Feeling themselves sometimes swept away upon this great current of events, inclosed in this serpent-fold of destiny, men have lost their proper sense of responsibility and sunk down into a passive fatalism. From this torpor God would ever arouse us, and have us see in the return, as in the going forth, the same providential plan--the same sphere of duty and privilege.
How full of privilege is this recurrent aspect of things! Led by the hosts of heaven, the seasons walk their benign round, and in their course they are ever renewing most delightful relations of life. In the calendar of nature there are far more festivals than fasts, and, to a well-taught mind, the recurrence of the sadder times and scenes of the year brings thoughts more blessed than the world's reckless feasting. Spring and summer are always new and always cheering, whilst autumn and winter teach lessons and may nurture affections more precious than their gayer treasures. The text of nature has ever a marginal commentary taken from the book of the heart; and as the text is read and re-read, the commentary grows in size and interest, for each year's repeated interviews reveal nature and the heart more fully to each other, and give variety ever fresh to a friendship constant as the law of God. The great universe was made, we must believe, more for the home of rational souls than for the playground of giant masses and powers of matter. What aspect of its vastness is more tender than that which exhibits its majestic changes as waiting upon the discipline and affections of God's children; the great sun lighting the laborer to his work, and then withdrawing its light to send him to the welcome of his home and the peace of his pillow; the whole starry host joining together to make and mark the days and months whose returning recalls some pleasant face of life and Providence, makes childhood glad, or age peaceful.
Man himself has in his own being a periodicity corresponding with the cycles of nature. His active energies, his sensibilities, social and devout, his intellectual powers, have their recurrent periods. He is strangely ignorant of his own nature, who has not learned that there are times and tides within his own soul as well as with seas and stars. The plan of the benign Deity for him seems to be such as to secure at once constancy, and variety, and progress.