colors. They do not shade into each other; they lie
as clearly defined as the course of glowing gems in the wall
of the New Jerusalem. It is precisely as if we were looking
upon an immense floor of lapis lazuli set within a ring of
flaming emerald.

The cause of this contrast is the sudden change in the depth
of the water at a certain distance from shore. For a mile or
so the basin shelves gradually, and then suddenly plunges
off into unknown depths. The center of the Lake must be a
tremendous pit. A very short distance from where the water is
green and so transparent that the clean stones can be seen on
the bottom a hundred feet below, the blue water has been
found to be fourteen hundred feet deep; and in other portions
soundings cannot be obtained with a greater extent of line.

What a savage chasm the lake-bed must be! Empty the water from
it and it is pure and unrelieved desolation. And the sovereign
loveliness of the water that fills it is its color. The very
savageness of the rent and fissure is made the condition
of the purest charm. The Lake does not feed a permanent river.
We cannot trace any issue of it to the ocean. It is not, that
we know, a well-spring to supply any large district with
water for ordinary use. It seems to exist for beauty. And its
peculiar beauty has its root in the peculiar harshness and
wildness of the deeps it hides.

Brethren, this question of color in nature, broadly studied,
leads us quickly to contemplate and adore the love of God. If
God were the Almighty chiefly,--if he desired to impress us
most with his omnipotence and infinitude, and make us bow with
dread before him, how easily the world could have been made
more somber, how easily our senses could have been created to
receive impressions of the bleak vastness of space, how easily
the mountains might have been made to breathe terror from
their cliffs and walls, how easily the general effect of
extended landscapes might have been monotonous and gloomy! If
religion is, as it has so often been conceived to be,
hostile to the natural good and joy which the heart seeks
instinctively,--if sadness, if melancholy, be the soul of
its inspiration, and misery for myriads the burden of its
prophecy,--I do not believe that the vast deeps of space above
us would have been tinted with