Excerpt from The Country Faith Well, there are so many things in the dear, sun colored earth that want to be spoken to! Yet, we must hurry along, or we shall never get to the end of our walk. So, as simple illustrations of the country faith, I want you to share with me some Of the things it was my privilege to see. The more I think of it, said Ruskin, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me - that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. If we honestly see and speak to the earth, it will luminously and inspiringly teach us. The first lesson from the teaching earth was a set of silent morning glory chimes. There they hung, the three Of them, in their rich blue tower Of color. Yet, on looking more closely, I found that two of the three bell-shaped flowers were already fading. Unequal to the growing heat of the sun, they were all doomed to a transient existence. For it is just the nature Of this flower to curl Up and wither away in the face of the sun. Looking at these flowers, faded and fading, somehow I could not keep back that wail Of the Hebrew prophet, O Israel, he cried, thy goodness is like the morning dew, that passeth early away. Now, it is perfectly natural for the flower to fade and for the dewdrop to vanish; but how unnatural that our goodness, too, should be so fickle and ephemeral! We say it is easy and natural to be bad, so hard and difficult to be good. But is the saying altogether true? A thousand times, no! It is false to the core. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.