To mark and to acknowledge the bounties of Divine Providence from year to year, during the progress of our lives, is not only a duty which we owe to the Lord, but is an exercise of mind and a manifestation of gratitude highly beneficial to ourselves. By doing so we at once discharge an obligation which we owe to that beneficent Being to whom we are indebted for everything we enjoy, and give strength and determination to the thoughts and affections of our minds, whose best and happiest exercise consists in connecting the creature with the Creator. In the course and current of our lives, whatever has the tendency or the effect of leading us from ourselves unto God, is a part of the Lord's providential operation, which we should dutifully and profitably acknowledge as sent for our improvement, whether by correction or instruction in righteousness.

The bounties of Providence, which are natural or temporal, are all those whose immediate use is the supply of our temporal wants, which may be considered to include whatever is necessary to the sustenance of our bodies, to the exercise and gratification of our senses, and to the education and delight of our natural minds. Under the most comprehensive view, the bounties of Divine Providence, spiritual and natural, may be regarded as contained in the works and in the Word of God.

In looking upon nature as provided for the supply of our temporal wants, we are not to consider it as limited to this necessary but transitory use. Although this is its immediate, it is not its only or its

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principal object. The natural world, as created and sustained by infinite wisdom, and designed for the use of a being created with a spiritual nature and for a higher state of existence, is intended to subserve a spiritual at the same time that it serves a temporal use. While it presents a succession of such varied beauties, and an abundance of such diversified uses for our natural delight and temporal accommodation, it addresses itself to our higher nature, as shewing forth the eternal power and godhead of the Creator, as displaying the wonders of His love and wisdom, and as teaching us how inexhaustible are the riches of His goodness, how numerous and how kind are His thoughts to usward. For may not every object in nature be regarded as the expression of, as well as an outbirth from, the divine mind, the material embodiment of some divine truth of the eternal Word, by whom all things were made, and without whom was not anything made that was made? And may not the various objects of nature be further regarded as counterparts of the various truths of revelation, the Word and works of God thus answering to and confirming and illustrating each other?

And while the Word and works of God unite their voices in testifying the goodness and wisdom of their Divine Author, they speak no less clearly of the nature of man, for whose use they were provided. The world without was designed to reflect the world within. The world was not only created to be a habitation for man, but was framed in perfect adaptation to and accordance with his nature, and to minister to his requirements. For although the earth was created before man, yet having been created for him, this end entered into all the means; and the world was made such as it is, because it was framed in accommodation to him who was to be its chief inhabitant. There is a mutual adaptation, and consequently a correspondence, between the senses and the elements and activities of the outward world, to which they have relation.

But this is true not only of the senses but of the organs of motion, and of the whole organic structure of our bodies, which in all their parts correspond to those things which are in the world. Thus the whole body is an organ composed of things the most mysterious that are in nature, and according to their secret powers of acting and wonderful modes of flowing (A. C. 4532). Between the nature of man and that of the world there is therefore a perfect and most minute analogy

This analogy extends also to those parts of nature and its economy