Psalms 148:8

Snow and vapours.

The glaciers as prophets

From the visible we divine the invisible. In what is physical we find parables concerning the spiritual, and even discern natural law in the spiritual world. The Teacher of teachers took often His texts from the freer Bible of Nature when He would expound either the constitution of His Kingdom or the attributes of Deity. To-day let us “enter into the treasuries of the snow,” and remind ourselves of some precious lessons therein. Snow is the vapour of water crystallized. The atoms of which all matter is compounded tend, when free, to assume the crystalline form, and by water, which is a solvent of nearly all substances, atoms are generally set free, and in their freedom they combine. So we get rock crystal from the resolution of flint, Iceland-spar as a crystalline form of the atoms of chalk, diamonds from carbon, and snow-crystals from the moisture aggregated in clouds directly the temperature is low enough to freeze that moisture. When the air is calm six-rayed stars are produced, as we can see with the naked eye when they are caught on a cold surface. Their being driven together by currents of air causes their beauty and their individuality to be lost in the shapeless snowflake. The colder the air, the smaller the crystal. Can we doubt that their geometrical form is an evidence of the active presence and action in nature of an orderly mind? That the structure of all crystals being based on mathematical laws and relations shows the handiwork of a grand Geometrician of the Universe? Catch some snow-crystals. So ordered in beauty are they, that we feel that to them also has been whispered, “Be ye perfect, even as your Father is perfect.” Tiny is each, but perfect in beauty of form. On our microscopes we may have learned to inscribe, Maximus in mini-mis es--Immeasurably great art Thou in Thy least, O God! The lovely sculpture of diatoms in the vegetable kingdom, of the tests of infusoria in the base of animal life, and the remembrance that only the most infinitesimal number of their inconceivable hosts can ever be seen by the eye of man, that only their Maker can delight in their absolute perfection, bids us burst out with a creed that is a commandment. We can, we must, aim at perfection, for nothing short of perfection expresses and imitates the quality of the Divine mind and work. So beautiful is each, and yet how varying. Over a thousand forms of snow crystals have been noted, albeit all have the necessary unity of being six-rayed. There is no act of uniformity here, or anywhere in Nature, for uniformity is man’s ignorant parody of the unity which alone God desires and creates. But now let us trace these crystals and these flakes, not backwards but forwards, as one might who saw them falling softly on a mountain top. Into quite other thoughts than those of beauty and goodness will they lead, and what has been as a guiding star may now become a beacon of warning. Tiny is each, and well nigh without weight. Can such as they have had relation to the valleys from which we have ascended, the ravines we have clambered up? Have they anything to do with the hard blue ice of the glacier, its crevasses, and its graving of even the granite rocks? Light, and falling noiselessly; white from the entangled air of the flakes and from the blending of the prismatic colours in their reflection from the minute faces of the crystals; yet in their multitude causing pressure as they lie sheet upon sheet; and this pressure gradually eliminating the air until neve, half snow and half ice, is formed. But still the pressure increases by fresh falls of snow above, and at last the neve becomes the blue, airless ice of the glacier. But this mighty field of ice remains not level or at rest; surely, and without pause, it is moving downwards, although imperceptibly to the eye. Nor is it without effect on all it touches. It chisels out with its imbedded stones grooves in the cliffs that bound it and form its bed; it smoothes, as with a vast plain, the hardest rocks over which it crawls, and leaves these testimonies graven in the rock to be read in ages far in the future when and where the glacier itself has ceased to be. Now in all this we may see a parable of the usual course of moral evil, from its beginning in the almost unnoticed venial sin which is unresisted as being considered unimportant, continuing by repetition and aggregation to gather force and destructive power, until at last there is the fixity of evil that mightily affects its surroundings. So light is each snow-crystal as it falls; so trivial it seems that little bit of self-love, or self-will, or self-confidence, the slight exaggeration, the only momentary harbouring of an evil thought; that questionable additional one per cent of profit; the pride that is little more than the consciousness of success; the resentment