THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 295 



recognition of Beauty and Sublimity of forms, constitutes 

 the worship. 



And Man in opposition to the Vegetable world ? Altering 

 many things, he has laid hands upon it, and the great 

 phases of his History are also catalogued on the green leaf 

 of vegetation. But how has he husbanded it? The 

 history of cultivation would answer us, " Excellently ; he 

 has by wise care converted the raw, unyielding material of 

 Nature into those choice gifts which now appear." Well, 

 we will not contest with him the glory, that where interest 

 and animal necessity have driven him, the individual has 

 indeed well understood his own profit, but then, shared 

 the advantage he has gained with fellow-men and those 

 coming after him, only when forced by the laws of Nature. 

 On the other hand, where no temporary profit was to be 

 derived from assisting Nature, or even from leaving it 

 alone, where the question was merely the misery of a 

 thousand or two of future fellow-beings, he has, with bar- 

 barous rudeness, demolished and destroyed, for thousands 

 of years, often wickedly squandered the seed which God 

 had vouchsafed, not for himself alone, but also for his 

 successors. And has he striven to adorn and sanctify the 

 temple of God to universal worship ? Oh, no ! In his 

 selfish labours, in the tears of his brother, rendered 

 miserable by his crimes, in the cry of the scourged slave, 

 the continual remembrance of God had become disagree- 

 able and troublesome to him ; he declared the afflatus of 

 the Divine breath in Nature was but a nursery tale, that 

 he might no longer be frightened by his conscience. 

 Beauty, the expression of the Divine in Nature, vanished 

 before selfish profit from the vegetable world, and at 

 most, caring, with narrow heart, but for himself alone, 

 the Individual enclosed a little space in which he used the 



