The Message of Beauty by R.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 14, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 27.

The Message of Beauty

By R.

THE world is full of beauty. Everywhere there is something to entrance the eye. Even the desert presents its contribution of beauty in waxlike blossoms, gorgeous sunsets, and star-clustered midnight skies.

By the dusty roadsides grow the humble weeds whose little florets, under the microscope, reveal beauties that surprise the eye and delight the heart.

Even the dull, gray mosses on the surfaces of rocks and tree trunks have their simple beauty of growth and texture. And in forest wastes and on mountainsides where the foot of man touches but once in a century, if at all, grow the grandest and rarest of flowers, imparting their fragrance to the desert air.

There is beauty in the shells along the seashore. Place a minute quantity of diatomaceous earth beneath the microscope; you will see forms of beauty that will startle the imagination and transcend the highest reaches of finite wisdom; minute as were the creatures, the skeletons they have left are all formed upon lines of the truest symmetry, numberless in variety, practically infinite in design.

We behold beauty when we look down into the depths of the unfathomable sea. There is beauty in the wreaths of glittering frost and the white plumes that hang upon the branches of the winter trees. There is unrivaled beauty in the deep turquoise blue of glacial ice, and the sunlight finds in their icy caverns that which shames the castles of kings and the glories of magnificent palaces.

Solutions of common salts when hardening take forms of indescribable beauty, rivaling the lace-work of the most beautiful ferns and showing, through their Author, a kinship with a higher world.

We can not gaze upon the skies without seeing vast sweeps of beauty that show how large a canvas can be gloriously covered by the Artist of the universe.

Even the clouds are indescribably beautiful. And in their changing forms they reveal the fact that nature is lavish of beauty. Nature never lets any one of the members of her family be like any other. Tho the clouds are alike in their great features, yet out of the countless millions that flock or cover the skies, every one of them has a separate beauty and character of its own.

Each cloud seems to have been formed by a distinct set of forces, and appears to manifest a separate thought in its creation. Take, for example, any single fragment of any cloud that floats in the sky, “and you will find it put together as if there had been a year's thought over the plan of it, arranged with the most studied inequality—with the most delicate symmetry—with the most elaborate contrast, a picture in itself.” Try any other piece of cloud in the sky, you will find it just as perfect, but not one in the least like another.

And then, again, the clouds are constantly changing their forms and colors. A dozen clouds may have for us “fifty pictures, made up each of millions of minor thoughts—fifty aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the shekinah of the blue—fifty hollow ways among bewildered hills—each with its own nodding rocks, and cloven precipices, and radiant summits, and robing vapors, but all unlike each other, except in beauty, all bearing witness to the unwearied, exhaustless operation of the Infinite Mind.”

As we gaze upon the beauty of the floating clouds, and see the delicate modeling of their shimmering sides, and the rounded glory of their magnificent heaps, we know and realize that the God who made them is a God of beauty; and by day even as well as by night we realize that “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork.”

There is nothing in nature so bad or degraded by the curse of sin but it still manifests some tokens of beauty. Many thorn bushes have beautiful blossoms. And we all know of the sweetbrier whose thorns are forgotten for the beauty and fragrance of its flowers.

In these and all similar cases, wherever beauty bursts through and irradiates the degraded things of earth, it sends to us—if we will have it so—a message of hope.

Beauty in the world is but the shining there of the love of God. Beauty is God's promise to us that where partial perfection and glimmerings of beauty now rest shall some day be manifested the fulness of His perfection and character.

Beauty then is an earnest of the glories to come. It is a promissory note from God that some day the world shall be all beautiful and all glorious forevermore. R.