p. 163 | God's Lightning-Rods

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 24, 1885

God's Lightning-Rods.

PROF. Cooke shows how God had made lightning-rods ages before Franklin thought of them:

To guard his roof from the destructive action of electricity, man erects the lightning-rod, whose bristling points quietly drain the clouds, or, failing to do this, receive the charge and bear it harmlessly to the earth. But ages before Franklin pointed the first rod to the storms, the merciful Parent of mankind had surrounded the dwellings of his children with a protection far more effectual than this; for since the creation of organic life, every pointed leaf, every twig and every blade of grass have been silently disarming the clouds of their destructive weapon. It is difficult to improve upon nature, and man constantly finds that in his best inventions he has been anticipated from eternity by a greater inventor than he. So, not long after Franklin had discovered the efficacy of metallic points in dissipating a charge of electricity, and had applied the principle in constructing the lightning-rod, it was found that a common blade of grass, pointed with nature's exquisite workmanship, was three times as effective as the finest cambric needle, and a single twig far more efficient than the metallic points of the best constructed rod.

When, now, you reflect how many thousand of these vegetable points every large tree directs to the sky, and consider what must be the agency of a forest with its innumerable twigs, or of a single meadow with its countless blades of grass, and then when you remember that these are only subsidiary to those vast lightning-conductors, the mountain-chains, whose craggy summits pierce the clouds themselves, and still further, when you learn that the rain-drops and snowflakes have been made good conductors, so that during the storms a bridge for the lightning is thrown across from the clouds to the earth, you will see how abundant the protection is, and with what care Providence has guarded us from the destructive agent. It is only under unusual circumstances, when electricity is developed more rapidly than it can be dissipated through these numberless channels, that a violent discharge takes place, and if then it tears, burns or kills, it also reveals the Merciful Hand which constantly spares.