belong to nature.” Now I believe in nature no more than I do in Baal. Nature is merely things—a great many things it is true, but only things—and when I add them all up together, and call them nature, as if they were one thing, I make an abstraction of them. There is no harm in that: but if I treat that abstraction as if it really existed, and did anything, then I make of it an idol, the which I have no mind to do. I believe, I say, in nature no more than I do in Baal. Both words were at first symbols; and both have become in due course of time mere idols. But those who worship nature and not God, say now—God did not make trees; they were made by the laws of nature and nothing else. Well: I believe that the so-called philosophers who say that, will be proved at last to be no more right, and no more rational, than those heathen workmen of Tyre. But meanwhile, what the Psalmist says, and what the Bible says, is—Those trees belong to God. He made them, He made all things; the sap—the mysterious life in them, by which each grows and seeds according to its kind—is His gift. Their growth is ordered by Him; and so are all things in earth and heaven.
Then why speak of them especially as trees of God? Because, my friends, we can only find out that something is true of many things, by finding out that it is true of one thing; and that we usually find out by some striking instance; some case about which there can be no mistake. And these cedars of Lebanon were, and are still, such a striking instance, which there was no mistaking. Upon the slopes of the great snow-mountain of Lebanon
stood those gigantic cedar-trees—whole forests of them then—now only one or two small groups, but awful, travellers tell us, even in their decay. Whence did they come? There are no trees like them for hundreds, I had almost said for thousands, of miles. There are but two other patches of them left now on the whole earth, one in the Atlas, one in the Himalaya. The Jews certainly knew of no trees like them; and no trees either of their size. There were trees among them then, probably, two and three hundred feet in height; trees whose tops were as those minster towers; whose shafts were like yonder pillars; and their branches like yonder vaults. No king, however mighty, could have planted them up there upon the lofty mountain slopes. The Jew, when he entered beneath the awful darkness of these cedars; the cedars with a shadowy shroud—as the Scripture says—the cedars high and lifted up, whose tops were among the thick boughs, and their height exalted above all the trees of the field; fair in their greatness; their boughs multiplied, and their branches long—for it is in such words of awe and admiration that the Bible talks always of the cedars—then the Jew said, “God has planted these, and God alone.” And when he thought, not merely of their grandeur and their beauty, but of their use; of their fragrant and incorruptible timber, fit to build the palaces of kings, and the temples of gods; he said—and what could he say better?—“These are trees of God;” wonderful and glorious works of a wonderful and a glorious Creator. If he had not, he would have had less reason in him, and less knowledge of God, than the Hindoos of old; who
when they saw the other variety of the cedar growing, in like grandeur, on the slopes of the Himalaya, called them the Deodara—which means, in the old Sanscrit tongue, neither more nor less than “the timber of God,” “the lance of God”—and what better could they have said?
My friends, I speak on this matter from the fulness of my heart. It has happened to me—through the bounty of God, for which I shall be ever grateful—to have spent days in primeval forests, as grand, and far stranger and far richer than that of Lebanon and its cedars; amid trees beside which the hugest tree in Britain would be but as a sapling; gorgeous too with flowers, rich with fruits, timbers, precious gums, and all the yet unknown wealth of a tropic wilderness. And as I looked up, awestruck and bewildered, at those minsters not made by hands, I found the words of Scripture rising again and again unawares to my lips, and said—Yes: the Bible words are the best words, the only words for such a sight as this. These too are trees of God which are full of sap. These, too, are trees, which God, not man, has planted. Mind, I do not say that I should have said so, if I had not learnt to say so from the Bible. Without the Bible I should have been, I presume, either an idolater or an atheist. And mind, also, that I do not say that the Psalmist learnt to call the cedars trees of God by his own unassisted reason. I believe the very opposite. I believe that no man can see the truth of a thing unless God shews it him; that no man can find out God, in earth or heaven, unless God condescends to reveal Himself to that man. But I believe that God did reveal Himself to
the Psalmist; did enlighten his reason by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit; did teach him, as we teach a child, what to call those cedars; and, as it were, whispered to him, though with no audible voice: “Thou wishest to know what name is most worthy whereby to call those mighty trees: then call them trees of God. Know that there is but one God, of whom are all things; and that they are His trees; and that He planted them, to shew forth His wisdom, His power, and His good will to man.”
And do you fancy that because the Jew called the great cedars trees of God, that therefore he thought that the lentiscs and oleanders, by the brook outside, were not God’s shrubs; or the lilies and anemones upon the down below were not God’s flowers? Some folk have fancied so.—It seems to me most unreasonably. I should have thought that here the rule stood true; that that which is greater contains the less; that if the Psalmist knew God to be mighty enough to make and plant the cedars, he would think Him also mighty enough to make and plant the smallest flower at his feet. I think so. For I know it was so with me. My feeling that those enormous trees over my head were God’s trees, did not take away in the least from my feeling of God’s wisdom and power in the tiniest herb at their feet. Nay rather, it increased my feeling that God was filling all things with life and beauty; till the whole forest,—if I may so speak in all humility, but in all honesty—from the highest to the lowest, from the hugest to the smallest, and every leaf and bud therein, seemed full of the glory of God. And if I could feel that,—
being the thing I am—how much more must the inspired Psalmist have felt it? You see by this very psalm that he did feel it. The grass for the use of cattle, and the green herb for men, and the corn and the wine and the oil, he says, are just as much God’s making, and God’s gift. The earth is “filled,” he says, “with the fruit of God’s works.” Filled: not dotted over here and there with a few grand and wonderful things which God cares for, while He cares for nothing else: but filled. Let us take the words of Scripture honestly in their whole strength; and believe that if the Psalmist saw God’s work in the great cedars, he saw it everywhere else likewise.
Nay, more: I will say this. That I believe it was such teaching as that of this very 104th Psalm—teaching which runs, my friends, throughout the Old Testament, especially through the Psalmists and the Prophets—which enabled the Jews to understand our Lord’s homely parables about the flowers of the field and the birds of the air. Those of them at least who were Israelites indeed; those who did understand, and had treasured up in their hearts, the old revelation of Moses, and the Psalmists, and the Prophets; those who did still believe that the cedars were the trees of God, and that God brought forth grass for the cattle, and green herb for the service of men; and who could see God’s hand, God’s laws, God’s love, working in them—those men and women, be sure, were the very ones who understood our Lord, when He said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin. And
yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not compared unto one of these.”