ter lecture, by one of yourselves, will enable me to
explain to you precisely what I _mean_.

After last lecture, in which you remember I challenged our physiologists
to tell me how a bird flies, one of you, whose pardon, if he thinks it
needful, I ask for this use of his most timely and illustrative
statement, came to me, saying, "You know the way in which we are shown
how a bird flies, is, that any one, a dove for instance, is given to us,
plucked, and partly skinned, and incised at the insertion of the wing
bone; and then, with a steel point, the ligament of the muscle at the
shoulder is pulled up, and out, and made distinct from other ligaments,
and we are told 'that is the way a bird flies,' and on that matter it is
thought we have been told enough."

I say that this instance given me was timely; I will say more--in the
choice of this particular bird, providential. Let me take, in their
order, the two subjects of inquiry and instruction, which are indeed
offered to us in the aspect and form of that one living creature.

281. Of the splendor of your own true life, you are told, in the words
which, to-day, let me call, as your Fathers did, words of
inspiration--"Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove, that is covered
with silver wings and her feathers with gold." Of the manifold iris of
color in the dove's plumage, watched carefully in sunshine as the bird
moves, I cannot hope to give you any conception by words; but that it is
the most exquisite, in the modesty of its light, and in the myriad
mingling of its hue, of all plumage, I may partly prove to you in this
one fact, that out of all studies of color, the one which I would
desire most to place within your reach in these schools, is Turner's
drawing of a dove, done when he was in happy youth at Farnley. But of
the causes of this color, and of the peculiar subtlety in its
iridescence, nothing is told you in any scientific book I have ever seen
on ornithology.

282. Of the power of flight in these wings, and the tender purpose of
their flight, you hear also in your Fathers' book. To the Church, flying
from her enemies into desolate wilderness, there were indeed given two
wings as of a great eagle. But the weary saint of God, looking forward
to his home in calm of eternal peace, prays rather--"Oh that I had wings
like a dove, for then should I flee away, and be at rest." And of these
wings, and this mind of hers, this is what reverent science should teach
you: f