1857.] Good in All Things. 351 



GOOD IN ALL THINGS. 



We know not the eternal purposes of God. We look at tte im- 

 mediate and transient result, not at the ultimate and permanent. 

 Thus the mariner can not come to port by reason of the storm and 

 rocks which obstruct his course ; he thinks the weather imperfect, 

 the world not well made — and you often hear men say : " How 

 beautiful the world would be if there were no storms, no hurricanes, 

 no thunder and lightning." While if we could overlook the cosmic 

 forces which make up the material world, we should see that every 

 storm and every rock was needful ; and the world would not be per- 

 fect and accomplish its function had not each been just in its proper 

 time and place. An oak tree in the woods appears quite imperfect; 

 the leaves are coiled up and spoiled by the leaf-roller ; cut to pieces 

 by the tailor-beetle ; eaten by the hag-mouth and the polyhemus, the 

 slug caterpillar and her numerous kindred; the twigs are sucked by 

 the white-lined tree-hopper, or cut oif by the oak-pruner ; the horn- 

 bug, the curculio and the timber-beetle eat up its wood ; the gad-fly 

 punctures leaf and bark, converting the forces of the tree to that 

 insect's use ; the grub lives in the young acorn ; fly-catchers are on 

 its leaves ; a spider weaves his web from twig to twig ; caterpillars 

 of various denominations gnaw its tender shoots ; the creeper and 

 the wood-pecker bore through the bark ; squirrels — striped, flying, 

 red and gray — have gnawed into its limbs and made their nests ; 

 the toad has a hole in a flaw of its base ; the fox has cut asunder its 

 fibrous root in digging his burrow ; the bear dwells in its trunk, 

 which worms, emmets, bees and countless insects have helped to 

 hollow ; ice and the winds of winter have broken ofi" full many a 

 bough. How inperfect and incomplete the oak tree looks, so broken, 

 crooked, cragged, gnarled and grim ! The carpenter can not get a 

 beam, the millwright a shaft, or the ship-builder a solid knee for his 

 purpose ; even the common woodman spares that tree as not worth 

 felling ; it only cumbers the ground. But it has served its compli- 

 cated purpose, given board and lodging for all these creatures, from 

 the ephemeral fly, joying in his transient summer, to the brawny 

 bear for many a winter hibernating in its trunk. It has been 

 a great woodland caravansary, even a tavern and a chateau, to all 

 that heterogenous swarm ; and yet no man but a painter thinks 



