatives; for the oak, though so stubborn
and sinewy in its substances, is cheery and gay in its tone when the
wind strikes it. But the evergreen trees, though so much softer in their
stock, are far deeper and more serious in their music; and the evergreen
is the Hebrew tree. The Cedar of Lebanon is the tree most prominent
when we think of Pa