Psalms 19:6

There is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

The moral uses of the weather

1. The contrasts and the changes of the season’s. What a picture of the vicissitudes of human life is in them! The experience of thousands has ranged from the extreme severity of winter’s poverty to the scorching blaze of midsummer prosperity. The man of wealth yesterday has become the beggar of today. Such contrasts and changes seem to have been far more numerous of late years than formerly.

2. Doubtless the extremes of heat and cold have their part to play in the beneficent economy of nature; yet no one doubts the physical evils that arise from them. To some, no doubt, the cold of winter seems invigorating and bracing, but to multitudes severity means death. So, too, there may be those to whom poverty and trial are stimulants to patient endurance, and develop some of the nobler qualities of the soul. We question, however, whether those are not the exceptions rather than the rule. Many of those around us are what they are largely because of their surroundings. When a man loses the stimulus of hope it is not very likely that his life will blossom into much moral beauty. We often hear it said, that prosperity is more dangerous to a man’s virtues than adversity; but we question whether there is not far more moral evil traceable to human poverty than many well-to-do philosophers are apt to imagine.

3. The poets have been influenced by something more than fancy when they have associated the ideas of cold and death, heat and life. Cold is only a relative term. Heat is essential to life.

4. The sun is the chief source whence heat is derived. The resistless energies of this omnipotent and all-pervading agent are in constant operation. There is not an instant or time that heat is not performing some important duty in fulfilment of the Divine purposes.

5. How dependent we are upon the weather for a bountiful harvest! Every summer brings us within a measurable distance of absolute want. The harvest, at best, does but provide for the wants of the year. It is seemly, then, that we should pray to the Lord of the harvest, that our “garners may be full.” Practical lessons--

(1) Earthly prosperity may be a legitimate object of desire. There is a cheap affectation of virtue which pretends to despise wealth.

(2) Do not overlook the connection between circumstance and condition.

(3) Recognise the lesson that spiritual, not less than physical, life, is dependent upon heat. It is so in the individual soul; it is so in the Church. Some men lament their own spiritual deadness, yet never take any steps to increase their store of vital heat. Death is the absence of life; cold is the absence of heat. Nothing can quicken the life of the soul, or produce in us the beauty of holiness, but the direct influence of the Sun of Righteousness. Only as we can get more perfectly into the presence of God, and have our cold natures warmed and our languid pulses quickened by His life, shall we have that for which we yearn. (F. Wagstaff.)