CANON FARRAR ON WATER.

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 125, 23 November 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

CANON FARRAR ON WATER.

God fills tho world with water. The great sea rolls ita puro, fresh waves of violet, and the tropic sun evaporates them, and they are distilled in tho mveet labora tory of the air, and the wind's of the wind winnow them free from all impurity amid the soft clouds of heaven, and they steal down in dew and iv silver rain, and hang like diamonds on the grass, and gladden the green leaves, and slide softly into the bosom of the rose, and arc Altered through again into crystal fountains and gurgle iv fairy waterbreaks and linger in glassy pools, and bubbling though the mountain turf become the rivulets and rivers, and are the sweet, wholesome, natural drink of mnn and beast, and wo thank God for these springs of health, and disease drinks and sleeps. Now to the simple, natural, noble taste this is enough ; it delights us— this pure diamond of God. But man has distilled, in his laboratories, a fiery flaming spirit ; and what sweetness is there iv water to the coarsened palate, the inflamed thirst, the parched tongue, the vitiated taste, the depraved craving of tho drunkard? How can that whichisflweetandsioiple and natural contend with the brutifying attraction of oily, maddening, Fcorching drams, which poison and degrade es they run through the throbbing veins in liquid fire ; burning up a man's vitals, blighting his powers, blasting his happiness, degrading Aim aud his mind and his manhood, and his wretched wife and his more wretohed ohildren after him, and biting at lnst like a fiery serpent with agony in its ince-sant •ting ? The taste for spiritual thiDgs— for the things of God— is like that pure, cool, delirious, wholesome, but unmaddening, nnseducing water ; the drink of Egypt, the drink of the house of bondage, and tho drink of the drunkard, and the madman, and the sensualist, in like that dissolved •pint of evil which is ruin, and sickness, and disease, and death. A cannon-ball of granite, believed to bavo been fired during the fight with the Spanish Armada, was recently found in a cavity at the foot of Beachy Head.