And of the wonders and glories of Nature that surround us every moment from the cradle to the grave, how much are we taught? Yet these can be studied at our leisure out in God’s blessed air and under God’s blessed heaven. In the garden, at the river-bank, on the hill-side, by the sea-shore, in the lonely desert, there we may find health and wisdom and knowledge and happiness; and how many of us go to seek them there? “A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books,” says Walt Whitman. Few of us ever see this morning glory; indeed, very few of us even take the trouble to look at an evening glory. I have stood day after day on the parade at a small seaside place, and have watched the sun sink below the watery horizon; sea, sand, rocks and sky all being illumined with magnificent colouring. Well-dressed people would pass and repass, some averting their eyes from the splendid spectacle lavished on them by prodigal Nature, others glancing at it vacantly with irresponsive countenances, others gazing on the ground or at one another, and talking of the cut of their new dresses or of the prices of stocks. Hardly any ever paused to look and admire. Poor creatures! All this joy--joy showered abundantly on me--was simply rejected by them. The essential God-like part of their natures had been starved; they had been taught in stuffy schoolrooms by wearied teachers and out of musty books; appreciation of the works of the good God had not been included in the curriculum. Carlyle mourns the extinction of the lamp of the soul. He is premature. In most of us it is never so much as lighted. Yet we have within us somewhere the capability for seeing--though as in a glass darkly--a dim reflection of the Lord of Glory. We have but to look--to be taught how to look aright--and to us the Lord shall be in the earthquake and in the storm. We have but to listen--to be taught to listen aright, and throughout the universe we shall hear the still, small voice. To Carlyle it was a tragedy that one man should die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge. And are not the majority of us ignorant even of the very things which lie most easily within our reach--of the air we breathe, of the ground on which we tread, of the skies on which we gaze? There is something known approximately about all of these which no man hath taught to us. After all our years of nerve-deterioration in stifling schoolrooms, few of us know anything of the very simplest facts of life, of the composition of our own bodies, of the most ordinary conditions of our own existence.