What is it—this soft, white, beautiful covering that falls from heaven so gently and noiselessly, and spreads itself over the earth.

“Crystallised water,” you will perhaps answer, water that has been frozen by the cold into little crystals, and fallen in flakes upon the earth.

But think, again, what the water is, and where it comes from. Try to remember some of the lessons that we learned about it a little while ago.

Like the air, which is His breath, and the sunlight, which is His glory, the water comes to us from God Himself, and is His own life, which He pours out upon the earth to give life to everything that He has made.

So when the water is crystallised by the cold, we can see something of the beauty of the Lord’s own life, the beauty of the Lord Himself, in the beautiful, pure white snow.

We can see much of its beauty by looking at it as it lies like a soft white carpet upon the ground, and robes the trees and bushes in its fleecy mantle; still more if we take some in our hands and look closely at the little flakes. But if we put some under the microscope and examine it, we shall see that these tiny flakes are perfect little star-shaped crystals of extreme beauty.

Here are some of the lovely forms that you would see. You will notice that they nearly all have six points or sides, and that they are all perfectly regular in shape. As many as one thousand different beautiful forms have been noticed, but in the same snow-fall the flakes are generally alike.

The beauty that we see in all the earth and sky is the beauty of God Himself. His own life appears to us in all these beautiful forms. And “He hath made everything beautiful in its time.”

In the spring and summer we have the beautiful flowers and plants. But in the winter when the flowers are gone God says “to the snow, Be thou on the earth,” and so He spreads another carpet over it, just as beautiful, just as wonderful, and we find when we look into it, just as varied, as the grass and flowers.

Besides the lovely shapes of the snowflakes, how beautiful is their dazzling whiteness. There is no colour in the snow itself; you know that water is as colourless as air. But the snow’s whiteness is caused by the way in which these wonderfully formed little snow crystals break up the light and reflect it.

We have spoken before of the seven different colours that are in the light, and how these all combined or blended make white. So the snow gets its pure, brilliant whiteness by reflecting all the rays of light.

God is able to “wash us from our sins in His own blood,” so that His pure light can shine through us, and be reflected by us to show His beauty to others.

We have been talking to-day about the beauty of the snow; next week we hope to tell you something of its usefulness.

The Present Truth – December 29, 1898
E. J. Waggoner

Story in pdf Snow Crystals