362. The Ornithology of the Bible; or, God Among the Birds

The Ornithology of the Bible; or, God Among the Birds

Mat_6:26 : ’93Behold the fowls of the air.’94

There is a silence now in all our January forests, except as the winds whistle through the bare branches. The organ-lofts in the temple of nature are hymnless. Trees which were full of carol and chirp and chant are now waiting for the coming back of rich plumes and warbling voices, solos, duets, quartets, cantatas, and Te Deums. The difference between the forests in summer and the forests in winter is the difference between an academy of music with enchanted throngs listening to an inspired cantatrice and an academy of music empty. But the Bible is full of birds at all seasons, and prophets and patriarchs and apostles and evangelists and Christ himself employ them for moral and religious purposes. My text is an extract from the Sermon on the Mount, and perhaps it was at a moment when a flock of birds flew past that Christ waved his hand toward them and said: ’93Behold the fowls of the air.’94 And so, in this course of sermons on God Everywhere, I preach to you this sermon concerning the Ornithology of the Bible, or God among the Birds.

Most of the other sciences you may study or not study, as you please. Use your own judgment, exercise your own taste. But about this science of ornithology we have no option. The divine command is positive when it says in my text, ’93Behold the fowls of the air!’94 That is, study their habits. Examine their colors. Notice their speed. See the hand of God in their construction. It is easy for me to obey the command of the text, for I was brought up among this race of wings, and from boyhood heard their matins at sunrise and their vespers at sunset. Their nests have to me a fascination, and my satisfaction is that I never robbed one of them, any more than I would steal a child from a cradle; for a bird is a child of the sky, and its nest is the cradle. They are almost human, for they have their loves and hates, affinities and antipathies, understand joy and grief, have conjugal and maternal instinct, wage wars and entertain jealousies, have a language of their own and powers of association. Thank God for the birds!

It is useless to expect to understand the Bible unless we study natural history. Five hundred and ninety-three times does the Bible allude to the facts of natural history, and I do not wonder that it makes so many allusions ornithological. The skies and the caverns of Palestine are friendly to the winged creatures, and so many fly and roost and nest and hatch in that region that inspired writers do not have far to go to get ornithological illustration of divine truth. There are over forty species of birds recognized in the Scriptures. Oh, what a variety of wings in Palestine! The dove, the robin, the eagle, the cormorant or plunging bird, hurling itself from sky to wave and with long beak clutching its prey; the thrush, which especially dislikes a crowd; the partridge, the hawk, bold and ruthless, hovering head to windward while watching for prey; the swan, at home among the marshes and with feet so constructed it can walk on the leaves of water-plants; the raven, the lapwing, malodorous and in the Bible denounced as inedible, though it has extraordinary headdress; the stork, the ossifrage, that always had a habit of dropping on a stone the turtle it had lifted and so killing it for food, and on one occasion mistook the bald head of ‘c6schylus, the Greek poet, for a white stone and dropped a turtle upon it, killing the famous Greek; the cuckoo, with crested head and crimson throat and wings snow-tipped, but too lazy to build its own nest and so having the habit of depositing its eggs in nests belonging to other birds; the blue jay, the grouse, the plover, the magpie, the kingfisher, the pelican, which is the caricature of all the feathered creation; the owl, the goldfinch, the bittern, the harrier, the bulbul, the osprey, the vulture, that king of scavengers, with neck covered with repulsive down instead of attractive feathers; the quarrelsome starling, the swallow, flying a mile a minute and sometimes ten hours in succession; the heron, the quail, the peacock, the ostrich, the lark, the crow, the kite, the bat, the blackbird, and many others; with all colors, all sounds, all styles of flight, all habits, all architecture of nests, leaving nothing wanting in suggestiveness. At the creation they took their places all around on the rocks and in the trees and on the ground to serenade Adam’92s arrival. They took their places on Friday, as the first man was made on Saturday. Whatever else he had or did not have, he should have music. The first sound that struck the human ear was a bird’92s voice.

