The Nature Providence is stern and even cruel in some of its dealings with us, but not in all, else we should run away from home. It is genial and friendly in the genial season--in a June meadow, in a field of ripening grain, in an orchard bending with fruit, in the cattle on a thousand hills, in the shade of the friendly trees, in the bubbling springs, in the paths by the green fields and by still waters, and in ten thousand other aspects of its manifold works. It is not friendly in the tropical jungles, nor amid the snows and blizzards of the polar regions, but upon four fifths of the surface of the globe it may be said to be friendly or neutral. Man is armed to face its hostile aspects and to turn its very wrath to account. If God maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, so man maketh the wrath of God to serve him, as when he subdues and controls Nature’s destructive forces, tames the lightning and harnesses Niagara. He has not bound the cyclone yet, nor warmed himself by the volcano, nor moved mountains from his path with the earthquake, but he may do it yet. He is fast drawing the fangs of contagious diseases, thus adding to his length of days. The Nature Providence working in man and through him has made the world more fit for man’s abode. Action and reaction are the steps by which life ascends. Nature acts upon man and man reacts upon nature. The labor the farmer puts into the soil comes back to him with interest, and enables him to labor more. The capital of life grows in that way; action and reaction; up we go. “Are God and Nature then at strife?” asks Tennyson, baffled and unsettled by what he sees about him. There is strife in the living world, the struggle of existence. In the non-living, there is collision, disruption, overthrow. The apparent strife between the two worlds is an effort toward adjustment on the part of the living--to master and utilize the non-living. The inorganic goes its way under the leash of physical laws, heedless of the organic. Myriads of living things are crushed and destroyed by the ruthless onward flow of the non-living. There is life in the world because life is plastic and persistent and adaptive, and perpetually escapes from the blind forces that would destroy it--the winds, the floods, the frost, the heat, gravity, earthquakes, chemical reactions, and so on. Every living thing runs the gantlet of the insensate mechanical and chemical forces. But this is not strife in our human sense; it is the discipline of nature. No living thing could begin or continue without these forces which at times are so hostile. Like faithful gardeners preparing the seed-beds, they prepared the earth for the abode of man and all other living forms. They made the soil, they bring the rains, they begat the winds, they prearranged all the conditions of life; but life itself is a mystery, the great mystery, super-mechanical, super-chemical, dependent upon these forces, but not begotten by them. They are its servants.