ature realize for us what we cannot
realize for ourselves. It is recorded of one of the world's gifted
painters that he stood before the master-piece of the great genius of
his age--one which he could never hope to equal, nor even rival--and
yet the infinite superiority, so far from crushing him, only elevated
his feeling, for he saw realized those conceptions which had floated
before him, dim and unsubstantial; in every line and touch he felt a
spirit immeasurably superior yet kindred, and he is reported to have
exclaimed, with dignified humility, "And I too am a painter!"

We must all have felt, when certain effects in nature, combinations of
form and colour, have been presented to us, our own idea speaking in
intelligible and yet celestial language; when for instance, the long
bars of purple, "edged with intolerable radiance," seemed to float in
a sea of pale pure green, when the whole sky seemed to reel with
thunder, when the night wind moaned. It is wonderful how the most
commonplace men and women, beings who, as you would have thought, had
no conception that rose beyond a commercial speculation, or a
fashionable entertainment, are elevated by such scenes; how the
slumbering grandeur of their nature wakes and acknowledges kindred
with the sky and storm. "I cannot speak," they would say, "the
feelings which are in me; I have had emotions, aspirations, thoughts;
I cannot put them into words. Look there! listen now to the storm!
That is what I meant, only I never could say it out till now." Thus do
art and nature speak for us, and thus do we adopt them as our own.
This is the way in which His righteousness becomes righteousness for
us. This is the way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice
of Christ; gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, "There,
that is my religion--that is my righteousness--what I want to be,
which I am not--that is my offering, my life as I would wish to give
it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect." So the old prophets,
their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, searched "what or what
manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify,
when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and of the
glory which should follow;" and so with us, until it passes into
prayer: "My Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my
clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of Thy
perfect picture. I fe