which seems justified, that, considering each one by one, and forgetting the cumulative weight of numbers, the sense of sin is as yet unroused, and watchfulness appears unneeded while still it is the day of small things. And even the snowflake, formed when crystals have been blown together, is felt only when falling on the uncovered and uplifted face, and then but as a touch--no bruise, and certainly no wound resulting, no burden felt; and so white still from the entangled air. So together with the venial sins there is yet so much of the atmosphere of habitual grace, such spiritual vitality still, such activity in good works, that there seems no prospect of the elimination of the air of heaven that may in time turn the snowdrift that a wind may move into the ponderous and crushing, dark and airless ice of the glacier. Yet the process is natural when once begun. The multitude of imponderable crystals causes weight. The superimposition of small forces creates the power that hardly can be resisted. Gradually the snow-beds change into neve as their pressure forces out the air; and gradually, unnoticed and unresisted, little sine chill the heart, dull the sensitiveness of the conscience, and form first the tendency and then the habit of coldness and apathy towards the interests, and invitations, and even the commands of duty towards one’s higher life-duty towards one’s neighbour, and duty to God. Not that overt evil is as yet apparent: neve to the casual glance is not so very different from snow. Respectability remains, morality is not apparently lost: the hardness of the airless ice is not yet produced. But it is only a question of time and of the continuance of increasing pressure as snowstorm upon snowstorm and winter after winter thickens the superincumbent mass. At last the ice is formed--airless, hard, and ready to destroy. To the eye, at any given moment, there seems no motion, and only by minute and scientific observation is the downward flow noted and calculated. Is it not so in the moral decadence of the human spirit? One day brings no obvious deterioration of character. The lethargic and frozen spirit thinks and avows that it is much as usual from year to year, and yet all the while, visibly enough to the grieving eye of its Creator, its Redeemer, and its Sanctifier, the continued downward course is rendering any arrest of this deathward progress less easy. Acts create habit, and habit forms permanent character assuredly, though perhaps as unobservedly, as snow changes into neve, and neve into the glacier. But, again, we observe the dead, descending stream of ice not merely in itself, but as it affects all it touches. No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself is an axiom true in the economic, the social, the natural, and the spiritual order of things. How absolutely impossible is the existence of any trust in the common saying, “He is no man’s enemy but his own,” and still more in the popular excuse, “If I do it, I injure no one but myself.” The cold heart must chill other hearts. Not only the fervour of zeal, but the paralysis of indifference and inaction is contagious. Our friends, our associates, and the greater number who, unknown to us, yet must be and are influenced for good or evil by what we say, or write, or do, and by the greater eloquence of what we are, form, as it were, the banks of the river of our life, and each atom of that bank is thrilled by our motion. Do they seem of sterner stuff than we? Yet even the granite cliffs are planed by the softer ice of the passing glacier, and scored by the fragments of rock it has absorbed. And, lastly, the scars remain when the glacier has disappeared, melted away by a kindlier climate. Glaciers in England passed away ages before historic or even traditional memory, but their effects remain. Not only “the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom in the dust,” but equally are unrighteous deeds a source of infection long after the doers are forgotten. These thoughts have been solemn--sombre if you will--but nature is a school-room, not simply a playground, and it is by enduring hardness, intellectually and spiritually, that one becomes the soldier of Christ, the prophet of God. Our mountain rambles derive their charm from the mixture of what is ever terrible with that which is lovely; black precipices linger in our mind as well as the wealth of flowers in the meadows; the startling roar of an avalanche echoes in our memory as well as the soft harmony of bells and rivulets below; and so, while mostly we are noting with thankful glee all things that seem sparkling ripples on the stream of a Maker’s love, the undertone of warning may well be heard--Be wooed to life; be scared from death. Sing thy Eucharist at the evidences of the love; chant also thy Litany at the reminder of the necessary justice of God. (J. W. Horsley, M. A.)

