EVIDENCE OF AN ARCHITECT.—If you should visit a park containing beautiful lawns, flower-beds, stately trees, well-contrived watercourses, pretty waterfalls, and many other attractions and contrivances all tending to the convenience and pleasure of visitors, you would surely conclude that no sane man would dare say that all these came by chance, but rather that it was planned by a wise head, and executed by a skillful hand. So when you survey this earth, so well fitted as a dwelling place for man and the other living creatures in it, when we see it stocked with light, air, water, food and fuel, with all the other manifold things which tend to man's need and comfort, what else can be concluded but that all was planned and made by an Almighty intelligent Being?
NOT MAN'S FOOTPRINT.—A Frenchman was crossing the desert with an Arab guide. Say after day the Arab never failed to kneel on the burning sand and call upon his God. At last one evening, the unbeliever said to the Arab, "How do you know there is a God?" The guide fixed his eye upon the scoffer for a moment, and then replied: "How do I know there is a God? How did I know that a camel and not a man passed last night? "Was it not by the print of his hoof in the sand?" And pointing to the sun whose last rays were fading over the horizon, he added, "that footprint is not of man."
MIRROR RING.—Plato says that the king of Lydia had a ring with which, when he turned its head to the palm of his hand, he could see every person, and yet he himself remained invisible. Though we cannot see God while we live, He can see how we live. His eyes are upon the ways of man; and He seeth all his goings.
CATO SEES YOU.—Cato was so grave and so good a man that none would behave unseemly in his presence; whence it grew to be a saying, Take heed what you do, Cato sees you.
NOT TO BE TRACED.—Luther was very importunate at the throne of grace to know the mind of God in a certain matter; and it seemed to him as if he heard God speak to his heart thus: "I am not to be traced." "If He is not to be traced, He may be trusted; and that religion is of little value which will not enable a man to trust God where he can neither trace nor see."
DIVINE MIND AND EYE.—Think of this vast world, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, think of its teeming millions of human beings and remember that not an individual or a spot is unseen by God's all-searching eye. Is this world vast—then know that it is but as a grain of sand on the shore compared with the unnumbered worlds that glitter in boundless space above us. And then remember that over all their unspeakable extent, over all these countless worlds on worlds the great Master Mind, the great Over Soul, presides.
DAZZLING SUN.—The Emperor Trajan once said to Rabbi Joshua, "You teach me that your God is everywhere and that He resides among your nation. I should like to see Him." "God's presence is indeed everywhere," said the Rabbi, "but he cannot be seen. No mortal eye can behold His glory." The Emperor still insisted. The Rabbi then took him into the open air at noonday and bade him look on the sun. "I cannot see," said the Emperor; "the light dazzles me." Then said the Rabbi, "Thou art unable to bear the light of one of His creatures, how then could'st thou look upon the Creator?"