"You're nearer God's heart in a garden..."

This is a compilation from various sources, including William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, all praising God in nature.


The night has gathered up her moonlit fringes,
And curtains grey,
And orient gates, that move on silver hinges,
Let in the day.

The morning sun his golden eyelash raises
O’er eastern hills,
The happy summer bird with matin praises,
The thicket fills.

And nature’s dress, with softly tinted roses
And lilies wrought,
Through all its varied unity, discloses
God’s perfect thought.

Oh, drop my heart, the burden that oppresses
And cares that rule,
That I may prove the whispering wildernesses
Heaven’s vestibule!

For I can hear, despite material warden,
And earthly balks,
A still small voice and know that thro’ His garden
The Father walks.

Nature calls with many voices to worship in her temple, a temple consecrated to the good of humanity. God is here and the quick soul feels His presence in the midst of His temple.

“When God reveals His march through nature’s night,
His steps are beauty and His presence light”

The groves were God’s first temples. Nature’s great heart beats under our feet and over our head. The currents of all pervading life flow into every form of the natural world and therefore do all partake of the divine energy.

“In contemplation of created things,
By steps we may ascend to God.”


“Tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.”
“Each moss, each shell, each crawling insect,
Holds a rank important in the plan of Him
Who framed this scale of beings.”

“Go mark the matchless working of the power,
That shuts within the seed the future flower;
Bids these in elegance of form excel,
In colour these and those delight the smell.”

“How mean the order and perfection sought,
In the best product of human thought,
Compared to the great harmony that reigns,
In what the Spirit of the world ordains!”

“All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body nature is and God the soul.”
“Thou art oh God, the life and light,
Of all this wondrous world we see.
Its glow by day, its smile by night,
Are but reflections caught from thee.
Where’er we turn, Thy glories shine,
And all things fair and bright are Thine.”

“God of the granite and the rose,
Soul of the sparrow and the bee,
The mighty tide of being flows
Through all Thy creatures, back to Thee.
Thus round and round the circle runs,
A mighty sea without a shore,
While men and angels, stars and suns,
Unite to praise Thee evermore.”