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IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 



OME people do not well know that God is out-of-doors. 

 I marvel at them. He is everywhere "though I take 

 the wings of the morning" but so God is in dusks 

 and dawns and twilights and noons, in doors and out, 

 at toil and on holidays, where deserts keep tryst with 

 the moonlight, and where the wide sea can behold no 

 shore God is always wherever I have gone. He is 

 in the little room where a baby learns its prayer 

 from mother lips, kneeling, and with fingers inter- 

 laced (God loves a sight like this), and in the 

 church where congregations meet to wait on the 

 Lord, and "worship in the beauty of holiness," and where in God's acre 

 we bury our beloved out of the sight of our eyes dimmed with weeping 

 God is there; but he is also out where he has planted the wind 

 flowers, and where the hawthorn stoops beneath its drifted snows fresh 

 fallen, and where sweet eglantine blooms and the fringed gentian, and 

 where the Indian pipe grows in the dusk of quiet woods, and where the 

 maple flushes a little in the early spring and sows the ground beneath, 

 where its shadows will soon shut sunlight out, with its own pink blos- 

 soms, and where the sycamore stands in winter with its yellow apples 

 like a jest of harvest for a tree so bulky, or where dodder plant, yellow 

 as gold, steals saps from other plants to feed its splendors on, and where 

 the sea-fowls float like a ghost of voices through the night skies, heard 

 but unseen, God is out-of-doors also God is everywhere. 



He made the Out-of-doors and loves it, and haunts it, as Jesus did 

 the mountain and the sea. "Behold the lilies how they grow," He 

 said whose name is sweet; and so I will heed them; and, He said, 

 "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?" True, sparrows are very 

 plentiful and bickering, but I will look at them, for He made them and 



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