and warmth there is, for each little plant has a certain portion, else its juices would freeze up; and every animal and insect has sufficient to preserve within it the vital spark, while that vital spark is allowed to remain. Leaves, therefore, are great preservatives of heat; and on these leaves, so light, so soft, and warm, the frost lies thick, and the snow often forms a pure white covering. Thus all things remain, the leaves carefully treasuring whatever is assigned to their care; the frost rendering the soil more loose and friable, and adapting it for tillage, and the spreading of roots; and the snow guarding the vegetable world from the intense cold, which is often experienced in winter, till that glad season returns, when a general renovation commences throughout nature. High winds begin to dry the earth; insects, and small animals, are all in motion; and early flowers, peeping forth from their friendly covering, seem to welcome the return of spring. The high winds also scatter the leaves, which then being no longer useful, are spread abroad upon the earth, and rapidly decay, and thus a fine and rich manure is formed by their decomposition, either to nourish the parent trees, from which they sprang; or to assist the vegetation of the seeds, and the rapid growth of the young plants, which they have sheltered through the winter. What a beautiful system of mutual aid and dependence is every where conspicuous. All created things minister to the public good; all cheerfully repay the debt of gratitude, which they owe to one another; all show forth the glory of that God, who called them into being; all, alas! but man. He, too often ungrateful, and regardless of his true interest, refuses obedience to the precepts of unerring Wisdom, and cruelly oppresses his fellow man. He knows not the things that belong to his everlasting peace, neither can he understand them, because he neglects to seek that wisdom, which would enable him, as beautifully to manifest the great end of his mysterious being, and as beneficently to assist his fellow mortals, as the creatures do by which he is surrounded. FOURTH DAY OF CREATION. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light unto the earth, and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light unto the earth; And to rule over the day, and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning was the fourth day. DAY dawned, yet it dawned over an unpeopled world. But now the time was come when this fair globe was designed to experience the immediate and unobstructed influence of light and heat. The obscuring clouds were were to now to be dispelled, and the sun and moon acquire their first visible existence, with relation to this earth. A bright light was seen towards the east, and a glow that never before lighted the mountain tops. Then it seemed as if the grey canopy of clouds was gradually drawing off, and a glorious luminary rose above the horizon; by degrees that luminary seemed to journey up the heavens, now lost, perhaps in dense clouds, and now emerging to the view, till at length it most gloriously broke forth, and sudden was the splendour that illumined this fair world. The cloudy covering was thrown aside, and all those fair and floating forms, those rolling masses, and light flying clouds, that beautifully diversify our summer skies, began to vary the clear azure. But how different was their appearance, from that cloudy medium, through which a pale and ineffectual light had struggled for admittance. The sun shone forth, and lighted up every leaf and flower with unwonted greenness and beauty; the streamlets flashed and sparkled as they passed, and all was splendour and luxuriance. The world was then beautiful, but all silent. No sound was heard, except the rapid flowing of clear waters, the rustling of the leaves, and the gentle whispers of the wind. There was no singing of birds among the branches, nor humming of bees around the hive, nor the pleasant lowing of cattle on the hills, nor the bleating of sheep in the green valleys. It was a beautiful, but solitary world. Thus passed the fourth day, and the sun descended towards the west, while around him gathered a gorgeous canopy of clouds. Gloriously the sun had risen, and as gloriously he set. Grey twilight succeeded, and then one little star, and then another, lighted up in the immensity of space. The moon at that memorable period was also made to serve in her season, for a declaration of times, and a sign to the world, shining in the firmament of heaven, the glory of the stars, an ornament giving light in the highest places of the Lord.* And in this we may observe, as a remarkable coincidence, that the Most High reserved the disclosure of those two great lights, that were to rule the day and the night, till that important day, in the history of this world's creation, when the moon, the faithful witness in heaven, had acquired a visible existence, and became decidedly apparent to the earth. Hence it appears that the period, in which the sun and moon were first exhibited as ruling the day and night, exactly coincides with the day of the lunar revolution, in which, by the laws of creation, the moon was first enabled to acquire its ruling character in the heavens. We may further observe, that when in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, when he gave the latter its first impulse of rotation, and first illumined the solar atmosphere, the two presiding luminaries were in that particular relation to the earth which astronomers call inferior conjunction; also, that in the third diurnal revolution of the earth, they first acquired the relative aspect, which enabled them to appear as the two great indexes of years and months. The new moon being thus in the third day of its revolution, that is, in its first quarter, it would necessarily appear at the setting of the sun, and so begin, lead on, and rule the night. And * Eccles. xliii. 6-9, |