as we work, then we acknowledge his greatness and wisdom.  Whereas his greatness, his wisdom, are rather shown in not making as we make, not working as we work:  but in this is the greatness of God manifest, in that he has ordained laws which must work of themselves, and with which he need never interfere:  laws by which the tiny seed, made up only (as far as we can see) of a little water, and air, and earth, must grow up into plant, leaf, and flower, utterly unlike itself, and must produce seeds which have the truly miraculous power of growing up in their turn, into plants exactly like that from which they sprung, and no other.  Ah, my friends, herein is the glory of God:  and he who will consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, that man will see at last that the highest, and therefore the truest, notion of God is, not that the universe is continually going wrong, so that he has to interfere and right it:  but that the universe is continually going right, because he hath given it a law which cannot be broken.

And when a man sees that, there will arise within his soul a clear light, and an awful joy, and an abiding peace, and a sure hope; and a faith as of a little child.

Then will that man crave no more for signs and wonders, with the superstitious and the unbelieving, who have eyes, and see not; ears, and cannot hear; whose hearts are waxen gross, so that they cannot consider the lilies of the field, how they grow:  but all his cry will be to the Lord of Order, to make him orderly; to the Lord of Law, to make him loyal; to the Lord in whom is nothing arbitrary, to take out of him all that is unreasonable and self-willed; and make him content, like his Master Christ before him, to do the will of his Father in heaven, who has sent him into this noble world.  He will no longer fancy that God is an absent God, who only comes down now and then to visit the earth in signs and wonders:  but he will know that God is everywhere, and over all things, from the greatest to the least; for in God, he, and all things created, live and move and have their being.  And therefore, knowing that he is always in the presence of God, he will pray to be taught how to use all his powers aright, because all of them are the powers of God; pray to be taught how to see, and how to hear; pray that when he is called to account for the use of this wonderful body which God has bestowed on him, he may not be brought to shame by the thought that he has used it merely for his own profit or his own pleasure, much less by the thought that he has weakened and diseased it by misuse and neglect:  but comforted by the thought that he has done with it what the Lord Jesus did with his body—­made it the useful servant, and not the brutal master, of his immortal soul.