Yea, Christian geology (for you know there is a Christian geology as well as an infidel geology), Christian geology comes in and helps the Bible show what we owe to the bird creation. Before the human race came into this world, the world was occupied by reptiles and by all styles of destructive monsters, millions of creatures loathsome and hideous. God sent huge birds to clear the earth of these creatures before Adam and Eve were created. The remains of these birds have been found imbedded in the rocks. The skeleton of one eagle has been found twenty feet in height and fifty feet from tip of wing to tip of wing. Many armies of beaks and claws were necessary to clear the earth of creatures that would have destroyed the human race with one clip. I like to find this harmony of revelation and science, and to have it demonstrated that the God who made the world made the Bible.

Moses, the greatest lawyer of all time and a great man for facts, had enough sentiment and poetry and musical taste to welcome the illumined wings and the voices divinely drilled into the first chapter of Genesis. How should Noah, the old ship carpenter, six hundred years of age, find out when the world was fit again for human residence after the universal freshet? A bird will tell, and nothing else can. No man can come from the mountain to invite Noah and his family out to terra firma, for the mountains were submerged. As a bird first heralded the human race into the world, now a bird will help the human race back to the world that had shipped a sea that whelmed everything. Noah stands on Sunday morning at the window of the Ark, in his hand a cooing dove, so gentle, so innocent, so affectionate, and he said: ’93Now, my little dove, fly away over these waters, explore, and come back and tell us whether it is safe to land.’94 After a long flight it returned hungry and weary and wet, and by its looks and manners said to Noah and his family: ’93The world is not fit for you to disembark.’94 Noah waited a week, and next Sunday morning he let the dove fly again for a second exploration, and Sunday evening it came back with a leaf that had the sign of having been plucked from a living fruit tree, and in that way the bird reported the world would do tolerably well for a bird to live in, but not yet sufficiently recovered for human residence. Noah waited another week, and next Sunday morning he sent out the dove on the third exploration, but it returned not, for it found the world so attractive now it did not want to be caged again, and then the emigrants from the antediluvian world landed. It was a bird that told them when to take possession of the resuscitated planet. So the human race was saved by a bird’92s wing: for attempting to land too soon they would have perished.

Ay, here come a whole flock of doves’97rock-doves, ring-doves, stock-doves’97and they make Isaiah think of great revivals and great awakenings when souls fly for shelter like a flock of pigeons swooping to the openings of a pigeon coop, and he cries out: ’93Who are these that fly as doves to their windows?’94 David, with Saul after him, and flying from cavern to cavern, compares himself to a desert partridge, a bird which especially haunts rocky places; and boys and hunters to this day take after it with sticks, for the partridge runs rather than flies. David, chased and clubbed and harried of pursuers, says: ’93I am hunted as a partridge on the mountains.’94 Speaking of his forlorn condition, he says: ’93I am like a pelican of the wilderness.’94 Describing his loneliness, he says: ’93I am a swallow alone on a housetop.’94 Hezekiah, in the emaciation of his sickness, compares himself to the crane, thin and wasted. Job had so much trouble he could not sleep nights, and he describes his insomnia by saying: ’93I am a companion to owls.’94 Isaiah compares the desolation of banished Israel to the owl and bittern and cormorant among a city’92s ruins. Jeremiah, describing the cruelty of parents toward children, compares them to the ostrich, who leaves its eggs in the sand uncared for, crying: ’93The daughter of my people is become like the ostriches of the wilderness.’94 Among the provisions piled on Solomon’92s bountiful table, the Bible speaks of ’93fatted fowl.’94 The Israelites in the desert got tired of manna and they had quails’97quails for breakfast, quails for dinner, quails for supper’97and they died of quails.

