lines, nor a benevolent institution run on the most modern improved plan. It is a work-a-day field where we learn from hard knocks, and where the harvest, not too sure, waits upon our own right arm. II MANIFOLD NATURE Few persons, I fancy, ever spend much time in thinking seriously of this vast, ever-present reality which we call Nature; what our true relations to it are, what its relations are to what we call God, or what God’s relations are to it; whether God and Nature are two or one--God and Nature, or only Nature, or only God. When we identify Nature with God we are at once in sore straits because Nature has a terrible side to her, but the moment we separate God from Nature we are still more embarrassed. We create a hiatus which we must find something to fill. We must invent a Devil upon whom to saddle the evil that everywhere dogs the footsteps of the good. So we have both a God and a Devil, or two gods, on our hands contending with each other. Even our good friends in the churches talk glibly of the God of Nature, or Nature’s God, little heeding the terrible black depths that lie under their words. The Nature that the poets sing and that nature-writers exploit is far from being the whole story. When we think of Nature as meaning only birds and flowers and summer breezes and murmuring streams, we have only touched the hem of her garment--a garment that clothes the whole world with the terrific and the destructive, as well as with the beautiful and the beneficent. Yet her fairer forms and gentler influences are undoubtedly the expression of those forces and conditions that go hand in hand with the things that make for our development and well-being. Probably not till flowers bloomed and birds sang was the earth ripe for man. Not till the bow appeared on the retreating storm-cloud was anything like human life possible. Of savage, elemental Nature, black in tempest and earthquake, hideous in war and pestilence, our poets and nature-students make little, while devout souls seem to experience a cosmic chill when they think of these things. The majority of persons, I fancy, when they consider seriously the problem, look upon Nature as a sort of connecting link between man and some higher power, neither wholly good nor wholly bad; divine in some aspects, diabolical in others; ministering to our bodies, but hampering and obstructing our souls. They see her a goddess one hour, and a fury the next; destroying life as freely as she gives it; arming one form to devour another; crushing or destroying the fairest as soon as the ugliest; limited in her scope and powers, and not complete in herself, but demanding the existence of something above and beyond herself.