244 RAMBLES AND REVERIES. 



scene of magnificence, where all things are conducive 

 to our highest welfare. Not upon some gigantic 

 cinder, as the moon is said to be, porous with the 

 vents and craters left by desolating fires as the 

 evidence of their dreadful forces, now gaping for 

 showers and dew that can never come out of an arid 

 sky ; but in a veritable Paradise though slimed 

 with the trail of sin has God placed His children of 

 the earth. And they who are wise enough to con- 

 template the Divine benevolence in Nature's laws 

 and arrangements do themselves become more like 

 God, and realise a foretaste of that "fulness of joy," 

 which, we may hope, will be ours when our know- 

 ledge of God's works shall no longer be incomplete, 

 but we shall "know even as also" we are "known." 



Are we not right, then, in saying that to bring to 

 man the delight of communion with God in Nature 

 is the highest function of science ? The truest glory 

 of a painting does not lie in the pigments that cover 

 the canvas, but in its power to speak as from the 

 soul of the artist to the soul of him who admires 

 the thought of which the picture is the embodiment. 

 And while it is good to admire scientific method 

 and natural law, it is better to worship the Mind 

 which that method discloses, and which made that 

 law. Thus are we touched at our noblest points, 

 and our truest humanity is awakened to sublime 

 soarings of thought and instinctive yearnings for 

 holiness. 



II. The suggestion is common in these days that 

 the proper domain of science is the positive or 

 material, and that Nature ought to be studied apart 