The Bible refers to the migratory habits of the birds, and says: ’93The stork knoweth her appointed time and the turtle and the crane and the swallow the time of their going, but my people know not the judgments of the Lord.’94 Would the prophet illustrate the fate of fraud, he points to a failure at incubation, and says: ’93As a partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not, so he that getteth riches and not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days and at his end shall be a fool.’94 The partridge, the most careless of all birds in choice of its place of nest, building it on the ground and often near a frequented road, or in a slight depression of ground, without reference to safety, and soon a hoof or a scythe or a cart-wheel ends all. So, says the prophet, a man who gathers under him dishonest dollars will hatch out of them no peace, no satisfaction, no happiness, no security. What vivid similitude! The quickest way to amass a fortune is by iniquity, but the trouble is about keeping it. Every hour of every day some such partridge is driven off the nest. Panics are only a flutter of partridges. It is too tedious work to become rich in the old-fashioned way, and if a man can by one falsehood make as much as by ten years of hard labor, why not tell it? And if one counterfeit check will bring the dollars as easily as a genuine issue, why not make it? One year’92s fraud will be equal to half a lifetime’92s sweat. Why not live solely by one’92s wits? A fortune thus built will be firm and everlasting. Will it? Ha! build your house on a volcano’92s crater; go to sleep on the bosom of an avalanche. The volcano will blaze and the avalanche will thunder. There are estates which have been coming together from age to age. Many years ago that estate started in a husband’92s industry and a wife’92s economy. It grew from generation to generation by good habits and high-minded enterprise. Old-fashioned industry was the mine from which that gold was dug, and God will keep the deeds of such an estate in his buckler. Foreclose your mortgage, spring your snap judgments, plot with acutest intrigue against a family property like that, and you cannot do it a permanent damage. Better than warrantee deed, and better than fire insurance is the defence which God’92s own hand will give it.

But here is a man, today as poor as Job, after he was robbed by Satan of everything but his boils; yet, suddenly, tomorrow he is a rich man. There is no accounting for his sudden affluence. He has not yet failed often enough to become wealthy. No one pretends to account for his princely wardrobe, or the chased silver, or the full-curbed steeds that rear and neigh like Bucephalus in the grasp of his coachman. Did he come to a sudden inheritance? No. Did he make a fortune on purchase and sale? No. Everybody asks: ’93Where did that partridge hatch?’94 The devil suddenly threw him up and the devil will suddenly let him come down. That hidden scheme God saw from the first inception of the plot. That partridge, swift disaster will shoot it down, and the higher it flies the harder it falls. The prophet saw, as you and I have often seen, the awful mistake of partridges.

But from the top of a Bible fir tree I hear the shrill cry of the stork. Job, Ezekiel, Jeremiah speak of it. David cries out: ’93As for the stork, the fir tree is her house.’94 This large white Bible bird is supposed, sometimes, without alighting, to wing its way from the region of the Rhine to Africa. As winter comes, all the storks fly to warmer climes, and the last one of their number that arrives at the spot to which they migrate is killed by them. What havoc it would make in our species if those men were killed who are always behind! In Oriental cities the stork is domesticated and walks about on the street, and will follow its keeper. In the city of Ephesus, I saw a long row of pillars, on the top of each pillar a stork’92s nest. But the word ’93stork’94 ordinarily means mercy and affection, from the fact that this bird was distinguished for its great love to its parents. It never forsakes them, and even after they become feeble, protects and provides for them. In migrating, the old storks lean their necks on the young storks, and when the old ones give out the young ones carry them on their backs. God forbid that a dumb stork should have more heart than we. Blessed is that table at which an old father and mother sit! Blessed that altar at which an old father and mother kneel! What it is to have a mother they know best who have lost her. God only knows the agony she suffered for us, the times she wept over our cradle and the anxious sighs her bosom heaved as we lay upon it, the sick nights when she watched us, long after every one was tired out but God and herself. Her life-blood beats in our heart and her image lives in our face. That man is graceless as a cannibal who ill-treats his parents, and he who begrudges them daily bread and clothes them but shabbily, may God have patience with him; I cannot. I heard a man once say: ’93I now have my old mother on my hands.’94 Ye storks on your way with food to your aged parents, shame him!

But yonder in this Bible sky flies a bird that is speckled. The prophet describing the church cries out: ’93Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her.’94 So it was then; so it is now. Holiness picked at. Consecration picked at. Usefulness picked at. A speckled bird is a peculiar bird, and that arouses the antipathy of all the beaks of the forest. The Church of God is a peculiar institution, and that is enough to evoke attack of the world, for it is a speckled bird to be picked at. The inconsistencies of Christians are a banquet on which multitudes get fat. They ascribe everything you do to wrong motives. Put a dollar in the poor-box, and they will say that he dropped it there only that others might hear it ring. Invite them to Christ and they will call you a fanatic. Let there be contention among Christians, and they will say ’93Hurrah! the church is in decadence.’94 Christ intended that his church should always remain a speckled bird. Let birds of another feather pick at her, but they cannot rob her of a single plume. Like the albatross, she can sleep on the bosom of a tempest. She has gone through the fires of Nebuchadnezzar’92s furnace and not got burned, through the waters of the Red Sea and not been drowned, through the shipwreck on the breakers of Melita and not been foundered. Let all earth and hell try to hunt down this speckled bird, but far above human scorn and infernal assault, she shall sing over every mountain-top and fly over every nation, and her triumphant song shall be, ’93The Church of God! The pillar and ground of the truth. The gates of hell shall not prevail against her.’94