Stormy wind fulfilling His word.--

The Divine use of destructive forces

Some of us may remember a walk through a park on the day after a hurricane: leaves, twigs, branches wrenched violently from their trunks strew the soil in every direction; oaks which have stood erect perhaps since the days of the Plantagenets now lie prostrate. Nor is vegetable life the only sufferer. The eye rests on what may remain of a nest of young birds dashed from their shattered home upon the ground; or perhaps here and there the carcase of an animal which had run for shelter beneath the cover of a tree already tottering to its fall. Or we are on the sea coast, the angry waves are subsiding, and as we watch them they presently lay at our feet the timbers of what we know a few hours ago must have been the home of human beings; and then one and another fragment of a ship’s furniture is floated up, and then, perhaps, at last, a human body, so bruised and gashed by its rude contact with the rocks as to be scarcely recognizable. “Fulfilling His word.” Somehow or other, then, His word is fulfilled in this devastation and disfigurement of that which His own hands have made; and the agent which inflicts it obeys some law as regular as that which governs the motion of the planet, although with more complex conditions. In its early history this earth seems to have been the scene of a series of catastrophes, each of them the product of existing law, each of them the preparation for some higher forms of life. As we pass from the physical and inanimate world and enter the human, the spiritual, and the moral, we find new and rich applications of the words before us. Here the wind and the storm become metaphorical expressions, having, however, real counterparts in the passions and the agency of man. Here, too, as elsewhere, we watch them fulfilling God’s word.

I. Let us begin with the State. Every reflecting person must know how intimately the well-being of mankind is bound up with the maintenance of social order, and the stability and vigour of existing institutions with good government, with the due security of life and property: It is the State which organizes and combines the conditions of well-ordered human life. The State answers in the social life of man to physical nature in man’s animal life. Its strength and unvarying order are the guarantee of man’s well-being; and yet the State is exposed to destructive storms which rival in their sphere the most violent catastrophes of nature: and the question is how such storms are fulfilling God’s word.

1. There is, for instance, the storm of invasion, the extreme and most dreaded result of the storm of war. Never, probably, before the establishment of the Roman Empire were such blessings as well-ordered government can secure secured for so large a proportion of the human family as was then the case. Upon the subjugation of a number of petty States continually at war with each other, the Romans established a vast system of law and police, which was almost conterminous with the civilized world. It extended from the Euphrates to the Straits of Gibraltar, from the Grampian Hills far into the deserts of Africa. This wonderful political edifice, which was begun by the soldiers of Rome, which was built up and completed by her lawyers and her administrators, was such that its seeming strength and its compactness and its practical wisdom made men believe that it would last for ever. But the centuries passed, and moral corruptions, imported chiefly from the East, ate out the very heart and fibre of Roman strength; and then there came the storm of the barbarian invasions. On they came, Goths, and Huns, and Vandals; on they came, wave after wave, breaking upon the enfeebled defences of decaying civilization; on they came, wrecking cities, devastating provinces, breaking up altogether the old fabric of society, and establishing in its place a state of things from which Rome had delivered the world, a number of petty States constantly at war with each other, and lacking in not a few instances the primary conditions of social order. And yet this wind and storm, we can see it, fulfilled God’s word. Rome had done its work, and the evil which festered under its ordered splendour at last greatly outweighed the good that could be secured by its longer continuance. It left to the world its great conceptions of law and rule that were never better appreciated than in our own day; it had to make room for new and vigorous nations instinct with a healthier spirit, guided from the infancy of their existence by a Divine religion; and the scenes of ruin in which it perished had a sanction which has been justified by the event.

2. There is the storm of revolution, more dreadful in its extreme phases than the storm of invasion or the storm of war, just as cruelty or wrong at the hands of relations is more unendurable than at the hands of strangers. Such a storm was that which burst upon France in the closing years of the eighteenth century. We may go far, indeed, to find a parallel to the Jacobin terror in point of deliberate ferocity perpetrated in the name and in the midst of an advanced civilization. The brutalities of the Committee of Public Safety are the more revolting from the contrast which they present with the lofty professions of a sensitive philanthropy amid which the Revolution was ushered into being. And yet, as we look back on those terrible years which occupied the whole attention of our grandfathers, we can trace in them, too, the wind and storm fulfilling God’s word. The old society which was thus destroyed was inconsistent with the well-being of the greater part of the French people; and the agonies of the Revolution have been counterbalanced by the exchange which millions have made of a life of great hardship and oppression for a life in which all men are equal before the law. He who makes the clouds of human passion His chariots, He who walks upon the wings of the wind of human violence, He permitted a company of pedantic ruffians, who for the moment controlled the destinies of France, to work its miserable will, because He had in view a larger future which would show that, however unconsciously, they were fulfilling His high purposes of benevolence and justice.

II. In the Church, the Divine society, we trace the operations of the same law. The Church is exposed to storms which in her higher life correspond to the storms of invasion and the storms of revolution in the life of the State.

