The story is told of the old Calabrian Abbot, Joachim da Fiore, that as he was saying vespers in some little church among the mountains, the glory of the setting sun caught his eye through the open [p.86 ] door of the nave. Suddenly realizing how much more beautiful was the great temple of the sunlit sky than the painted stone walls of his little building made with hands, he led his congregation out into the open air, and with nature's ritual around them they went on praying, gazing upon the picture of that evening landscape and the wonder of the sunset above. Though he was the adopted father of many admirable heretics, and for long a suspect himself, Blessed Joachim did not offend thus more than once, as far as we know, against the laws of ritual. But many another saint must have been tempted to do as he did. It is, indeed, easy for us to understand how in the old days every high place had its altar, and how again and again in later times solitude upon a mountain has seemed to give the most congenial atmosphere for prayer. Unconsciously, and quite apart from our beliefs, we instinctively turn in physical weariness, and often in other troubles, to the calm rest of nature. However much at times we may ponder her sterner side, and search in vain to explain to ourselves the mysteries of death and pain with which she confronts us constantly, it is not these things of which she speaks to man, when he goes to her sad and weary, like a tired child to his nurse. A feeling of quietness, beneath which lies strength, the dim apprehension of law, inexplicable indeed, but majestic and even beautiful, and above all that indefinable sense of peace which comes to us sometimes when we [p.87] are in the presence of that which is immeasurably greater than ourselves, all this may nature bring to us, when we go to her alone with our troubles. The old stoics must have sometimes felt this, though to the Roman mind at least wild nature did not usually possess the attractive power it has for us. One cannot but feel that when Marcus Aurelius cries to the Universe "that which is harmonious to thee, is to me too," he is conscious of something of this feeling in which our petty cares and troubles sink into nothingness amid the waters of the great ocean of universal life; though he arrived at the sense of this rather by inward meditation than by the contemplation of nature without him. And whatever the philosophers may have felt, one has no doubt of the poets. Propertius, alone in the Umbrian highlands by the sources of the Tiber, and Catullus, listening to the ripple of the waves of Garda, were able for a moment to rise above the pain and fire of passion into a calmer air; and yet the Roman poets have no such sense of the overwhelming majesty and order of nature as came to the Hebrew Psalmists.