On a midsummer day, calm, clear, warm, the leaves shining, the grain and grass ripening, the waters sparkling, the birds singing, we see and feel the beneficence of Nature. How good it all is! What a joy to be alive! If the day were to end in a fury of wind and storm, breaking the trees, unroofing the houses, and destroying the crops, we should be seeing the opposite side of Nature, what we call the malevolent side. Fair days now and then have such endings, but they are the exception; living nature survives them and soon forgets them. Their scars may long remain, but they finally disappear. Total nature is overpoweringly on the side of life. But for all this, when we talk about the fatherhood of God, his loving solicitude, we talk in parables. There is not even the shadow of analogy between the wholesale bounty of Nature and the care and providence of a human father. Striding through the universe goes the Eternal, crushed worlds on one hand and worlds being created on the other: no special act of love or mercy or guidance, but a providence like the rains, the sunshine, the seasons. When we say hard things about Nature--accuse her of cruelty, of savagery, of indifference--we fall short of our proper filial respect toward her. She is the mother of us all; neither an indulgent mother, nor a cruel stepmother. In many respects the gifts she has lavished upon us only make her own poverty the more conspicuous. Where she got the gift of reason which she has bestowed upon man, together with the sense of justice and of mercy, the moral consciousness, the æsthetic perceptions, the capacity for learning her secrets and mastering her forces, are puzzling questions. We may say that man achieved these things himself; but who or what made him capable of achieving them, what made him man, and out of the same elements that his dog or his horse is made?