Genesis 24:63 And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide: and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming. What help, then, does nature give us in meditating? That she does give help you may have noticed from the aspect of companies gay, sprightly, and talkative, whom nature soon began to silence. Gradually the rattle of tongues died away, and each got isolated and absorbed in the world around; and yet it was no intentness of observation. It was no keenness of search. It was simply the hush of the spirit in a great, vast presence. The calm and quiet of nature infect the spirit. There is something that steals away the fret and worry and care. The babbling brook runs away with our fever and ache and burden. It cheats us out of our scheming and planning. It says to us, Come and be for a while like me. Nature whispers of the supernatural, and the fleeting preaches the eternal. Nature suggests thoughts to us, and breathes impressions that are beyond our explaining, A line of meditation is entered on, and we do not know how it rose. We never imagine that it was the wind sighing through the trees or the scent of the new mown hay. The sights and sounds of nature, her silence and repose, her vastness and variety, are always inviting us to meditation. Our old lines are broken and new presented to us — sometimes pressed upon us. We can only resist the solicitation by a sort of forced and obstinate prepossession. It is a short path into the infinite from any point of our aggressive and contagious surroundings. How can a man by any possibility escape being reminded of the perfect, the vast, the beautiful, the solid, the eternal of which nature is always speaking through her sameness and change? Nature cannot quite force a man to let his thoughts go in these directions, though she sometimes comes to the very edge of force with her sudden surprises, her golden effulgence, her far tremulous haze, her flashes and outbursts, her mountain peaks, and awful chasms and abysses. If any one goes through the world in a thoughtless vein, if he sleeps the journey as men sometimes do in everyday travel, he cannot blame nature. She has been perpetually calling him, inviting, coaxing, wooing, hinting, insinuating, admonishing, and threatening him, that he may reflect and meditate. (J. Leckie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide: and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming. |
    |