THE INFINITY OF GOD'S HANDIWORK.
By C. M. Snow
THERE isn't a brook in this wide, wide world, No matter how close you cut it, Nor a bird, nor a tree, nor a bumblebee, However you look upon it, Nor a single sprig of columbine, Or moss, or weed, or eglantine, Or a spike of purple clover, Or dread nightshade that God has made To deck the earth in glen or glade,— But the breath of God has fashioned it, As the Spirit speaketh in Holy Writ; And never a star His hands have hurled, And never a law His lips unfurled, Nor man, nor thing in this wide, wide world, Since the Godhead breathed and the universe wreathed In widening circles ’round,— But each has grown from a mold of its own, Whether man, or beast, or boulder stone, And God is the fashioner, He alone, Whose thoughts are force, whose Word creates, Has found no place for duplicates. More manifold are the thoughts of God Than the forms of the flowers our feet have trod, For the thing that is is God’s thought expressed, And who can think of a thought at rest? Or who would measure the mind of God By the narrow channel our thoughts have trod? The widest ken of the minds of men Is dwarfed and crooked and narrow, when We contemplate with humble mien The mighty Mind of the Great Unseen. And who shall say that His thoughts must run In a bounded circle, and one by one As His thoughts are framed in forms more fair To people the earth, the sea, and air, That God, exhausted, stops thinking there? Or that He is bound as the years go by, And the seasons wane, and the flowers die, To summon again this earth’s array By thinking His thoughts of yesterday? Were such the case, then should we find That God had made us all of a kind; And that every pansy that drinks the dew And smiles to the sun and nods to you Its velvety cheeks of varied hue, Were the same old pansy that year by year Has bloomed and died but to reappear. Canst thou measure the space of His dwelling-place Or check the stars in their fiery race Through age-enduring course? Or summon again earth’s buried men From sea and hill, from field and fen? If thou canst not, ’tis folly then To seek to fathom the fearful force In the thoughts that spring from that center Source. ’Tis enough to know—and this is true— That the God who thought and fashioned you And gave you a name to your nature true, Has made no soul from first to last In the mold where another had first been cast. To every being He names a name No other creature of His can claim. That name is true to His thoughts of you And opens your soul to the angels’ view, How good or ill soe’er. There’s not a soul from pole to pole, Nor flower, nor bird, nor burrowing mole— Nor will there be while the ages roll— But God has given to each alone A form and a face that is all its own. The narrow mind of the child of earth May question the wisdom, the plan, the worth Of this multifarious rule of birth, Since never a pea or a pansy-blow That the law of the Lord has caused to grow On His floral footstool here below, Is just like any other. But He whose wisdom embraceth all, Who noteth every sparrow’s fall, And heedeth the humblest suppliant’s call, May one day even to us reveal The secrets hid ’neath His signet seal. Content be thou, O child of the night, To grasp His hand and feel His might Till that glad day when eternal light Shall flood the universe through and through And open the wonders of God to you.