Three Books of God Nature History Author:George Dawson 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: the foolish man the halo is departed. There was that poor boy, who, with his piece of string and his beads, studied Venus and Saturn, and mapped the relative... more » positions of the stars. That boy was very fervent, and pious ; he was giving his mind to it; and the string and the beads -- ah ! they did their work, they sufficed. Therefore, all pleas about " opportunities " are of no account. If your knife is blunt, you must put on more force. If you have but a few minutes in which to do a thing, you must put more steam on. Of all whimpering, " I have had such small opportunities" is the most feeble and inexcusable. The time has come when we must utterly refuse to pity people for their ignorance. If you love God with all your mind, you will do what you do when you love a great author. You may say, " Of all authors, I think Shakespeare is the greatest; but I have never read one of his plays, never studied one of his sonnets." Indeed ! What do you do, then, to show your love to Shakespeare ? " Oh, I talk about him." He who loves an author well, turns his pages again and again ; weighs his words, and marks their construction. If he reads the " Merchant of Venice," he studies it attentively, and proposes to himself to go back to his labour of love again and again. I don't know who is yourdarling; but I know it is the author with whom you are most familiar. And that is what loving God with all your mind is. You must love the actions that He has done. The three great volumes of God which you should study, are before every one of you. There is the splendid volume of Nature; that book over which the great Hebrew writer says, God looked while He rested from His labours, not with the rest of weariness, but with the drawing back of an artist, when the last stroke is struck -- looked at it and...« less