it feeds the stalks of corn and grass, and makes them stiff. The
corn-stalks would never stand upright if they could not get sand
from the soil. So what a thousand years ago made part of a
mountain, now makes part of a wheat-plant; and in a year more the
wheat grain will have been eaten, and the wheat straw perhaps eaten
too, and they will have DIED--decayed in the bodies of the animals
who have eaten them, and then they will begin a third new life--they
will be turned into parts of the animal's body--of a man's body. So
that what is now your bone and flesh, may have been once a rock on
some hillside a hundred miles away.

Strange, but true! all learned men know that it is true. You, if
you think over my words, may see that they are at least reasonable.
But still most wonderful! This world works right well, surely. It
obeys God's Spirit. Oh, my friends, if we fulfilled our life and
our duty as well as the clay which we tread on does,--if we obeyed
God's Spirit as surely as the flint does, we should have many a
heartache spared us, and many a headache too! To be what God wants
us!--to be MEN, to be WOMEN, and therefore to live as children of
God, members of Christ, fulfilling our duty in that state to which
God has called us, that would be our bliss and glory. Nothing can
live in a state in which God did not intend it to live. Suppose a
tree could move itself about like an animal, and chose to do so, the
tree would wither and die; it would be trying to act contrary to the
law which God has given it. Suppose the ox chose to eat meat like
the lion, it would fall sick and die; for it would be acting
contrary to the law which God's Spirit had made for it--going out of
the calling to which God's Word has called it, to eat grass and not
flesh, and live thereby. And so with us: if we will do wickedly,
when the will of God, as the Scripture tells us, is our