the Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. When Science turns poet, as it sometimes does in the fervid utterance of such a man as Professor Tyndall, it personifies and says these things to the Eternal Energy.

But, again, as in the preceding lecture, it is not so much philosophical justification for these statements as practical justification that needs at the present time to be most set forth and illustrated. The enemies of human happiness and life, even in the midst of our most advanced civilization, are so many and so persistent and strong that it sometimes seems very hard to believe in any bountiful provision for human needs. The enemies, the hostile forces, are present and very close, while the supplying bounty may seem far off, beyond reach and call, so distant as not to be realized. Just now, especially, is a most opportune time to consider the first of the three statements of our verse from a practical point of view. The casualties from natural causes, the devastations to property and life, within the last year have been appalling, to say nothing of those catastrophes in which human agency has been more apparent. Floods and tornadoes, mine explosions and drownings, earthquakes and conflagrations, have been casting human beings into the abysses of death by the thousands. And where, many persons have asked, amidst such scenes of terror, devastation, and destruction, is the careful and bountiful Provider? Why does not the Eternal Power intervene.

to save human beings and human possessions from such fearful disasters?

In attempting an answer to this question, we must again remind ourselves that the Eternal Power may shepherd and beneficently provide for mankind, though not on the cosseting plan of a special Providence which would intervene to snatch us from this or that danger. It is the ground plan of this universe that human beings should become a providence to themselves; that the Eternal Power works within and through their own faculties by natural law; that thus it provides and cares for them, while all around them, as well as within them, are the mighty forces on which they are to draw for sustenance and benefit. Whether the sustenance and benefit will be formed in individual cases depends on the measure of adjustment to these great world-forces. That the welfare is found in the experience of mankind at large there can be no question. For this process of adjustment of finite life, through finite perception and effort, to the infinite resources and forces that pervade and surround it, is the school of education for the human race from savagery to civilization, and to all the power, prosperity, happiness, and wellbeing which an enlightened and moral civilization implies. And all the time, while mankind are staggering under the difficulties which confront them, in presence of the very enemies of their prosperity and peace, this infinite bounty of natural resource is offered, awaiting and soliciting man's

adjusting effort to partake of it.

While we may

be reading, every spring-time, of destruction and death by flood and gale, Nature weaves around us, alike under storm as under sunshine, her yearly garment of life and beauty. And, when the desolating winter storms come, Nature is not dead.

In the tiny, strongly cased buds on yonder leafless trees are safely garnered all the vital hopes of next year's bounty of foliage and fruit. Dissect if you can a single snowflake of the storm, and you will find it a house of perfect crystals of amazing beauty. Seed-time and harvest arrive in their order, not with such certainty of measure as to make man careless on his side of the needed mutual service, but by laws that never fail. Somewhere the earth produces, or may be made to produce, enough for all who anywhere live upon it. Under the ground are stored treasures of wealth, ready at man's transforming touch to be converted into heat and light and motive power. And in what secret cells of earth or of air is hidden that mightiest and most marvellous of nature's forces, which, wherever hidden, man has discovered, but is only just learning its vast capabilities of service? The thunderbolt, drawn from that secret chamber, is becoming man's right hand. The lightning's spark is steed for our loaded cars. And the same power, under a surgeon's scientific skill, has removed a tumor from a baby's lip as painlessly and tenderly as if done by a mother's kiss.

It seems as if everywhere the Power of the

Eternal in nature were appealingly saying to man, "Learn how to use me, and see how I will bless you!"

For the truth of these lessons of our Psalm I like to find the most recent illustrations possible; and there came to me, as I wrote, an apt illustration of this point we are now considering, in the number, just then at hand, of that little newspaper called the Southern Letter, which is printed by the colored students at the Tuskegee Normal School, Alabama, a school where the president and teachers are also all of the colored race. The little sheet comes to some of you, perhaps; but it is so very small and modest that I suspect it is quite likely to go into the waste-basket unnoticed. But, humble as it is in appearance, I always find in it some suggestive hint of the way in which good is gradually overcoming evil in this world. First, at the head of it, there stands the excellent motto, "Devoted to the Education of the Hand, Head, and Heart." And this is what that school is doing down there for the colored people, right in the presence of their old enemies, who once held them in the ignorance of slavery, but who are now being converted into friends. But the thing which specially struck my attention in that particular number of the little paper was the story of the experience of one of the graduates of the school, which he sends back to the principal in a letter. The young man went out into a country region in the autumn to begin a school where there was no

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school-house nor school organization. weeks the teaching was done in a room which was a dining-room and lodging-room and kitchen, yet sometimes there were fifty scholars. But in six weeks he had managed, with a little help, to build a school-house, for which the forests around furnished ample material. And this is the way he tells the story of the building and its uses: “I had to skin most of the logs myself and help lay them up, help get out the board timber and get the boards, help buy the lumber, and had to pick nearly one-fourth of the nails out of an ash-bed, where a cotton-gin house had recently burned down. The house was without heater or chimney; but we made a fire in the yard, and gladly turned first one and then the other side to it, when it got too cold in the house. I spoke to the people there one night in each week last month, and feel satisfied that much good was done. I have organized a Sunday-school there, which has about fifty members, most of whom are in earnest. Many of them are parents. We have had singing, too; and I have talked to them on Sunday afternoons, when sometimes nearly a hundred people would turn out. I have thought of you and your Commencement address to us very often. I thought of [what you said of] Emerson's looking for himself. But I found it necessary for me not to look for, but to lose myself. To do this was a hard task. 'Tis not a perfect accomplishment yet. With this one thing accomplished, I can climb above any other barrier."