The Pulpit Commentary — Isaiah — Volume 1 — Section 260

Bight of the trees. We cannot see their leaves fall in autnmn without something of a pang. We hail the returning blush on the beech woods of our own land in the spring- time, and the dimly deepening green of the hed)1;erows. A silent sense of sympathy st,ials to our he&rt, as if sickness, old age, and death were illusions, life the only reality. 'l'he dimpling reflections of the sunlight on the leaves are as smiles, and as a whisper from the spiritual world the rustle of the wind among them, We can understand how in olden time men felt the trees to be oracular, and believed, or half believed them to be tenanted by supernatural beings. A landscape without a tree, like a sea without a i;ail, is a ~ight we cannot Jong endure without pain. Such feelings have undoubtedly e religious meaning and value. As we listen to them and cmltivate them, the faith grows stronger that a Divine love and sympathy is stirring at the very heart of things. It is an ill thing if we permit on every occasion our cold scientific conscience to chide us out of such a mood. In the present exalted mood of the prophet, the trees seem not merely to offer a silent sympathy, but to find tongue and to break forth into articulate triumph. Still more boldly, in eh. lv. 12, they are conceived ll!I clapping their hands in joy. Here the cypresses and cedars, appropriated by the patriotic eagerness of the prophet, as it were, exult in deliverance from the axe of the alien feller, as he exults in the breaking of the alien sceptre. III. LESSON ON TIIE SYMPATHY OF MIND WITH NATURE. Let 118 not be tempted to idle words in speaking of that high faculty of poetic fancy exercised upon the objects and scenes of nature, and illustrated in this passage. A great spiritual poet of our age -Wordsworth-ha~ taught us religiously to cherish it. We accept the teacbiug, but not in its exaggerated forms. It has been asserted as a principle of primary and universal import, that "it has pleased God to educate mankind from the begi11ning through impressions derived from the phenomena of the natural world." A sounder theology and a juster theory of the imagination teaches otherwise. '.l.'he home, the school, the Church, the state, society,-these are the scenes of our spirit's training in religion and in morals, for time and for eternity. We cast upon the forms of the exteraal world reflections of sentiments and truths we could not divine from that world, We know the physical cosmos through the moral cosmos, not vice versa. As to poets of the highest order, all have been at home in the grandeurs of the spiritual world, not all have been affected by the forms of nature. This has been especially remarked of Dante. This observation is fixed almost exclusively upon the Divine and human world . .And, indeed, it must be admitted that the noblest objects of contemplation are God and man himself. "The universe and all its fair and glorious forms is indeed included in the wide empire of imagination; but she has placed her home and her sanctuary amidst the inexhaustible varieties and impenetrable mysteries of the human mind . . . . ls it not the fact that external objects never strongly excite our feelings but when they are contemplated with reference to man, as illustrating his destiny or as inli.uencing his character?" (Macaulay). We can find in Nature only what we take to her. '.l.'he key to her mystical meanings is to be found in the awakened conscience, the heart made pure. Petrarch, unlike Dante, loved the face of nature. But on one occasion, in the midst of 11, glow of delight in a glorious prospect, he remembered that he had a volume of St. A~"11stine in his pocket. Opening the; book at random, he read these words : " Men go to admire the lofty mountains, the mighty sea-billows, the broad courses of the rivers, the circuit of the ocean, the orbit of the stars, and they neglect themselves." He closed the book and reproached himself. Even the heathen philo- sophers might have taught him _a deeper truth. Doubtless. Socrates said that "trees did not teach him anything, but man." Let us adapt the saying to religious feeling. The trees will yield no oracles but those which have been first heard in the inmost conscience. .And if there are times when they seem to whisper of gladness, or to smile an<l clap their hands for joy, it is because God has already opened a fountain of JJerennial truat and hope within the soul. Then "fruitful trees and all cedars" will praise the Lord, when the heart is filled with praise. "The outward face of nature is a religioWl communication to those who come to it with the religious element already in them, but no man can get a religion out of the beauty of nature. Those who have first made the knowledge of themselves and their own souls their care, its glory has ever turned to light and hope. They have read in nature an augury and a presage; they have fonnd in it a language and a revelation" (Mozley)-J.  OH, xiv. 1-32.] THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET ISAIAH. 253