The Windows of Heaven.
Have you ever wondered how the sea-birds get their drinking water? Sometimes they sail thousands of miles from shore. What are their springs amid those wastes of tossing brine?
Not below, but above; in the clouds.
When a storm comes up, if you are on shipboard, you may see the birds scurrying toward it from all directions. They have scented it from afar with their wonderful bird organs, and they haste to their descending springs.
They wheel under the drops gleefully, and gulp them down in glad mouthfuls. Thus they find fresh water in mid-ocean.
Brothers and sisters featherless, when next you find yourselves in the desert places of life, when you can see nothing but liquid salt even to the encircling horizon, when your parched tongue and your aching soul cry out for the water of life, seek not beneath you or around you for the well-springs of happiness, but look above! There in God's blue they gather, the soft caravans of bounty. Dark on the underside, you know that the heavenward portion is all aglow with God's smile. Rest on the waves, and turn your faces to the sky. The windows of heaven will open, and God will pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room to receive it.
The Divine Dispatcher.
Boston is said to have, in connection with its South Union Station, the most complicated set of railway tracks in the world. Trains enter the station on twenty-nine tracks, but so narrow is the passageway into the city, that there is room for only six tracks, as the station is approached. To distribute hundreds of trains from six tracks among the twenty-nine tracks, requires an intricate network of switches, and many men are kept busy in cold weather freeing these switches from ice and snow. Even with all the care of the dispatchers and the numerous signal towers, accidents occasionally happen. The wonder is that accidents are not more frequent.
But if we wonder at such an iron network, what must we think of the endlessly intricate crisscross of human lives? Influences, examples, words, looks, by the thousand every day, link us with hundreds of other beings. Yet God keeps track of it all, and will guide us through it to a happy end, if we yield ourselves to His direction.
A World of Providences.
In an African mine there was a shaft 2,000 feet deep. At the top was an iron bucket containing more than a ton of rock. Of a sudden the cable broke and down went the pieces of rock like cannon-balls. At the bottom of the shaft fifty-three men and boys were working at the time.
The superintendent of the mine was horrified, called up the hospital, had a new bucket rigged up, and went down into the mine, expecting to find a terrible scene below. Arrived there, he found no one harmed. Indeed, no one was conscious that there had been an accident. The foreman had noticed a "bit of dust coming down," but that was all.
The shaft was eight feet by twenty-eight, and yet the bucket and all the pieces of rock had lodged on the timbers on-the way down! Those timbers averaged eight inches in width.
Since then experiments have been made by dropping metal balls from the top of deep shafts, one of them the deepest in the world, measuring 5,300 feet. In no case did the balls reach the bottom. They all lodged somewhere in the walls of the shaft.
This is because the earth is moving from west to east as it turns upon its axis, and so catches a body falling down a shaft and will not let it reach the bottom unless the sides are smooth and it can bounce from one side to the other. The ball has at the surface a velocity greater than that of the lower depths, and therefore always strikes against the east wall of the shaft.
This is only a specimen of the thousands of wonderful adjustments hidden away in our marvelous world waiting for the need of man to find them out. Every year brings fresh revelations of them, and the last decade has been fuller of these discoveries than any other decade of the world's history. We ought to be singing the praise of the Creator all the time.