But we cannot stop here. From a tall cliff, hanging over the sea, I hear the eagle calling unto the tempest and lifting its wing to smite the whirlwind. Moses, Jeremiah, Hosea and Habakkuk, at times in their writings, take their pen from the eagle’92s wing. It is a bird with fierceness in its eye, its feet armed with claws of iron, and its head with a dreadful beak. Two or three of them can fill the heavens with clangor. But generally this monster of the air is alone and unaccompanied, for the reason that its habits are so predaceous it requires five or ten miles of aerial or earthly dominion for itself. The black-brown of its back, and the white of its lower feathers, and the fire of its eye, and the long flap of its wing make one glimpse of it, as it swoops down into the valley to pick up a rabbit, or a lamb, or a child, and then sweeps back to its throne on the rock, something never to be forgotten. Scattered about its eyrie of altitudinous solitude are the bones of its conquests. But while the beak and the claws of the eagle are the terror of all the travelers of the air, the mother-eagle is most kind and gentle to her young. God compares his treatment of his people to the eagle’92s care of the eaglets. Deu_32:11 : ’93As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him.’94 The old eagle first shoves the young one out of the nest in order to make it fly, and then takes it on her back and flies with it, and shakes it off in the air, and if it seem like falling, quickly flies under it and takes it on her wing again. So God does with us. Disaster, failure in business, disappointment, bereavement, are only God’92s way of shaking us out of our comfortable nest in order that we may learn how to fly. You who are complaining that you have no faith or courage or Christian zeal have had it too easy. You never will learn to fly in that comfortable nest. Like an eagle, Christ has carried us on his back. At times we have been shaken off, and when we were about to fall he came under us again and brought us out of the gloomy valley to the sunny mountain. Never an eagle brooded with such love and care over her young as God’92s wings have been over us. Across what oceans of trouble we have gone in safety upon the Almighty wings. From what mountains of sin have we been carried, and at times have been borne up far above the gunshot of the world and the arrow of the devil. When our time on earth is closed, on these great wings of God we shall speed with infinite quickness from earth’92s mountains to heaven’92s hills, and as from the eagle’92s circuit under the sun, men on the ground seem small and insignificant as lizards on a rock, so all earthly things shall dwindle into a speck and the raging river of death so far beneath will seem smooth and glassy as a Swiss lake.

It was thought in ancient times that an eagle could not only molt his feathers in old age, but that after arriving to great age he would renew his strength and become entirely young again. To this Isaiah alludes when he says: ’93They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles.’94 Even so the Christian in old age will renew his spiritual strength. He shall be young in ardor and enthusiasm for Christ; and as the body fails, the soul will grow in elasticity, till at death it will spring up like a gladdened child into the bosom of God. Yea, in this ornithological study, I see that Job says: ’93His days fly as an eagle that hasteth to its prey.’94 The speed of a hungry eagle when it saw its prey a score of miles distant was unimaginable. It went like a thunderbolt for speed and power. So fly our days. The old earth is rent and cracked under the swift rush of days and months and years and ages. ’93Swift as an eagle that hasteth to its prey.’94 Behold the fowls of the air. Have you considered that they have, as you and I have not, the power to change their eyes so that one minute they may be telescopic and the next microscopic. Now seeing something a mile away, and by telescopic eyesight, and then dropping to its food on the ground, able to see it close by, and with microscopic eyesight.

