chaotic, the world of man, his very soul, rent, shattered, darkened. We have read of great cities, under which an earthquake shook the foundations, or over which volcanic fires swept, and the melted masses covered and grew hard above them; houses, palaces, temples, the fairest works of art, and the men who rejoiced in them, all buried in the ruin. Shadows of the soul receding from the Spirit, and letting the world and its lusts sweep over it or undermine! The empire of the Lord divided; centre mixed with circumference; heaven darkened and sunken by infernal blasts; the sun and stars fallen; the order and beauty of the soul shattered and lost in an ingulfing earth or a volcanic mass. It is as if the destroying god of the East had done his first wild work of boundless desolation. Let but the central life, the quickening spirit, come over and fill us; then all is changed, and the universe of man reproduces the perfection and symmetry of maternal nature; the destroyer disappears, or rather, as in the mythic tale, becomes the renewer, and as he goes out in his power, Heaven resumes its wonted serenity and brightness; sun and stars shine; worlds stand forth in fresh beauty. The spiritual creation rests in its Sabbath.

SERMON II.

THE MANIFOLD UNITY.*

PSALM civ. 24.

O LORD, HOW MANIFOLD ARE THY WORKS! IN WISDOM HAST THOU MADE THEM ALL THE EARTH IS FULL OF THY RICHES.

THE last week has renewed our remembrance of the great truth. The powers latent in what seems but dead, the earth beneath our feet, have been shown. As we walk over it or take portions of it in our hands, it appears only as sand or clay. Rocks may have been beaten, or through other process have crumbled, into little and loose pieces; fallen leaves have mingled with them, or decayed trees or autumnal grasses; rains have come down upon them, or dews or vapors, and seas, lakes, streams, from the grand river to the tiny brook, have watered them; heat, light, air, have penetrated through them; and as results of these, and if there be other influences, we have, for bare and dry wastes, green fields, flowers of every scent and hue, rich fruit, nourishing grain, all, in one word, which gives life and beauty to nature. Such the simple combinations of the elements!

* Delivered the Sunday succeeding an agricultural exhibition.

Their products as numberless. Out of fissures in the rocks, from the unbroken rock itself on which a little soil has gathered, plants spring and flowers bloom. All along the steep sides of mountains we see the pine, the oak, the maple, other loftiest trees growing out from between masses standing forth in everlasting grandeur; and from the dark precipice vines stretch their tendrils, and flowers soften the wild savagery by their sweet, calm beauty. But who shall speak of the uncounted varieties, and of the equally uncounted numbers in each variety, by which fields and forests are thronged! And how wonderfully fitted, each to whatever may be the spot of its growth or other relations within which it is held! Streams of manifold influence are flowing for ever, every one through its own channels to its own repositories. The flower-weed we pull up and fling away, how wonderful in itself! What powers and combinations have entered into it! Look at some single leaf through a glass by which it shall be sufficiently enlarged; you might call its little particles compact piles of brilliant pearls. And into each glittering pearl of this vegetable mine nature has given forth of her amplest resources. A soil, fitted through nicest choice and numberless adaptations; water gathered from height or depth, through meeting influences of sky and earth; air, tempered to the very want of the hour and the growth; fire, penetrating the whole through heat or light; seed at once endowed with precisely the power of yielding such growth, and exacting for the effect precisely these conditions; and from

the first outcoming of the soft shoot to the completion of the plant, silent processes going forward every hour of night and of day to secure the end. Sun and earth, as well as air and clouds, are waiting, as servants, on the very weed. Nay, they are waiting in perpetual ministrations on each leaf, and in unexhausted care bringing their secret powers into and through every particle for its perfection and the perfection of the whole. Growth is not partial and fragmentary, but integral; the universe, we might almost say, compresses itself into the atom; the atom, expanded to its widest, is index and mirror of the universe. Yet with infinite variety; that from the poles to the tropics, from east to west through every region, each product is, not symbol only of the whole great nature, but exponent of the peculiar qualities and modifications assumed within the sphere of its own growth. Nor is this the end of all vegetation, similar as the seeds and influences may be throughout the entire period of development, there are still those hidden differences which mark all as wholly individual. The resources of nature are indeed inexhaustible. From even the same stem, several fruits grow; but as kind is distinct from kind, so is individual from individual wholly and for ever.

The remark applies equally to animal existence. From the lowest, which forms a sort of junction with the vegetable, to the highest, which appears almost as if prophetic of man, and thence in man through his ascending course to the very verge of pure spiritual existence, we see the same perpetual

discrimination. Two opposite facts meet us here, as they meet us lower down in the many realms of existence; unlimited oneness, endless multiplicity. All is one, no twain are alike. But here again each contains the whole. If the mere weed seen in its amplitude, is comprehension of the infinite powers of nature; so likewise is each animal, with the developed energies of a life revealing sensation and movement; so likewise is man, with the higher qualities of spiritual consciousness, not only taking in the whole compass of inferior existence, but entering into that higher and broader cycle within which divine and celestial realities for ever revolve. Nothing is more common than the endeavor to illustrate or to prove God's existence and perfection from nature as it thus appears through each realm to the body and even the bodily sensations of man, with their relations also to those mental powers by which he reduces outward things to subjection. It is well. These all indicate, as they flow from, a cause evolving them as effects. But they fail of revealing the first and highest cause. To perceive that, we must seek to go into the holiest shrine, the secret oracle, the Divine Presence itself in our souls. Before essaying this, however, we will proceed a while on our external path.

As the mind of man is highest among such as we know of the manifold works of the Divine Wisdom, richer than all the fulness of the earth, so may we deem also the products of mind operating through the bodily organs, portions of the same inexhaustible energy. From the spontaneous growth