THE VOICE OF NATURE by Hugh Macmillan

Training-School Pub. Ass'n, Ltd. · Battle Creek, Michigan · May 1900

FromTraining School Advocate, Vol. 2, No. 5.

THE VOICE OF NATURE.

By Hugh Macmillan

It was not in a temple that God first appeared to Moses. It was in a bush growing on a lonely hill-side. And yet that common piece of earth was made by the presence of God holy ground. Moses could feel as solemn there, and as near to heaven, and could worship God as fully, as if he were beneath the roof of the grandest temple that man had ever built. . . . God makes the place of his feet everywhere glorious, and every wayside bush is aflame with his presence. . . .

The abode of the rich man is made for the very purpose of exalting the person who inhabits it, and separating him from his fellow creatures. All his splendid surroundings are intended to show what a great personage he is. The very object of the magnificent architecture and furniture is to overwhelm the spectator with astonishment and awe. But, on the other hand, everything in God's dwelling is meant to attract the poorest and humblest visitor, and by the gentleness of God exhibited in every object to make him great. God made his house so grand and beautiful in order that he might teach our minds and win our hearts. Everything is intended to produce in us a deep sense of the lovableness of the divine character. And when we find out with what wonderful skill God has adorned the smallest things for our sake, and how wisely he has fitted them to gratify the innocent desire for pleasure, we yield to the attraction of his softer attributes, and realize that he delights in the happiness of his creatures. . . .

He who can see all the splendor, and take in all the joy of the landscape, has the true possession of it, no matter to whom its acres belong. All the beauty, all the tender touches, with which God has filled it are for him alone, a kind of confidential cipher-writing he alone can interpret in which God reveals to him the secrets of his wisdom.

It is indeed in man's soul that the beauty of nature has any existence. In the physical world it is mere color and shape, and substance and motion, mere matter in its various attributes. But in man's soul it becomes a scene of divine order and beauty, full of infinite significance.

Nature takes the hue of a man's own feeling, and he finds in it what he brings to it. In proportion as he becomes more intelligent and holy, so does it become more beautiful and significant to him. We know how much more heavenly this earth seems to us when we are in a heavenly frame of mind. And every one who has been made by his conversion in sympathy with nature, and in harmony with God's creation, when he gazes upon some beautiful scene of nature, feels that it touches within his soul some secret sense of more perfect scenes, of which, in future stages of his being, he is destined to bear a part.

And that feeling greatly helps his spiritual communion with God, and gives a sacred character to the landscape. Every emotion which natural objects inspire assumes the character of devotion. He has not, when he seeks the solitude of nature, to work himself into an elevated frame of mind or to regard the time and place only as a fit opportunity for holy meditation and prayer. He passes at once into a mood of divine fellowship. The atmosphere around him is itself devotional. The supernatural is to him but the natural disclosed. He sees an impress of God upon the whole scene, and every thing witnesses of him. The place is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven. . . .

The Bible is full of natural aids to devotion. We look upon the love of nature as an essential feature of modern times, the great peculiarity of modern poverty. But like everything beautiful in modern culture and thought, the seed of it may be traced to the Bible. In all the literature of Greece and Rome there is no such appreciation of the beauty of nature as we find in the Holy Scriptures. And this was owing to the higher and purer religious faith of the sacred writers, their deep consciousness of the all-pervading presence of the one living and true God. They made use constantly of the beauties of nature, not to create a mere idle sentiment, but to illustrate and emphasize man's moral and spiritual relations to God, as a kind of pictorial language of trust, prophecy, and prayer. They studied the universal beauty of life only in God's will. In the Hebrew Psalms, long ages before the light of physical science had dawned, there is a glowing recognition of the glory of the earth and sky, teaching us to open our ears and eyes, to listen to God's whisper, and to look upon God's face in the wonders of creation. And therefore every one should give way to his feelings. . . . The more truly religious we become, the more we can enter into the simple life of flower and bird and tree, and rise through this vividness of sympathy to the spiritual images or symbols which they suggest, and which our Lord so wonderfully embodied in his teaching.—Hugh Macmillan.