The Wind

GOD’S MESSENGERS (Ps. 147.).—“We misjudge the winds. We do not understand them. They follow a code too unsubstantial for our sight. We call them capricious, whereas their movements have an august equity and precision which make the stolid see-saw of the tides seem cumbrous and approximate. They are the accountants of the air, their purpose is pure justice, they rectify disparities and cease. Again, we call them noisy, whereas, of all the elements, the winds alone are dumb. Fire mutters and croons, water has its numberless dialects; the earth has as many cries as colours, from the rustle of a leaf to an earthquake’s clang. But the winds are magnificently mute. In their own kingdom, scouring the fields of space, they plunge and countermarch and range in the midst of an immaculate hush. That impetuous peace—that exultant onset and whirl unstained by the tiniest sound—is a thing that the imagination, with its passion for purities, contemplates with a curious joy. But it is a joy that the body can never hope to share. . . . They humiliate and exalt. Unlike the sea, whose character varies with its coasts, and unlike the fire and the clay, which we have moulded and tamed into new creatures, the winds have never altered; they will stalk through the shining cities of the future just as they strode above the morasses of the prime, and shaggy fears, as well as an exultant confidence, are shaken from their wings as they pass. Their code which we have not yet grasped, and their strength which we may never measure, have always placed them outside the knowledgeable forces and given them an enduring kinship with the incompre-hensible and divine. . . .”—Dixon Scott.

1918 Christadelphian: Volume 55. 1918 (electronic ed.) (252). Birmingham: Christadelphian Magazine & Publishing Association.