Australia Twice Traversed - The Romance Of Exploration, Through Central South Australia, And Western Australia, From 1872 To 1876 By Ernest Giles
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It Does Not Strike
The Traveller In The Wilderness, Amongst Desert Scenes And Hostile
Indians, As Necessary That He Should
Desire the neighbourhood of a
temple, or even be in a continual state of prayer, yet we worship
Nature, or
The God of Nature, in our own way; and although we have no
chapel or church to go to, yet we are always in a temple, which a
Scottish poet has so beautifully described as "The Temple of Nature."
He says: -
"Talk not of temples; there is one,
Built without hands, to mankind given;
Its lamps are the meridian sun,
And the bright stars of heaven.
Its walls are the cerulean sky,
Its floor the earth so green and fair;
Its dome is vast immensity:
All nature worships there."
We, of a surety, have none of the grander features of Nature to
admire; but the same Almighty Power which smote out the vast Andean
Ranges yet untrod, has left traces of its handywork here. Even the
great desert in which we have so long been buried must suggest to the
reflecting mind either God's perfectly effected purpose, or His
purposely effected neglect; and, though I have here and there found
places where scanty supplies of the element of water were to be found,
yet they are at such enormous distances apart, and the regions in
which they exist are of so utterly worthless a kind, that it seems to
be intended by the great Creator that civilised beings should never
re-enter here. And then our thoughts must naturally wander to the
formation and creation of those mighty ships of the desert, that alone
could have brought us here, and by whose strength and incomprehensible
powers of endurance, only are we enabled to leave this desert behind.
In our admiration of the creature, our thoughts are uplifted in
reverence and worship to the Designer and Creator of such things,
adapted, no doubt, by a wise selection from an infinite variety of
living forms, for myriads of creative periods, and with a
foreknowledge that such instruments would be requisite for the
intelligent beings of a future time, to traverse those areas of the
desert earth that it had pleased Him in wisdom to permit to remain
secluded from the more lovely places of the world and the familiar
haunts of civilised man. Here, too, we find in this fearful waste,
this howling wilderness, this country vast and desert idle, places
scooped out of the solid rock, and the mighty foundations of the round
world laid bare, that the lower organism of God's human family may
find their proper sustenance; but truly the curse must have gone forth
more fearfully against them, and with a vengeance must it have been
proclaimed, by the sweat of their brows must they obtain their bread.
No doubt it was with the intention of obtaining ours, thus reaping the
harvest of unfurrowed fields, that these natives were induced to make
so murderous an attack upon us.
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