A TUFT OF MOSS. 



throughout all the formations of the earth, it is surely 

 not a vain imagination to suppose that in the constitu- 

 tion of the lower forms of vegetable and animal life, 

 which were made by Him long ages before man, He 

 who seeth the end from the beginning, and to whom a 

 thousand years are as one day, should have had an eye 

 to the constitution of the wonderful being that was one 

 day to occupy the highest place in the organic world. 

 We cannot but suppose that God worked up to this new 

 thing in His universe, as His manner always is, by hints 

 and forecasts of it in lower and earlier forms. He 

 traced, in the structure and habits of the first emerald 

 tuft of moss that crept over the newly -formed soil, the 

 first faint indication of the idea that was to be unfolded 

 in all its wonderful fulness of meaning in the human 

 world. The moss-tuft composed of its branching and 

 mutually related individuals, had its real origin in man, 

 its primary source in man's moral nature, and its true 

 meaning in the institution of man's social condition ; 

 that condition for which God made provision in the 

 formation of man, which He inaugurated when He gave 

 him a help-meet, taken as a rib from his side, and which 

 He means to perfect and complete in that heavenly 

 " city " towards which from the first the desires of 

 man and the preparations of God have been alike 

 directed. 



6. A compact tuft or cushion of moss is a solid mass 

 that has a smooth surface and a rounded outline. It is 

 like the uniform pile of plush or velvet, as even and as 

 closely pressed together. We know how the velvet or 



