The Newtown bee., 1895-05-17

ABOUT THEM.--GoD IS NOT GREAT BE-
 CAUSE HE HAS MADE SOME BBG THINGS.
 THE SEA SPEAKS OF GOD BECAUSE IN
 IT WE SEE LIFE, BEAUTY, POWER
 AND MYsTERY.-A SERMON PREACHED
 IN THE VIEWPOINT CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH BY REV OTIS W. BARKER.
 Ps. v :l9: "Thy way is in the sea and Thy path in the great waters"
 have never been able tn understand how there could be blasphemous cap tains of ships and stony-hearted mates and thoroughly absolute shipmen and crew. "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep"-they see Gods works and they read His wonders in the deep because they cannot help doing so. When most of ones life is spent in a cramped and narrow valley, or when the sunny hours of the day in dark and dingy coal mine, can easily understand how such a man can get little or no idea of God from nature; but, when ones life is spent on the vast reach of waters, lack of thought about God and lack of reverence for God seem to me wholly in- explicable. Somewhere have read the story of little girl, who, while the wind was bowling through the rigging and the waves came leaping down like some savage monsters to seize the vessel in their jaws, stood by the side of her father, the captain, and, laying warmly hold of his hand, said, thus quieting his fears: Papa, is not Got upon the ocean ! just the same as on the land?" l think it can be truly said that God is more | upon the ocean than He is upon the land. At sea everything speaks of God. Whether we look down into the unex- plored depths or up into the great cano- py above, whether we strain our eyes to descry far away the point where the horizon marries the sea and the sky, or whether we contemplate the vessel on which we ride, alone, it seems, in a boundless waste, alone in a mighty world, whether the prov of the ship cuts sharply path through smooth, unrrffled sea, or the onrushing moun- tain waves make even her stout frame tremble, whether it be day when the sun is riding high and clear in the heavens, or night when the silvery moon throws a pathway of light over the untrodden wave-the message to the receptive soul is one and the same "The sea is His, and He made it,"
 ALL GODS WORKS SPEAK OF HIM,
 and the man who does not see God everywhere he goes, shuts his eyes. He who does not take God with him on ionship. But you do not need travel thousands of miles to find God you need not cross the ocean, pierce the des- ert, climb some heaven-tipping steep you need not seek for marvels that star- tie and for scenes that enrapture the soul. God is everywhere. The dew drop with it's iridescent hues reveals Him, and 80 do the forked lightning and the crashing storm. The mingling col ors of butterfly's wing reveal God man cannot reproduce them-they sur pass his daintiest touch and his finest skill-their beauty alone is enough to stop the mouth of prating inidel. The butterfly's wing reveals God, and so does landscape bathed in the mellow glow of setting sun. Bigness is not greatness. God is not great because He has made some big things-the moun- tains, the rivers, the sun and the sea but He is great because He has made everything we'll, everything suited to it's object, everything in evidence of love.
 "Thy way is in the sea-" Let, then, the sea teach us this morning about God First, l think of God as the One who has breathed into mans nostrils the breath of life, as the One who has given to everything that grows it's fertility and bloom, from the pale violet that grows in the cool shade near the wall to the oak that. drives its roots through the fiinty rock. This, too, is true of the sea; it is the great mother of all prolific life. We do not generally think of it in that way. We speak of the ocean as a "howling waste of waters." We think of 1t as sepuichre and a tomb. We read in our geographies the fact that the ocean covers two-thirds, if not three | fourths, of the earth's surface, and we | get the impression that this is a dis proportion between the sea and the land, and that somehow the great Creator made a mistake when He set a bound to the waters that they might not pass over. In very real sense the sea is a sepulchre and tomb. Oh, the ships that have gone down into it's depths and the sea settled over the place as if the catastrophe had not beenl Oh, the bones that lie whitening
 IN ITS ABYsMAL CAvERNs,
 their resting-place there to be and never to be known until that day when the sea gives up it's dead!
 But in a very real sense, too, the sea is the great mother of all prolific life. Scientists tell us that were 1t not for the amount of the water the earth could not | bear fruit for want of rain, and that were it not for the saltness of the water we could not live upon the earth on ac- count of the sickening influences the water would bring. The sea is desert, an interminable expanse of sterilty and death; and yet out of this desert are born the rains that refresh the parched land, the clouds which scatter moisture, the fogs and mists that hang with their