C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Creation
Creation is great, and cannot be understood.
As Thou has created me out of mingled air and glitter, I thank Thee for it.
God only opened His hand to give flight to a thought that He had held imprisoned from eternity.
God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes.
A spontaneous production is against matter of fact; a thing without example, not only in man, but the vilest of weeds.
Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
The wisdom and goodness of the Maker plainly appears in the parts of this stupendous fabric, and the several degrees and ranks of creatures in it.
A wonder it must be, that there should be any man found so stupid as to persuade himself that this most beautiful world could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.
No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God.
It became Him who created it to set it in order; and if he did so, it is unphilosophical to seek for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of Nature.
Whoever considers the study of anatomy I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man’s body and coherence of his parts being so strange and paradoxical that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of Nature.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.
How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?
The ever varying brilliancy and grandeur of the landscape, and the magnificence of the sky, sun, moon and stars, enter more extensively into the enjoyment of mankind than we, perhaps ever think, or can possibly apprehend, without frequent and extensive investigation. This beauty and splendour of the objects around us, it is ever to be remembered, is not necessary to their existence, nor to what we commonly intend by their usefulness. It is therefore to be regarded as a source of pleasure, gratuitously superinduced upon the general nature of the objects themselves, and in this light, a testimony of the divine goodness, peculiarly affecting.
We cannot look around us, without being struck by the surprising variety and multiplicity of the sources of beauty of creation, produced by form, or by colour, or by both united. It is scarcely too much to say, that every object in nature, animate or inanimate, is in some manner beautiful, so largely has the Creator provided for our pleasures, through the sense of sight. It is rare to see anything, which is in itself distasteful, or disagreeable to the eye, or repulsive.