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Nature is a school, — primary school, grammar school, high school, university, all in one. She teaches little children their alphabets, while they are at play; teaches them elementary lessons of the qualities of things, of hard and soft, heavy and light, resistance, momentum, ductile, malleable, and elastic. These are her object lessons. Then she takes those a little older, and shows them the grammar of the world, the laws of language in sea and sky. The men who dig and plant and mine and manufacture, who make shoos and hats, who spin and weave, manufacture glass, make watches, print books, — learn necessarily the qualities of things and the laws of nature. Children playing are in the primary school; man working is in the grammar school. But we only enter the high school and university when we go further, and take up that greatest work of life, of which the elements are conscience, liberty, and love. To this all things lead, all invite. Summer and winter, nature and society, success and failure, life and death, — all point to this highest aim of all — spiritual growth, religious progress, the salvation of the soul. If the summer has brought you only passive pleasure, only selfish indulgence, then it has been wasted. Rest is good, and joy is good, but as they lead to something higher and better. For man is so made that he can never rest contented in any merely passive joy. He can only be contented when he is making progress. There are no landing places on the stairway of human ascent. You may give a man or woman every wish of their heart. You may give them the purse of Fortunatus, never empty; the miraculous carpet, on which they can journey through the air, from place to place, over sea and land, by a mere wish. They may have St. Leon's gift of renewed youth; they may go to the tropics, and have a perpetual summer. But all this is not heaven. All this, by itself, will not satisfy them for more than a few weeks. The soul is not made to be satisfied so. The only thing which satisfies it, and makes a perfect rest, which turns all things to gold, and earth to heaven, is a heavenly life; that is, a life in which we have plenty to know, plenty to love, and plenty to do, and are making progress to more knowledge, love, and use, all the time. It was to teach us this that Christ came; to teach us this that the Holy Spirit comes daily to our soul; that God knocks at the door of our hearts. This teaches us that we only have plenty to know, when we see God in all things; only plenty to love, when we love God in all His creatures; only plenty to do, when we serve Him by making ourselves useful to all. I have taken my text from the passage in Jeremiah which says, "The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." I also would ask, "Are we saved? "Summer rest and joy will not save us. All the joy in the universe heaped on us would not save us. Put us into heaven, put us by the right hand of God, — that will not save us. It is to drink of the cup which Christ drinks of, and to be baptized with His baptism, that saves us. We are safe, then, — safe from the perils which belong to the great power of freedom which is in all of us, — only when we are doing what Christ did; seeing God in all things, loving God in all things, and serving God by serving all His children. He who is living in this spirit, even though he has a thousand faults, though he is stumbling and falling day by day, though he seems to himself a poor creature, and does not seem much better to anyone else, is safe — safe here, safe hereafter. All things will work for his good, and he will not be afraid of any evil tidings. Evil tidings are always arriving. Danger is always near. We seem to have been living, even in this peaceful summer, in the midst of terrible dangers and fearful crimes. The sweetness of nature has not saved us. Fiends in the form of men commit awful crimes in the midst of our peaceful villages, and pollute serene nature with their brutal deeds. What shall make us safe? Not summer days, not the shield of devoted love, not all the bulwarks which civilisation and fortune place around us: nothing can make us safe but a life hid with Christ in God. And by this I mean nothing mystical, nothing extraordinary: I mean the simple purpose and habit of living with our heavenly Father wherever we are, — being in His presence; seeing Him in nature, history, life; and going, as Christ went, about His business, while we do our own. Then we are safe. Then, if we fall, struck dead by sudden accident, we fall, through death, into the arms of God outspread to receive us. We fall from love into larger love; from know. ledge into deeper knowledge; from usefulness here into the uses, whatever they may be, of the great world yonder. The sun, which makes summer, seems the natural type of Deity. Astronomers tell us, indeed, that in winter the earth is nearer the sun than in summer. So sometimes we are nearer God in the chill and loneliness of our heart, than in our joy. We feel that we are wandering away into outer darkness; but God holds us near Himself, waiting till our hearts turn towards Him, and so receive their summer affluence and influence out of His radiance. Summer comes, not because the sun is any nearer to us, but because our part of the earth is turned up to it. Turn up your hearts to God. Sursum corda. Lift them up towards God, — the God of peace and love, — who images Himself in nature, in this magnificent orb of day. All life, movement, activity, it is well said, come from the sun. It hides itself from us, like God, in an excess of light. The most brilliant light which man can produce, even the electric light, makes only a black spot on the surface of the sun, and so our brightest wisdom is only folly before God. As the sun marches through his twelve houses he creates the seasons — spring, summer, autumn, winter; and so God creates evermore in human life the revolving seasons of childhood, youth, manhood, and age. As the sun reaches out into the farthest depths of space with irresistible force, and yet moves all things according to a great unchanging order, so God governs the universe, not by pure will, but by will and law. Even the spots on the solar surface are now found to have their law of periodic return, and come and go in cycles of years. So the darkness which seems to hide the face of God, the total eclipse of faith which chills the heart and mind, and the doubts which pass across our belief like spots on the sun, have also their laws, which we shall one day understand, as we now understand the laws of the solar eclipse, which once terrified impious nations with fear of an eternal night. So, as we never tire of sunlight, let us rejoice in the sunshine of God. The final question is, Are we saved with a Christian salvation? Are we living with or without God in the world? Have we, with this human peace which makes our land rejoice, also the peace of God which passes all understanding? So, though summer he ended, the better part of summer need not be ended. We shall take it with us into winter. Whatever we have seen of God in nature, felt of God in our hearts, and done for God with our hands, makes a perpetual summer within. The outward summer comes and goes: the summer of the heart shall abide for evermore.

(J. Freeman Clarke.)

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KJV: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

WEB: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.