The purpose of all purposes in the study of nature is to understand God. While no man by searching can find out God, yet believing in Him we may come to greater revelations of Him. We can form but little, if any, idea of God apart from His works; for it is through the avenue of the senses that the Spirit of God enters the soul. Therefore love for God should very early be instilled into the mind of a child. We understand God through faith, and the child—especially the little child—is a living example of faith. Without this faith in God going hand in hand with the study of nature, it will only lead away from Him, and thus its grandest and greatest purpose will be defeated.
The great aim of nature study—and indeed of all study—is character-building. This is attained by presenting conditions in which all the powers of the child may be so developed that he will live an honorable, upright, and noble life. Such a life yields happiness, and the happiness so derived is the happiness of heaven. True liberty is the only means by which true happiness may be secured, but liberty is little else, in its right sense, than the ability to help one’s self and others. It is greater power to think righteous thoughts and to do righteous deeds, greater capacity for meeting a brother’s need, greater strength in expression; and the world has great need for the expression of such thoughts and feelings and sympathies. All this is liberty, an expansion of soul which may go on everlastingly.
One of the great necessities of this life is a knowledge of our surroundings or environments. The child is given a life amid trees and flowers, humming bees and singing birds, rivers and rills, tempest and sunshine, insects and animals, foes and friends, rocks, moving sand, and fertile soil—all bearing witness of that great silent force, life,—and all existing for him alone. He is lord of all, he is to subdue all, so far as he can to bring it to its proper relation to its Maker and his. Upon the life of his environment does the physical life of the child depend, and his spiritual life is directly concerned with the laws governing nature in all its various manifestations and varieties of form and color. The same hand which guides the flying cloud, the shifting sands of the desert, or the tides of the ocean, will direct our steps. Nature is yielding to His hand. This is why it is so constant and regular; and when our lives are as completely yielded to Him, all our steps will be ordered by him.
Nature teaches living truths. It does not lie. All of God’s works are done in verity and truth. Character-building does not stop alone with mere seeing, hearing, and feeling. All this furnishes merely a basis upon which the child may reason or interpret what has come to him through the senses. The child sees a certain object; he examines it carefully, and notes all the conditions surrounding and influencing it. These conditions are the causes, the object is the effect. He unites cause and effect, and discovers the relation. Here begins the great work of self-emancipation; the child is moving toward liberty—true liberty, if God be in His reasoning.
All nature is of little interest, however, to the child until he discovers a connection between it and his life. But all the phenomena of life bear a very close relation to all his existence; so much so that if rightly studied and interpreted, it will lead to complete liberty, happiness. The necessity, then, of every one studying Nature must be apparent and its purpose equally evident. When a belief in God is carried into the study, it reveals Him as a God of love and justice, mercy and truth. It enables man so to relate himself to his environments as to make both them and himself, means of praise to his Creator. He lives a more useful and accomplished life, and is of more value to his fellow-men because of his ability to use aright those laws which govern them and their environment.
Says one writer: “Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would one day or another, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don’t you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit; and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with disapprobation, amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight? Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, fortune, and happiness of every one of us, and more or less of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman, of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that His play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know to our cost that He never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength; and one who plays ill is checkmated without remorse. My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with a man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm strong angel who was playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win, and I should accept it as an image of human life.”
