Dangerous Dust

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

Exodus 8:16-19

And the LORD said to Moses, Say to Aaron, Stretch out your rod, and smite the dust of the land…

Dangerous dust in the air is circulated by the elevated railways in New York. A member of the staff of The Scientific American hung a magnet under the track of the elevated road, and when a few minutes later he took it down it was coated with minute particulars of iron dust. This dust, he said, is the cause of many severe cases of eye troubles. The swift passing trains grind off showers of iron particles, which often fall or are blown into the eyes of pedestrians. The microscope shows, that the particles are of innumerable shapes, and they usually have jagged fringes, and many of them have barbs like a fish hook. When lodged in the eye they cannot be attracted therefrom with a magnet, but a gouge-shaped instrument the size of a sewing needle had been devised for the purpose. This peculiarity of the dust resembles that of moral evil It is in the air, and when once it finds a lodgment in the human heart it cannot be withdrawn without difficulty and suffering. This is the of finger God . — "Like Phidias, who in his image carved his own name, there is God engraven upon every creature." Not in characters of human writing is it written, but in the character of the work. Phidias needed not to have written the word PHIDIAS in so many letters, for the master's hand had a cunning of its own which none could counterfeit. An instructed person had only to look at a statue and say at once, "Phidias did this, for no other hand could have chiselled such a countenance"; and believers have only to look either at creation, providence, or the Divine Word, and they will Cry instinctively, "This is the finger of God." Yet, alas, man has great powers of wilful blindness, and these are aided by the powers of darkness, so that, being both blind and in the dark, man is unable to see his God, though His presence is as clear as that of the sun in the heavens.

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