THE GRAND AND BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE.
By A. Smith
God is the Creator of, and loves, the beautiful and sublime. All nature attests this attribute of divinity. When our infant world sprang into being, its majestic timber-crested mountains; its vine-clad hills, and vales of waving green and gold; its soft air, burdened with the aroma of vernal bloom; the shades and tintings of Edenic flora embosomed in foliage of green; its crystal springs, meandering streams, and expansions of lake and sea; the sweet songs and beautiful plumage of the birds of the air; the noble animals of every kind; and, as the crowning work of the Creator, man, the lord and ruler of the world, the most exalted of all animated nature, and woman, his companion and equal, the most beautiful,—when all these things were brought into existence, no wonder that angels rejoiced and sung as they beheld the wondrous scene. Job 38: 4–7. No sin had touched with its virus the minutest point on the fair face of nature. And that world was a real, tangible world, its clay and sand and rock the same as that upon which we tread to-day. All animate nature ate and drank of material substances; they saw the beauties of nature, and tasted of its sweets as we do now. But their eyes were not so dim, their natural vigor so abated, nor their food so contaminated with the germs of disease and death, as ours. Before me as I write is a bouquet of beautiful flowers, and an excellent landscape oil painting. I examine the flowers with a good magnifying glass, and no coarseness of texture or tinting is revealed by the closest scrutiny, but, rather, new depths of beauty not discovered by the unaided eye. Not so with the painting. Its beautiful perspectives fade away beneath the power of the lens into unsightly daubs of paint upon a rope-like canvas. God arranged the tintings and texture of the flowers, but man those of the canvas. As the flowers exceed in beauty and fineness of texture the oil painting, so the earth that was, as it came forth from the hand of the Creator, exceeded in glory and beauty that which now is. The prone and decaying trunks of once stately monarchs of the forest, the dead and dying branches of the standing trees, the fading flowers, the corrupting substances of once living animals, the air-burdened miasmatic exhalations of putrescent marshes, the stooping form of man, the waning beauty of woman, the silver locks crowding out the raven and the gold, the dimming eyes overflowing with tears welling up from grief-stricken hearts,—all, all attest the truth of the aphorism, “Decay is enstamped everywhere,” and justify the perspective inscription upon all nature—“Passing away.” Yet even now we behold in nature’s panorama glimpses of the glory that was, and pledges of that which is to be. As Jesus sat upon the mount, and saw upon the bosom of the lake that laved its base, the lily, in its pure, snowy whiteness, and on its margin the fragrant pink oleander and the superb bright blue flowers of the thistle of Palestine, he directly taught that it was God who clothed them with their supernal glory, and that the care he manifested for them was indicative of the care he has for man, to whose happiness the flowers were created to minister; and, indirectly, that God will verify every promise of a regeneration of the pristine felicity of man and the glory of his first dominion. When nature holds her breath in dread suspense at the approach of a storm; when the heavy clouds roll up in majestic billows from the horizon; when the blinding flash of lightning, as it traces its nerve of fire athwart the bosom of the storm, lights up the caverns of the cloudy mountains, and the succeeding deep-toned thunder reverberates from hill to hill, shaking the very earth,— “Who forgets not,
At the tremendous tokens of God’s power,
Himself, and lays his pride and folly by?”
The coruscations of the wonderful aurora borealis, at times assuming forms and tintings of great beauty; the rainbow upon the bosom of the retreating storm, as well as the deep bass of the thunder, attest the majesty and power of the beneficent Creator. When the sun with pencils of light and shade traces scenes of beauty on the evening sky, lighting up the mountain ranges of cumulus clouds, or clothing detached portions with the verdure of tropical islands in a limpid purple sea, and gilding flecks of the cirrus canopy like birds of bright plumage on the wing,— “And we can almost think we gaze
Through op’ning vistas into heaven,”
we are led further to exclaim with the poet:— “Those hues that make the sun’s decline
So grand, so beauteous, Lord, are thine.”