1. Thus there is the storm of persecution which in Scripture is distinctly ascribed to the agency of Satan. It might well have seemed to the first Christians hard and almost unintelligible that the almighty and loving Father should have called out from among mankind into existence the society of His true children and worshippers only to expose it to the fierce trial which beat on it with such pitiless, with such well-nigh incessant fury during the first three centuries of its existence; and yet as we look back we can see that this education in the school of suffering was neither needless nor thrown away. If the Head of the new society had been crowned with thorns, the members could not expect to be crowned with roses, and withal to be in true correspondence and communion with the Head. If the storm of persecution swept round the cradle of Bethlehem when the holy innocents were sent to their appointed thrones by the sword of Herod; if it beat with relentless fury upon that cross where He hung, the Infinite and the Eternal, expiating human sin, it could not but be that His members would be perfected through suffering.

2. And there is the storm of controversy. Between the sacredness of Divine truths, and the angry passions which rage around them when the floodgates of controversy have been opened, there is the hideous contrast which we all feel most deeply in our best moments; and yet the wind and the storm of controversy have their place and use in God’s providential government of His Church. If St. Paul had not withstood St. Peter to his face at Antioch, it seems probable that, humanly speaking, the Church of Christ would never have exceeded the dimensions of a Jewish sect. If Athanasius had not opposed Arius at Alexandria, it is difficult to see how, but for a miraculous intervention, the Church would have continued to teach the Divinity of Jesus Christ. If Augustine had allowed Pelagius and his coadjutors to pass uncontradicted, Western Christendom at least would have ceased to believe that we are saved by grace. The controversies of the sixteenth century plunged a large part of Europe into spiritual anarchy; but at the same time they cleared away mists which else must have hung in ever-thickening corruption over the face of Christendom. Our own age has not been wanting in its full share of religious disputes, and we have not escaped the heart-burnings and the other evils which always accompany them. But those winds and storms of controversy have in their measure fulfilled God’s word by rescuing from oblivion almost-forgotten truths; by reminding Christians of a truer and higher standard of life and practice which they had well-nigh forgotten; by bringing out into the sunlight the agreement which often underlies apparent differences, as well as the deep differences which often traverse a specious agreement; by persuading men of goodwill to combine courage in defence of truth with a chivalrous and charitable bearing towards its opponents; by deepening our sense of the preciousness of that well of truth of God which is itself attested by our misunderstandings, by our struggles, by our faults of conduct and of temper which accompany the effort that is made to recognize and to proclaim it. Yes, even controversy may have its blessings.

III. And not less applicable are the words to the experience of individual life which is assailed by storms that in their various ways fulfil the will or word of God. There are the outward troubles of life; loss of means, loss of friends, loss of reputation, the misconduct of children, the inroads of bad health, the slow decay of hopes that once were bright and promising; these things are what men only mean when they use the metaphor in their common talk. The storms of life also represent disasters and failures of a more or less external kind. And no doubt when they fall upon us in quick accumulation they do break down nerve and spirit, they do lay us low, as the psalmist says, “even to the dust.” But these storms most assuredly are not seldom our best friends if we only knew it. They break up the class of alliance which the soul, despite her higher origin and destiny, is ever too ready to make with the outward world of sense. They throw us back from the realm of shadows upon the other kingdom which is so close to us, which we forget so easily, but where all is life. Life is full of illustrations of the truth that these storms are meant to fulfil and do fulfil God’s word by promoting the conversion and the sanctification of souls. There are, for instance, souls who are exposed to fierce intellectual trials, because in no other way, as it seems, would they or could they learn the patience, the courage, the humility, the self-distrust which are so essential to the Christian’s character. There is no doubt a dreadful risk lest the violence of the storm should wear them out and they should sink disheartened and lie down and die. But the struggle need not be given up in any case; and God’s grace is sufficient for all who will seek it, since “His strength is made perfect in weakness.” (Canon Liddon.)

