What can you say but that your heart is better than the heart of the God which nature reveals?
Can you hear, understand and love a God like that?
Can you climb through nature up to nature’s God and say, “I have found him, I know him?”
You can climb up, but where will you find him?
You will find him wrapped in the black thundercloud or girded with the robe of the lightnings: You will find him the God who splits the earth in twain with the earthquake’s riving blow, loosens the bands of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges of destruction, pours out the lava streams from the volcano’s cone, as kings pour wine from an earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the cup; the God who turns an earthly paradise (like Messina) into a fire-smitten desert, and a city of the living into a cemetery of the unburied dead.
When your heart aches, will such a God care for you? Will his thunders console you? When your soul is dark, will his lightnings illumine it? When you yearn for love, will his inexorable law supply it?
Ah, sirs, without Christ you are without a God whom you can love, whom you can trust, to whom you can go, and in whose strength you can lie down and—at last—be folded in peace.
If Jesus Christ is not God, if the only God to whom you can go is the God of nature, then you might as well fall down in the sand at the base of the far Egyptian sphinx, open your eyes for a moment to the blue sky that spreads away to the horizon before its staring face, its cold, chiselled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment shut your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds blow thither.
Ah! Nature is a sand-dune—and the God of nature is a Sphynx.
Do you care to kneel and worship there?