Isaiah 61:3 To appoint to them that mourn in Zion, to give to them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning… I. The well-known fable of the Phoenix is one that has been often truthfully enacted on our earth. Successive platforms of creation, with all their varied life and loveliness, have been reduced to ruin, and out of the wreck new life and beauty have emerged. The earth has reached its present perfection of form through repeated geological fires. The fair Eden, in the midst of which the history of the human race begins, was developed from the ashes of previous less lovely Edens. The soil of the earth is composed of the ashes of substances that have been oxidized, burned by the slow, soft caresses of the very air that breathed upon them — and whose gentle smile gave them colour and form. The building of the world was a process of burning, and its foundations were undoubtedly laid in flames. Its crust was originally like a burnt cinder. The rocks and the earths, the sands and the clays, the very seas themselves are, as it were, the ashes of a long-continued and universal conflagration. But during the long geological periods, by the silent agency of vegetable life working in unison with the sunshine, the work of the fire has been partially undone, and a considerable amount of combustible matter has been slowly rescued from the wreck of the first conflagration. Whatever now exists on the earth unburnt is owing to the wonderful co-operation of plant life and solar light. These two forces have given to us all the beauty which now spreads over the ashes of the world. Nay, the very ashes of the earth themselves contribute in the most marvellous manner to its beauty. How much does the scenery of our world owe to its picturesque rocks, and sandy deserts, and lonely seas, which, as we have seen, are but the ashes of the primeval fire! What wonderful beauty God has brought out of water! It is strange to think of water being the ashes of a conflagration — the snow on the mountain-top, the foam of the waterfall, the cloud of glory in the heavens, the dewdrop in the eye of the daisy. Without the intervention of vegetable life at all, God has thus directly, from the objects themselves, given beauty for ashes. He might have made these ashes of our globe as repulsive to the sight as the blackened relics of forest and plain, over which the prairie fire has swept, while, at the same time, they might have subserved all their ends and uses. But He has, instead, clothed them with incomparable majesty and loveliness, so that they minister most richly to our admiration and enjoyment; and some of the noblest conceptions of the human mind have been borrowed from their varied chambers of imagery. 2. Like the old processes of nature are the new ones that take place still. Out of the ashes of the local conflagration that has reduced the fields and forests to one uniform blackened waste comes forth the beauty of greener fields and forests of species unknown there before. Very strikingly is this seen on the dry hill-sides of the Sierra Nevada, covered with dense scrub which is often swept by fire. All the trees in the groves of pine that grow on these hill-sides, however unequal in size, are of the same age, and the cones which they produce are persistent, and never discharge their seeds until the tree or the branch to which they belong dies. Consequently, when one of the groves is destroyed by fire, the burning of the trees causes the scales of the cones to open, and the seed which they contain is scattered profusely upon the ground; and on the bare, blackened site of the old grove a young, green plantation of similar pines springs forth. This curious adaptation explains the remarkable circumstance that all the trees of the grove are of the same age. In an equally remarkable way the fires in the Australian bush, which are so destructive to the forests of that country, are made the very means of reproducing the vegetation. 3. Another illustration of the principle may be derived from volcanic regions. No scenes of earth are lovelier than those which are subjected to the frequent destructive action of volcanoes. The Bay of Naples is confessedly one of those spots in which scenic beauty has culminated. And yet this second Eden is the creation of volcanic fires. No soil is so fertile as crumbling lava and volcanic ashes. The destroyer of the fields and gardens is thus the renovator The ashes of the burning that has devastated homestead and vineyard reappear in the delicate clusters of the grape, and the vivid verdure of the vine-leaves which embower a new home of happiness on the site. 4. And — a case of extremes meeting — frost has the same effect as fire. No meadows are greener, no corn-fields more luxuriant, than those which spread over the soft that has been formed by the attrition of ancient glaciers. The cedars of Lebanon grow On the moraines left behind by ice-streams that had sculptured the mountains into their present shape; and over the ranges of the Sierra Nevada, the coniferous forests, the noblest and most beautiful on earth, are spread in long, curving bands, braided together into lace-like patterns of charming variety — an arrangement determined by the course of ancient glaciers, upon whose moraines all the forests of the Nevada are growing, and whose varied distribution over curves and ridges and high rolling plateaus, the trees have faithfully followed. Elsewhere throughout the world pine-woods usually grow, not on soil produced by the slow weathering of the atmosphere, but by the direct mechanical action of glaciers, which crushed and ground it from the solid rocks of mountain ranges, and in their slow recession at the end of the glacial period, left it spread out in beds available for tree-growth. 5. Is there not beauty for ashes, when the starchy matter which gives the grey colour to the lichen is changed by the winter rains into chlorophyl, and the dry, lifeless, parchment-like substance becomes a bright green pliable rosette, as remarkable for the elegance of its form as for the vividness of its colour? Does not the corn of wheat, when God, as Ezekiel strikingly says, "calls" for it and increases it, develop out of the grey ashes that wrap round and preserve the embers of its life, the long spears of bright verdure which pierce through: the dark wintry soil up to the sunshine and the blue air of heaven? All the beauty, of the green fields and woods, springing from the root, or the seed, or the weed, in produced from the ashes of previous vegetation. Some plants are found only where something has been burnt. Farmers say that wood ashes will cause the dormant white clover to spring up; and fields treated in this manner will suddenly be transfigured with the fragrant bloom. A lovely little moss, whose seed-vessels, by the twisting and untwisting of their stems, indicate the changes of the weather like a barometer, grows on moors and in woods in spots where fires have been; and it covers with its bright green verdure the sites of buildings, marking with its soft, delicate cushions where the hearthstone had been. From its fondness for growing in such places, it is known in France by the familiar name of La Charbonniere. After the great London fire, a species of mustard grew up on every side, covering with its yellow blossoms the charred ruins and the recently exposed soil strewn with ashes; and, as if to show some curious affinity between the conflagration of cities and the mustard tribe, after the more recent burning of Moscow, another species of the same family made its appearance among the ruins, and is still to be met with in the neighbourhood of that city. (H. Macmillan, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified. |
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