useless pretty things

What we have in the Bible is only the record of a part of God’s activity. In actuality God reveals himself to man throughout the whole, breathtaking range of his mysterious doings. For that reason scientific experiment, which was of great importance to Oetinger, is simply a way of thinking God’s thoughts after him. Through it man gains insights not only into the relations of the natural order, but into the spiritual world as well. A case in point here is the significance he attached to his famous experiment with balm-mint leaves. If such a leaf is crushed, and if its juice is spread upon water, so he alleged to have found, it invariably forms itself into the pattern of the leaf from which it came. This he regarded as conclusive proof of the inter-connection of the natural and the spiritual orders, so that the former is not merely a symbol of the latter, but a direct means to a fuller understanding of the spiritual world. Little wonder that at the end of every scientific experiment Oetinger insisted upon reverend silence, since God was about to answer a question.

—F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century.