THE LESSONS WHICH IT TEACHES.
MY DEAR BOYS AND GIRLS: When God desired to set Job to thinking, among other questions He asked him: Canst thou enter into the treasures of the snow? (Job xxxviii: 22.) While coming to church to-day, when I saw you frolicking and glad in the midst of the snow, which was falling all about you, I wondered whether you had ever stopped to think much about the snow. So I thought to ask you the question which God asked of Job nearly thirty-five hundred years ago: "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?"
When you were all so glad on account of this first snowstorm of the winter, did you stop to think that the snow comes from God? Now like everything else which comes from God, the snow is wonderful. No philosopher has ever yet been able fully to explain how the snow is formed and to tell us all about it, and I do not suppose that all the mysteries concerning it will ever be fully and perfectly solved. It is wonderful, however, because it comes down so lightly and noiselessly. It drops upon the earth almost like feathers, covering the ground, hanging upon the limbs of the trees and shaping them into things of strange beauty, piling up on the post by the side of your gate, until perhaps it looks more like the white man from the flour mill than like that to which people tie horses. Yet it comes down so noiselessly that we scarcely notice it.
When the snow falls upon the ground a foot deep it is said to be equal in weight to one inch of rain. Now one foot of snow, on one square mile of street, would weigh, it is estimated, about sixty-four thousand tons. If this snow, which covers only one square mile, were placed in wagons loaded with one ton each, and allowing sufficient space for these teams to move one behind another, these wagons would make a string or procession reaching from Philadelphia to New York, and from New York up the Hudson River almost to the city of Albany. I am sure you will be astonished at this, but when you consider that some snowstorms cover thousands of square miles, and are sometimes more than one foot deep, you will see how increasingly wonderful it is that all this great weight falls so gently upon the earth as to produce no disturbance, no shock, and generally goes away as quietly and peaceably as it came.
Like everything else that God has made, the snow is very beautiful. Did you ever hear that poem which begins:
"Beautiful snow! beautiful snow!
Falling so lightly,
Daily and nightly,
Alike 'round the dwellings of the lofty and low;
Horses are prancing,
Cheerily dancing,
Stirred with the spirit that comes from the snow."
Snow-flakes Magnified.
We oftentimes think that God is seen in the fields and flowers in the spring and summer, but He is also seen in the beautiful snow of winter. If you will let some of the snow fall upon the sleeve of your coat and then examine it carefully, you will be surprised at its beauty. It is beautiful when examined without a microscope, but much more beautiful and wonderful when examined with a microscope. Each flake is fashioned into stellar shape. It is formed and fashioned by the same hand which made the stars of the heavens and gave them their sparkle and beauty. Each flake is a beautiful crystal. Each somewhat like the others, and yet no two exactly alike. There are hundreds of varieties, each beautiful and all glorious. These beautiful little snow stars are all formed with perfect geometrical accuracy. Some have three sides and angles, some six, others eight, and some have more. One resembles a sparkling cross, while others seem almost like the leaves of an open flower. Some are like single stars, others like double stars and clusters of stars; and although the ground in winter is covered with myriads of them, yet each one is formed with as much correctness and beauty as if God had made each one for special examination and as an exhibition of His infinite skill and divine perfection.
But like everything else that God has made, the snow is also useful. You may possibly have thought of it as affording excellent sport in sliding down hill, enabling you to enjoy a sleigh ride behind horses with jingling bells, affording opportunity for a snow-ball fight, or as furnishing the material for making snow men or snow houses. In all these ways the snow is a source of delight and pleasure to boys and girls, but after all, the snow has a special mission in the world during the severe cold of the winter.