But what a senseless passage of Scripture that is, until you know the facts, which says ’93The sparrow hath found a house and the swallow a nest for herself where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.’94 What has the swallow to do with the altars of the Tabernacle at Jerusalem? Ah! you know that swallows are all the world over very tame, and in summer time they used to fly into the windows and doors of the Tabernacle at Jerusalem and build a nest on the altar where the priests were offering sacrifices. These swallows brought leaves and sticks and fashioned nests on the altars of the Tabernacle, and hatched the young swallows in those nests, and David had seen the young birds picking their way out of the shell while the old swallows watched, and no one in the Tabernacle was cruel enough to disturb either the old swallows or the young swallows, and David bursts out in rhapsody, saying: ’93The swallow hath found a nest for herself where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God!’94

In this ornithology of the Bible, I find that God is determined to impress upon us the architecture of a bird’92s nest and the anatomy of a bird’92s wing. Twenty times does the Bible refer to a bird’92s nest: ’93Where the birds make their nest,’94 ’93As a bird that wandereth from her nest,’94 ’93Though thou set thy nest among the stars,’94 ’93The birds of the air have their nests,’94 and so on. Nests in the trees, nests on the rocks, nests on the altars. Why does God call us so frequently to consider the bird’92s nest? Because it is one of the most wondrous of all styles of architecture, and a lesson of Providential care which is the most important lesson that Christ in my text conveys. Why, just look at the bird’92s nest, and see what is the prospect that God is going to take care of you. Here is the bluebird’92s nest under the eaves of the house. Here is the brown thrasher’92s nest in a bush. Here is the blue jay’92s nest in the orchard. Here is the grosbeak’92s nest on a tree-branch hanging over the water, so as to be free from attack. Chickadee’92s nest in the stump of an old tree. Oh, the goodness of God in showing the birds how to build their nest! What carpenters, what masons, what weavers, what spinners the birds are! Out of what small resources they make what an exquisite home, curved, pillared, wreathed. Out of mosses, out of sticks, out of lichens, out of horsehair, out of spiders’92 web, out of threads swept from the door by the housewife, out of the wool of the sheep in the pasture-field. Upholstered by leaves actually sewed together by its own sharp bill. Cushioned with feathers from its own breast. Mortared together with the gum of trees and the saliva of its own tiny bill. Such symmetry, such adaptation, such convenience, such geometry of structure.

Surely these nests were built by some plan. They did not just happen so. Who draughted the plan for the bird’92s nest? God! And do you not think that if he plans such a house for a chaffinch, for an oriole, for a bobolink, for a sparrow, he will see to it that you always have a home? ’93Ye are of more value than many sparrows.’94 Whatever else surrounds you, you can have what the Bible calls ’93the feathers of the Almighty.’94 Just think of a nest like that, the warmth of it, the softness of it, the safety of it’97’94the feathers of the Almighty.’94 No flamingo outflashing the tropical sunset ever had such brilliancy of pinion; no robin redbreast ever had plumage dashed with such crimson and purple and orange and gold’97’94the feathers of the Almighty.’94 Do you not feel the touch of them now on forehead and cheek and spirit, and was there ever such tenderness of brooding’97’94the feathers of the Almighty’94? So also in this ornithology of the Bible God keeps impressing us with the anatomy of a bird’92s wing. Over fifty times does the old Book allude to the wing, ’93Wings of a dove,’94 ’93Wings of the morning,’94 ’93Wings of the wind,’94 ’93Sun of righteousness with healing in his wings,’94 ’93Wings of the Almighty,’94 ’93All fowl of every wing.’94 What does it all mean? It suggests uplifting. It tells you of flight upward. It means to remind you that you, yourself, have wings. David cried out, ’93Oh, that I had wings like a dove that I might fly away and be at rest.’94 Thank God that you have better wings than any dove of longest or swiftest flight. Caged now in bars of flesh are those wings, but the day comes when they will be liberated. Get ready for ascension. Take the words of the old hymn, and to the tune unto which that hymn is married sing:

Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,

Thy better portion trace.

Up out of these lowlands into the heavens of higher experience and wider prospect. But how shall we rise? Only as God’92s Holy Spirit gives us strength. But that is coming now. Not as a condor from a Chimborazo peak, swooping upon the affrighted valley, but as a dove like that which put its soft brown wings over the wet locks of Christ at the baptism in the Jordan. Dove of gentleness! Dove of peace!

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly dove,

With all thy quickening powers,

Come shed abroad a Saviour’92s love,

And that shall kindle ours.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage