elon. They
communed with the Saviour in his glory of transfiguration, sustained
him in the anguish of the garden, watched at the tomb; and as they had
thronged the earth at his coming, so they seem to have hovered in the
air in multitudes at the hour of his ascension. Beautiful as they seem,
they are never mere poetic adornments. The occasions of their appearing
are grand. The reasons are weighty. Their demeanor suggests and befits
the highest conception of superior beings. These are the very elements
that a rude age could not fashion. Could a sensuous age invent an order
of beings, which, touching the earth from a heavenly height on its most
momentous occasions, could still, after ages of culture had refined
the human taste and moral appreciation, remain ineffably superior in
delicacy, in pure spirituality, to the demands of criticism? Their very
coming and going is not with earthly movement. They suddenly are seen
in the air as one sees white clouds round out from the blue sky, in
a summer's day, that melt back even while one looks upon them. They
vibrate between the visible and the invisible. They come without motion.
They go without flight. They dawn and disappear. Their words are few,
but the Advent Chorus yet is sounding its music through the world.

* * * * *

=_John McClintock,[18] 1814-1870._=

From a Sermon on "The Ground of Man's Love to God."

=_52._= THE CHRISTIAN THE ONLY TRUE LOVER OF NATURE.

It is not too much to say that the only _true_ lover of nature, is he
that loves God in Christ. It is as with one standing in one of those
caves of unknown beauty of which travellers tell us. While it is dark,
nothing can be seen but the abyss, or at most, a faint glimmer of
ill-defined forms. But flash into it the light of a single torch, and
myriad splendors crowd upon the gaze of the beholder. He sees long-drawn
colonnades, sparkling with gems; chambers of beauty and glory open on
every hand, flashing back the light a thousand fold increased, and in
countless varied hues. So the sense of God's love in the heart gives an
eye for nature, and supplies the torch to illuminate its recesses of
beauty. For the ear that can hear them, ten thousand voices speak, and
all in harmony, the name of God! The sun, rolling in his majesty,--

"And with his tread, of thunder force,
Fulfilling his appointed course,"--

is but a faint and feeble image of the great central Light of the
univ