Out-door Worship. June 8.

In the forest, every branch and leaf, with the thousand living things
which cluster on them, all worship, worship, worship with us! Let us go
up in the evenings and pray there, with nothing but God's cloud temple
between us and His heaven! And His choir of small birds and night
crickets and booming beetles, and all happy things who praise Him all
night long! And in the still summer noon, too, with the lazy-paced
clouds above, and the distant sheep-bell, and the bee humming in the beds
of thyme, and one bird making the hollies ring a moment, and then all
still--hushed--awe-bound, as the great thunder-clouds slide up from the
far south! Then, then, to praise God! Ay, even when the heaven is black
with wind, the thunder crackling over our heads, then to join in the paean
of the storm-spirits to Him whose pageant of power passes over the earth
and harms us not in its mercy!

_Letters and Memories_. 1844.

God's Countenance. June 9.

Study nature as the countenance of God! Try to extract every line of
beauty, every association, every moral reflection, every inexpressible
feeling from it.

_Letters and Memories_. 1842.

Certain and Uncertain. June 10.

"Life is uncertain," folks say. Life is certain, say I, because God is
educating us thereby. But this process of education is so far above our
sight that it looks often uncertain and utterly lawless; wherefore fools
conceive (as does M. Comte) that there is no Living God, because they
cannot condense His formulas into their small smelling-bottles.

O glorious thought! that we are under a Father's education, and that _He_
has promised to develop us, and to make us go on from strength to
strength.

_Letters and Memories_. 1868.

Sensuality. June 11.

What is sensuality? Not the enjoyment of holy glorious matter, but
blindness to its meaning.

_MS._ 1842.

The Journey's End. June 12.

Let us live hard, work hard, go a good pace, get to our journey's end as
soon as possible--then let the post-horse get his shoulder out of the
collar. . . . I have lived long enough to feel, like the old post-horse,
very thankful as the end draws near. . . . Long life is the last thing
that I desire. It may be that, as one grows older, one acquires more and
more the painful consciousness of the difference between what _ought_ to
be done and what _can_ be done, and sits down more quietly when one gets
the