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(a Spring discourse): — They are "trees of the Lord."

I. ON ACCOUNT OF THE PECULIARITIES OF THEIR STRUCTURE. They reveal a new idea of the creative mind. They are neither Phaenogams, or flowering plants, nor Cryptogams, or flowerless, and have many points of alliance with club-moss. They combine the highest appearance with the lowest structure, and are thus links binding together the two great orders of vegetation. In them we have an example among plants of a common principle in God's moral procedure towards His creatures, choosing the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, and giving more abundant honour to that which lacked. Into the earthen vessel of the humble organization of the cedars He has poured the glory of the highest development, that the glory may be seen to be all His own. And in this wondrous combination of types in the "trees of the Lord" we have a dim foreshadowing of "Him who dwelt in the bush"; who united in Himself the highest and the lowest, God and man, in one person for ever; and who still, though in the midst of the throne, dwells with the man that is of an humble and contrite heart. The cedars are "trees of the Lord."

II. ON ACCOUNT OF THE ANTIQUITY OF THEIR TYPE. Of this class Preadamite forests were principally composed. In every stratum in which arborescent fossils occur we can trace this antique tree pattern. We burn the relics of extinct cedars in our household fires, as the microscopic investigation of the coal formation reveals. They form the evergreen link between the ages and the zones, growing now as they grew in the remote past, inhabiting the same latitudes, and preserving the same appearances in bulk and figure. Universal in space and universal in time they are monuments of the unchangeableness of the Ancient of Days — proofs indisputable that the vegetable kingdom did not commence as monads, or vital points, but as organisms so noble and complicated that even the most bigoted advocate of the development theory must admit that they could not have been formed by the agency of physical force. During untold ages the cedars were the sole examples of forest vegetation. They afford an illustration of a general law of the deepest philosophic import, namely, that the first introduced animals or plants of any class have been combining types. From the side, as it were, of those Preadamite cedars God took the ribs, of which He made the graceful palm-tree to yield its welcome shade and fruit in the thirsty desert, and the beautiful apple-tree to clothe itself with its bridal dress of blossoms under the smiling, tearful skies of the northern spring. Thus is illustrated that the ceaseless working of the Creator hitherto has been exercised only in the eternal unfolding of the original conception. The cedars are "trees of the Lord."

III. ON ACCOUNT OF THE MAJESTY OF THEIR APPEARANCE. Religion and poetry have sounded so loudly the praise of the cedar that it has become the most renowned natural monument in the world. At an elevation of six thousand feet, with their roots firmly planted in the moraines of extinct glaciers, with their trunks riven and furrowed by lightning, with the snows of Lebanon gleaming white through their dusky foliage, who can fail to feet the force of the psalmist's words, "The trees of the Lord are full of sap," etc.

(H. Macmillan, D.D.)

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KJV: The trees of the LORD are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted;

WEB: Yahweh's trees are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon, which he has planted;