p. 12 | FRANCES E. BOLTON by Frances E. Bolton

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 6, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 40.

FRANCES E. BOLTON

By Frances E. Bolton

NATURE’S MEANING. No. 4.

The sun rising over the world is a symbol of the Sun of righteousness. The firmament is a symbol of the vast expansion there is in Him, in which our singing thoughts may fly upward as the birds toward the zenith. He has compared the wind to His Spirit, and His blessing to the bright clouds from which fall the former and latter rain. But He who is our heart light is also our firmament. He who gives the far-reaching expansion gives to us a soul atmosphere, and the Spirit can take our thoughts and words further than we ever can know.

Does He not from the clouds of life bring down the rain of compassion? Does He not tint them also with silver linings, and paint upon them the colors of the rainbow? The bloom and vegetation of the world is symbolic of the verdure of the soul,—of thoughts like lilies where the Beloved feeds; the birds, symbolic of the inner melody unto the Lord; the beasts, under the dominion of reason, symbolic of the passions under control; the Sabbath day, a sign of the rest of the soul in the love of God.

Strange that we should be in a world of God’s creating, and yet be as those who are blinded, deafened, and senseless, living only for the material world! In Drummond’s “Natural Law in the Spiritual World,” he uses for illustration the processes of nature by which one form of matter is of service to another, to show how the spiritual is served by the natural. The mineral is transformed into the vegetable, so that the brown, unknowing earth becomes in the flower a thing of life, motion, beauty, and suggestion. The vegetable becomes, in the animal, feeling, will, and reason. Even so the material elements of our daily existence should be transformed into higher forms of life, until all is centralized in godlikeness. This is the design of all nature, the flower of consummation.