Nature is dumb and silent concerning the Infinite behind it to him who goes but to catalogue and dissect. Take a heart that can wonder with you on your country-walk, open your eyes and look, open your heart like a child and listen, and you will find, as Moses found, that even in a bush there may be the Voice of God. Hold the door of your heart ajar in simple wonder, and some thing of God will enter to cleanse and freshen it, as the hot and dusty street is washed by the rain from Heaven. Just as he who goes to Nature with a heart that cannot wonder, will find no message there for him, so he who looks out upon the sanctities of home, of human life and love, in that dull mood of mere acceptance, must often find himself hard pressed for material when he makes his thanksgiving to God. George Eliot has spoken somewhere of the agony of the thought that we can never atone to the dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the "little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God has given us to know." The divinest thing God has given us to know! Have we realised that that gift of God to us lives now in the same home with us? Do you know what it is? It is a wife’s devotion, a mother’s care, a brother’s comradeship, a sister’s love. It is the trust and affection of little children, and the patience of those who love us. And yet there have been men--judge ye if this be not true--who have lived close to gifts of God like these, and taken them all unquestioned and never wondered at the undeserved bounty of them or their continuance from day to day. How easy it is to discover the gifts and charm of a stranger, how easy to wonder at that! But to wonder at the sacrifice and the patience of the love that dwells under the same roof with us, and stoops, in Mrs Browning’s happy phrase, "to the level of each day’s most quiet need," how few of us do that! And yet, without daily wonder, how can we be sure that we do not slight it, or requite it ill, how can we truly give our thanks to God whose gift it is? Most important of all, he who brings no wonder in his heart can never be touched with the sense of God. The lack of the great deep and awful wonder of our fathers in all their thought and speech about God, has brought it about that our religious speech to-day is too often either superficial, flippant and easy, or syllogistic, mechanical, and hard. It is the absence of wonder that tempts men to imagine that God can be enclosed in any formula whatever, or brought to the hearts of men in so many rigid propositions. If men would but give their wonder expression when they frame their creeds, there would be less chafing where the edges are too sharp.