Therefore, my friends, let us at all times, in all places, and especially at this Whitsuntide, remember that all we see, or can see, except sin, is the work of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God. Let us look on the world around us, as what it is, as what the old Psalmist saw it to be,—a sacred place, full of God’s presence, shaped, quickened, and guided by the Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life.
My dear friends, God grant that you may all learn to look upon this world as the Psalmist looked on it. God grant that you may all learn to see, each in your own way, what a great and pious poet of our fathers’ time put into words far wiser and grander than any which I can invent for you, when he said how, looking on the earth, the sea, the sky, he felt—
‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world; Of eye and ear, both what they half create And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.’ { 243}
Yes; of our moral being, our characters, our souls. By looking upon this beautiful and wonderful world around us with reverence, and earnestness, and love, as what it is,—the work of God’s Spirit,—we shall become not merely the more learned, or the more happy, we shall become actually better men. The beauties in the earth and sky; the flowers with their fair hues and fragrant scents; the song of birds; the green shaughs and woodlands; the moors purple with heath, and golden with furze; the shapes of clouds, from the delicate mist upon the lawn to the thunder pillar towering up in awful might; the sunrise and sunset, painted by God afresh each morn and even; the blue sky, which is the image of God the heavenly Father, boundless, clear, and calm, looking down on all below with the same smile of love, sending his rain alike on the evil and on the good, and causing his sun to shine alike on the just and on the unjust:—he who watches all these things, day by day, will find his heart grow quiet, sober, meek, contented. His eyes will be turned away from beholding vanity. His soul will be kept from vexation of spirit. In God’s tabernacle, which is the universe of all the worlds, he will be kept from the strife of tongues. As he watches the work of God’s Spirit, the beauty of God’s Spirit, the wisdom of God’s Spirit, the fruitfulness of God’s Spirit, which shines forth in every wayside flower, and every gnat which dances in the sun, he will rejoice in God’s work, even as God himself rejoices. He will learn to value things at their true price, and see things of their real size. Ambition, fame, money, will seem small things to him as he considers the lilies of the field, how the heavenly Father clothes them, and the birds of the air, how the heavenly Father feeds them; and he will say with the wise man—