The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an embassador from the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association—that of a divine and perpetual presence—is shed over the landscape, and its golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse—the cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse, and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting blood—are all clothed in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree—
“A light which never was on sea or shore.”
In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, the locusts are God's “great army;”—the winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, the lightning a “fiery stream going before him,” the moon his witness in the heavens, the sun a strong man rejoicing to run his race—all creation is roused and startled into life through him—its every beautiful, or dire, or strange shape in the earth or the sky, is God's movable tent; the place where, for a season, his honor, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell—the tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode.
His mere “tent,” however—for while the great and the infinite are thus connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature are but the mirrors to God's face—the scaffolding to his future purposes; and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed. The great sheet is to be received up again into heaven. The heavens and the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God's glory seems to shine [pg 579] with a struggle, and but faintly, shall disappear—nay, the worlds which bore, and sheltered them in their rugged dens and eaves, shall flee from the face of the regenerator. “A milder day” is to dawn on the universe—the refinement of matter is to keep pace with the elevation of mind. Evil and sin are to be eternally banished to some Siberia of space. The word of the poet is to be fulfilled,
“And one eternal spring encircles all!”
The mediatorial purpose of creation, fully subserved, is to be abandoned, that we may see “eye to eye,” and that God may be “all in all.”
That such views of matter—its present ministry—the source of its beauty and glory—and its future destiny, transferred from the pages of both Testaments to those of our great moral and religious poets, have deepened some of their profoundest, and swelled some of their highest strains, is unquestionable. Such prospects as were in Milton's eye, when he sung,
“Thy Saviour and thy Lord
Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed,
In glory of the Father to dissolve