Heary Ward Beecher well said ths:
May w not say that a forest tree is the most majestic and dignified thing thst God has made. A forest is more improssin to me than a range of mountains. I: has, ae the gree' forest trees that David la thinking. "Thr cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted" is the second clause in the verse Whether we see trees in a forest with tall clean trapks like the pillars of a Gothic cathedral, the idea of which they probably farnished, or standing like solitary sentinels on mountain crags, or shading the cattle in home meadow, they are always glorious, No wonder men have worshipped them. Next to that of the heavenly bodies tree-worship is the most worthy form of heathenism. It is found everywhere. Abraham's oak at 2665
Mamre was s remnant of it, St. Boniface cut down an oak dedicated to Thor in Friesland, and that cost him his life, What colour there is in autumn in the gold of beeches; what symunetry of form in the pine; what grace in the ash, the "queen of the glen."" There is ea much of the deepest spirit of God's wisdom in trees that one has to conclude that nations which recklessly destroy their forests are decadent and through greediness wandered far from God who made them, To-day is Harvest Sunday. Let us think of the one feature in trees that evidently impresses the mind of David in this Pealm. He says, " The trees of the Lord are fall of sap." He is not dwelling on their gracefalness or beanty or utility immediately, but on their intense vitality, The sap is the life of the tree, Sap is "the liquid which circulates through all parts of the plant" says scientific authority in a sentence which would be grested with groans of indignation if it had been written by a theo-logion, "carrying the dissolved elements to those parts of the plant where active metabolic changes are occurring, avd bearing thence the elaborated substances to other parts of the plant where kats-polic changes occur." I hope we all understand that. It means that the aap is the life of the tree, the mystery in it, the thing that holds in itself the power of its timber, the beauty of its grain, the gold of its leafage, the lneciousness of its trait, or the teeming abundance of its seed.
What strikes David as specially exemplified in the cedars of Lebanon in that " the trees of the Lord are full of sap." What impresses him is the abundance and tenacity of their vitality. That after all is the translation in the Revised Version, " are satisfied." Falness is satisfied. It is emptiness of all kinds that is discontented and miserable; mbether it be emptiness of purse, of head, of mind and heart, It is fulness of vitality of all kinds that is the ideal to strive for, The trees are fall of life, of tides of Comthorpeiork, at Wetherby near York, 1,800 years old. It is forty-eight in girth. Think of the tenacity of fe inn tree that has stood every storm that has blowa since Constantine established Christianity, two handred years bel tengist and Horsa landed Ssxons in since Carsusias revolted Romans and the queen Zenobia tiou in her de-ort capital, Palmyra, Thiok of it. Some animals have a tremendous vitality, but what to this oak. trees of the Lord are full of sap. Think of those gists in the Calaver snd Maripoea valle in California four hundred feet high, in girth 100 feet; that have stood, it may be, 4,000 or 5,000 years, from a time that not long ago the creation of the world was thought to date from. They were green in leaf when the first Pharoahs bowed out their rocky tombs in the Nile valley, and before the Great Pyramid was built,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.