"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these"
(Matt. 6:28-29).
The beauty of the flowers reveals something about the nature of God.
You remember that Jesus used to set great store by the chance words of men. "Every idle word that men shall speak," he said, "they shall give an account thereof." "Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaketh." The unstudied word, the word which we let slip out without thinking and to serve no particular end, the small change of daily intercourse, which we could quite easily dispense with so far as the immediate business of living is concerned,--these, almost more than anything else, reveal the inner man, and are the index of his true quality. So also are the little, superfluous, unnecessary acts of daily life. Most of us manage to do with some grace the necessary things, the things which clamant human need or coercive public opinion demands; but the man who throws little, unnecessary, beautiful acts into his daily conduct, he it is who reveals a truly beautiful soul. The superfluities, the things which flow, not so much out of the pressure of the external situation, as out of the internal pressure of a tender and generous spirit, these declare the man. Now it is the same with beauty as a revelation of God. Beauty in creation is the overflow of God's heart; it is the unstudied Divine word uttered, apparently for no particular purpose and to serve no particular end; an unnecessary, delightful superfluity; therefore, more eloquent of the Divine mind almost than anything else.
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Herbert Henry Farmer was born in Highbury, London, the youngest of four sons. Herbert's early academic proclivities at Owen's School in Islington earned him a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read for the moral sciences tripos and graduated first class in 1914. Farmer chose to work at a farm at Histon, near Cambridge, rather than entering the armed services during the First World War. In 1916 he decided to pursue ministry with the Presbyterian Church of England and was chosen as the Burney Student in the Philosophy of Religion at Westminster College, Cambridge. Following the completion of his studies in 1919, he took a pastorate at Stafford and three years later moved to a parish in New Barnet where he remained until 1931.
In 1931 Farmer left parish ministry to pursue an academic career. After a four-year post with the Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut, he returned to Westminster College, Cambridge, where he succeeded his friend John Oman as Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics. In 1936 Farmer was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Glasgow, followed in 1937 by his appointment as the Stanton Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge.
Farmer retired from the college in 1960 and continued to preach and write into his twilight years. He died on 13 January 1981 in Birkenhead.