Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. NOTHING TO BE LOST. AMONG the more striking miracles wrought by our Saviour, was that of feeding five thousand men from five barley loaves and two small fishes. But, striking as it was, it was simply a reproduction, in a different form, of the great miracle of nature that is constantly going on around us. The miracle was not at all in the things made, but wholly in the manner of making them. Bread had been made before, and as good bread; and there had been fish before; but never before had they been formed at once, by the energy of will, from their original and simple elements. In both cases the elements existed. There was no new creation; but in the miracle they were brought together in a manner entirely different. When the sower sows the seed in which is the nucleus, the possibility, and the promise of all the bread that is to be eaten the succeeding year, where are the materials out of which that bread is to be made ? They exist, but are dispersed hither and thither, and are held in different affinities. No human eye can see, and no skill can detect them They are like an army in ambush, ready to come at the appointed signal, but answering only to that. And now the earth receives the seed. It is buried, but not forgotten. Small as it is, the ocean knows of it andoffers it moisture; and the atmosphere knows of it, and is ready with its invisible fingers to lift the mist, and fashion the cloud-car, and transport the moisture lo it. The sun, too, distant as it is, remembers it, and sends it heat and light. These provoke its hidden life, and the roots shoot downwards, and the stem upwards. But in those roots, and in that stem, there is no particle that will make bread. There must first be a blossom, and then a receptacle formed, and then the stalk of grain must set…