"THIS one of the heavenly bodies, which we tenant, was created to be as it were the garden, the Eden, of His Incarnation; and He adorned it in His love, before Adam, the first copy of Him, lived among its Asiatic shades. Perhaps it lay for ages in the glad sunshine, solitary, silent, in beautiful desolation, and He took complacence in the adorning of it. He loved perchance to see its beauty ripen, rather than to rise up at once complete. Continents sank slowly at His will, and new oceans rolled above their mountain tops, or elevated steppes. New lands rose out of the bosom of the deep. Floras of marvellous foliage waved in the sun, and the wisdom and the joy of the Babe of Bethlehem was in them. Faunas, strange, gigantic, terrible, possessed the waters and the land, of His fashioning, and for the delight of His glory. The central fires wrought beautifully and delicately the metals and the gems, which were for the altars of the Babe of Bethlehem, for the tiara of His Vicar, or the chasubles of His priests. The rocks and marbles ripened on the planet, as the fruits ripen on a tree and the Babe, the Wisdom of the Father, disported Himself in the vast operation, the pacific uniformity, and the magnificent slowness of His own laws. The grandeur of those huge-leaved trees, the unwieldy life of those extinct monsters, the loveliness of…