God’s word fulfilled in Nature

We are apt to think and speak as if everything had been made for us--as if the sun and moon and stars, the mountains and hills, the fruitful trees and all cedars, beasts and all cattle, creeping things and flying fowl had had no other object but our pleasure and comfort. Whereas, in truth, all these were designed to praise God. First, then, each of these glorifies the Lord by obeying its Maker’s will. The fulfilment of His design in making them is, according to His own appointment, the proof that He has wrought them well, and therefore that He is worthy to be praised. They also praise Him by accomplishing His work. Sometimes He entrusts them with special commissions. The fire which came, at Elijah’s prayer, to decide the people’s choice between Baal and the Lord, fulfilled a distinct word of God; so did the hail which destroyed the crops of the Egyptians; so did the cloud which received our ascending Lord; and the mighty wind which raged around Jonah’s ship; and the great rain which began in the little cloud of promise granted to the kneeling prophet. And so, again, the glory of God is subserved by these, when they awaken the minds of His sons and daughters to consider in these material forces the operations of His hands. How good it is, what honour is rendered to the Lord of all things, when we are taught by those sights and sounds of nature which are the instruments of God, to discern even Him the Lord Himself, in the snow-storm, and the ocean tempest, and the prairie fire, and the great hailstones, and the impenetrable mists! How gloriously, too, all of these may extol Him by suggesting analogies to us--teachings of that spiritual world, whereof we find so many pictures and parables around us on all sides. These are not fanciful--God forbid that we should think so. They are employed again and again by our blessed Lord, in His Gospel doctrine, when He is showing the heavenly meaning of earthly scenes. And as the Everlasting Son, so also the Eternal Father, does, in Gospel prophecy, use just this imagery (Isaiah 55:10).

1. One of the very first lessons to be learnt from such visitations is our utter dependence upon God. Look at the way in which the complex machinery of this great country has been suddenly put out of gear by a few hours’ snow--how our postal service, our telegraphs, our common business, our markets, our trade, our schools, our mutual intercourse have been interrupted as in a moment by the tiniest particles of snow joining together against us in irresistible masses--a great army of the Lord, as mighty as the locusts of His sending. Here is, indeed, a disclosing to us of the power of God to hold us down, and to show us His great strength at any time.

2. Since we are entirely dependent on Him ourselves, we should remember, with a self-denying charity, those whom He has suffered to be smitten by the rushing waters, or the raging wind, or the cutting frost and snow. There must not only be,--though He does desire this,--the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His Name: besides this, we must not forget to do good and to distribute, for it is with such sacrifices that God is well pleased.

3. Though the heart is the seat of holy gratitude, the lips are the gates through which it passes to the throne of the heavenly grace. Should net our prayer be this, the familiar petition which yet is too little our own: “O Lord, open Thou our lips; and our mouth shall show forth Thy praise”? (G. E. Jelf, M. A.)

God’s hand in the wind and storm

God’s hand is in the wind and storm. He raises it, He directs and rules it, and He stilleth it again.

I. God employs the stormy wind to fulfil His threatened judgments. I do not say or suppose that men who perish in the storm are sinners above others, more than were the men on whom the tower of Siloam fell, or the men whose blood Pilate mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. We are forbidden to judge of any man’s eternal state by the manner of his death. But we know and are assured that death is never an accident--that in every case, and as the common effect of sin, it is always a judgment; and that, so often as it is brought to pass by the stormy wind, this is the minister of the judgment which God has decreed and threatened.

II. The stormy wind fulfils God’s word of promised mercy. Directly, and by its proper effect, it is the executioner of judgment; indirectly God makes use of it for the very opposite result. For need I tell you that God pursues a plan of mercy on behalf of our world, as well as judgment, which in His wonderful working doth in part accomplish it by the very judgment which He sends abroad on the earth? The same events in providence, you know, work to the most opposite ends in regard to different individuals--as the pillar of cloud, which threw fear and confusion into the host of Pharaoh, animated the camp of Israel with courage and confidence. And who of you all, that are careful to mark God’s dealings with you, but has, in connection with the storm, reason to sing of mercy as well as of judgment--that, amid your frequent exposures, you have been preserved--that you have been delivered from those dangers in which this and that other of your messmates have perished? This surely demands of you, at the least, that you acknowledge the riches of God’s goodness and forbearance and longsuffering to you-ward, as not willing you should perish, but that ye should come to repentance.

III. The stormy wind fulfils God’s word as serving in many ways to promote the great end of moral discipline.

1. To recall men to the sense of a forgotten God.

2. To rebuke and chastise men.

3. To try the grace of God’s people, to explore its weakness, or to manifest its strength. (J. Henderson, D. D.)