That is enough for thee, O man, to know. What life is thou canst not
know. Thou canst only speak of it in a figure--as the breath, the
Spirit of God. That Spirit of God is not the universe itself. But
he is working in all things, giving them form and life, dividing to
each severally as he will; all their shape, their beauty, their
powers, their instincts, their thoughts; all in them save brute
matter and dead dust: from him they come, and to him they return
again. All order, all law, all force, all usefulness, come from him.
He is the Lord and Giver of life, in whom all things live, and move,
and have their being.
Therefore, my friends, let us at all times, in all places, and
especially at this Whitsuntide, remember that all we see, or can see,
except sin, is the work of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God. Let us
look on the world around us, as what it is, as what the old Psalmist
saw it to be,--a sacred place, full of God's presence, shaped,
quickened, and guided by the Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of
life.
My dear friends, God grant that you may all learn to look upon this
world as the Psalmist looked on it. God grant that you may all learn
to see, each in your own way, what a great and pious poet of our
fathers' time put into words far wiser and grander than any which I
can invent for you, when he said how, looking on the earth, the sea,
the sky, he felt -
'A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
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