This Psalm, therefore, is a Psalm of thanksgiving for all the creatures which God has created, whether in the heavens, in the earth, or in the sea; and a rendering of thanks unto God also, that he hath made a covenant with the day and the night, and hath given laws to the heaven and the earth; laws so certain that they cannot be moved, but continue in their appointed order. The moon, saith the Psalmist, distinguished the seasons; the sun knoweth his going down; the day cometh, and also the night; the summer returns at its appointed time, and the winter also in its season. Thou fillest, saith he, that immense space of the heaven with light: thou stretchest out the heaven itself like a curtain, which resteth not on any beams or columns: and thou suspendest the mighty range of clouds, at thy word, like a glorious canopy. The winds rise, and blow over and blow through all things, having neither wings nor feathers. And the angels whom thou sendest forth, saith he, fulfil their commands like the winds, and like a “flame of fire.” Hence the prophet, as you see, has all these things depicted in his mind, and his faith is kindled by a meditation on this wonderful and ineffable work of creation. But, alas! how few, how very few, are there who thus look into, meditate on, and admire these created things? Here, therefore, with a view to reprove both the indolence and the wickedness of certain characters, I cannot help transcribing the words of Cicero, a heathen, who cites another heathen, Aristotle: ‘Aristotle,’ says Cicero, ‘has most greatly and beautifully spoken thus. “If there could be men, who had lived under the earth in grand and noble habitations; habitations adorned with paintings and works of art, and with all those embellishments which ornament the houses of those who are now accounted wealthy and happy; and if it could so be that such subterranean inhabitants had never been above ground, but had heard by fame and report that there was a certain Deity, and a certain Almighty power of that Deity; and then if it could so be, that, at a certain time, the doors of the earth’s surface should be thrown open, and they should come forth from their subterranean abysses into these above-ground regions which we inhabit:—when such men beheld, on a sudden, the earth, the sea, and the heavens; when they saw the expanded grandeur of the clouds, and felt the mighty power of the winds; when they looked up to the sun and beheld his glorious magnitude and his beauty, and knew something of his influence and efficacy in all creation,—that it is he, who, by diffusing his light through the whole heaven, makes the day; and when such mortals, newly admitted on earth, should see by the departure of the sun the whole creation veiled in the darkness of night, while the whole heaven was studded and bespangled with stars; and when they saw and understood the various degrees of the light of the moon, and the