ng forces in the physical structure of the world. The earth has
been torn and convulsed as by the spasm of some great agony, and the
signs of it lie thick around. Huge beds of rock, thousands of feet in
thickness, have been cracked and shivered like potsherds; streams of
molten metal have been injected into the fissures, and have surged
through the rents and swept vast floods of burning lava over the smiling
plains. There must have been times in the history of the development of
this earth, fair and calm as it lies now under the sun, when its whole
structure must have been shaken to the very centre; when there was dread
peril lest, like some lost planet, it should be shattered into fragments
and fill its orbit with a cloud of wreck. But some sure hand has helped
earth's travail, and has brought forth out of the chaos of struggle and
storm an orderly, smiling, serene, and beautiful world. The signs of
past agony are there, to those whose eye can pierce the surface; but a
loving hand has clothed it all with a glow of beauty and a robe of
grace. The regions where the convulsion was fiercest, where the scars
are deepest, are the regions of glorious mountain beauty, whither
pilgrims wend as to nature's most sacred shrine. The rents and chasms,
clothed with the most splendid forests, with streams leaping and
sparkling through the emerald meadows to the hollows below, breathe
nothing but beauty, and stir all hearts to joy and praise. The touch of
the destroyer is everywhere masked by beauty; and out of the chaos of
confusion God has drawn forth, what never could have been but for the
chaos, the infinite variety, the grace, the splendour, the glory of the
world.

This mystery of order and beauty, of cosmos, which reveals itself to us
in nature, unveils itself too in man's spiritual world. Life, the life
of the human, bears traces everywhere of kindred dislocation. A great
convulsion has rent man's nature, has torn it away from God and from
Eden, and scattered what, but for a redeeming restoring hand, would have
been blasted wrecks, about the world. Toil, pain, care, anguish have
chased the serenity and bliss of paradise from man's heart and from
man's world. Earth is full of wailing, and life of misery. Looking at
its surface aspects, we are tempted to call this life of man the
abortion of freedom, and to cry with Job, with Jeremiah, Why did it not
perish before it saw the sun? Look deeper. As in nature, so in man's
life, a lov