Psalms 148:13

Let them praise the name of the Lord.

Universal praise due to God

I. The goodness of God to the irrational creatures. Although Nature is out of joint, yet even in its disruption I am surprised to find the almost universal happiness of the animal creation. On a summer day, when the air and the grass are most populous with life, you will not hear a sound of distress unless, perchance, a heartless schoolboy has robbed a bird’s nest, or a hunter has broken a bird’s wing, or a pasture has been robbed of a lamb, and there goes up a bleating from the flocks. The whole earth is filled with animal delight--joy feathered, and scaled, and horned, and hoofed. The bee hums it; the frog croaks it; the squirrel chatters it; the quail whistles it; the lark carols it; the whale spouts it. The snail, the rhinoceros, the grizzly bear, the toad, the wasp, the spider, the shell-fish have their homely delights--joy as great to them as our joy is to us. Goat climbing the rocks; anaconda crawling through the jungle; buffalo plunging across the prairie; crocodile basking in tropical sun; seal puffing on the ice, ostrich striding across the desert, are so many bundles of joy; they do not go moping or melancholy; they are not only half supplied; God says they are filled with good. The worms squirming through the sod upturned of ploughshare, and the ants racing up and down the hillock, are happy by day and happy by night. Take up a drop of water under the microscope, and you find that within it there are millions of creatures that swim in a hallelujah of gladness. The sounds in Nature that are repulsive to our ears are often only utterances of joy--the growl, the croak, the bark, the howl. The good God made these creatures, thinks of them ever, and will not let a ploughshare turn up a mole’s nest, or fisherman’s hooks transfix a worm, until, by Eternal decree, its time has come. God’s hand feeds all these broods, and shepherds all these flocks, and tends all these herds. The sea anemone, half animal, half flower, clinging to the rock in mid-ocean, with its tentacles spread to catch its food, has the Owner of the universe to provide for it. We are repulsed at the hideousness of the elephant, but God, for the comfort and convenience of the monster, puts forty thousand distinct muscles in its proboscis. I go down on the barren seashore and say, “No animal can live in this place of desolation,” but all through the sands are myriads of little insects that leap with happy life. I go down by the marsh and say, “In this damp place, and in these loathsome pools of stagnant water there will be the quietness of death”; but lo! I see the turtles on the rotten log sunning themselves, and hear the bogs quake with multitudinous life. When the unfledged robins are hungry, God shows the old robin where she can get food to put into their open mouths. Winter is not allowed to come until the ants have granaried their harvest and the squirrels have filled their cellar with nuts. God shows the hungry ichneumon where it may find the crocodile’s eggs; and in Arctic climes there are animals that God so lavishly clothes that they can afford to walk through snowstorms in the finest sable, and ermine, and chinchilla, and no sooner is one set of furs worn out than God gives them a new one. He helps the spider in its architecture of its gossamer bridge, and takes care of the colour of the butterfly’s wing, and tinges the cochineal, and helps the moth out of the chrysalis. The animal creation also has its army and navy. The most insignificant has its means of defence--the wasp its sting, the reptile its tooth, the bear its paw, the dog its muzzle, the elephant its tusk, the fish its scale, the bird its swift wing, the reindeer its antlers, the roe its fleet foot. We are repelled at the thought of sting, and tusk, and hoof, but God’s goodness provides them for the defence of the animal’s rights.

II. The adaptation of the world to the comfort and happiness of man. The sixth day of creation had arrived. The palace of the world was made, but there was no king to live in it. Leviathan ruled the deep; the eagle, the air; the lion, the field; but where was the sceptre which should rule all? A new style of being was created. Heaven and earth were represented in his nature. His body from the earth beneath; his soul from the heaven above. The one reminding him of his origin, the other speaking of his destiny--himself the connecting link between the animal creation and angelic intelligence. In him a strange commingling of the temporal and eternal, the finite and the infinite, dust and glory. The earth for his floor, and heaven for his roof; God for his Father; eternity for his lifetime.

1. The Christian anatomist, gazing upon the conformation of the human body, exclaims: “Fearfully and wonderfully made.” No embroidery so elaborate, no gauze so delicate, no colour so exquisite, no mechanism so graceful, no handiwork so divine. So quietly and mysteriously does the human body perform its functions that it was not until five thousand years after the creation of the race that the circulation of the blood was discovered; and though anatomists of all countries and ages have been so long exploring this castle of life they have only begun to understand it. Volumes have been written of the hand. Wondrous instrument! Behold the eye, which, in its photographic gallery, in an instant catches the mountain and the sea.

2. I take a step higher, and look at man’s mental constitution. Behold the benevolence of God in powers of perception, or the faculty of transporting this outside world into your own mind--gathering into your brain the majesty of the storm, and the splendours of the day-dawn, and lifting into your mind the ocean as easily as you might put a glass of water to your lips. Watch the law of association, or the mysterious linking together of all you ever thought, or knew, or felt, and then giving you the power to take hold of the clue-line, and draw through your mind the long train with indescribable velocity--one thought starting up a hundred, and this again a thou-sand--as the chirp of one bird sometimes wakes a whole forest of voices, or the thrum of one string will rouse an orchestra. Watch your memory--that sheaf-binder, that goes forth to gather the harvest of the past, and bring it into the present. Your power and velocity of thought--thought of the swift wing and the lightning foot; thought that outspeeds the star, and circles through the heavens, and weighs worlds, and, from poising amid wheeling constellations, comes down to count the blossoms in a tuft of mignonette, then starts again to try the fathom-hag of the bottomless, and the sealing of the insurmountable, to be swallowed up in the incomprehensible, and lost in God!

3. I take a step higher, and look at man’s moral nature. Made in the image of God. Vast capacity for enjoyment; capable at first of eternal joy, and, though now disordered, still, through the recuperative force of heavenly grace, able to mount up to more than its original felicity; faculties that may blossom and bear fruit inexhaustibly. Immortality written upon every capacity; a soul destined to range in unlimited spheres of activity long after the world has put on ashes, and the solar system shall have snapped its axle, and the stars that, in their courses, fought against Sisera, shall have been slain, and buried amid the tolling thunders of the last day. (T. De Witt Talmage.)