The nature that we see about us is enough for all forms of life except man; why should he flatter himself that his appearance and life demand something extra, some miracle, something mysterious and incomprehensible? Why not invest the gods we have and know with the extra power demanded, rather than appeal to gods we know not? How the fire warms us, how our food nourishes us, how we sprang from a microscopic germ and grew to be the men we are, are miracles enough. Every living thing is a miracle as wonderful as the Immaculate Conception or the Incarnation, but of a different order. If I knew how the meat and bread which the poet eats is turned into poetry, or how the pond-lily weaves its satin and gold out of the muck and slime of the creek-bottom, I should possess a secret that would make me cease to wonder at the so-called “miracles.” In the face of the marvels we hourly see about us in living Nature, why should we look afar off and invent marvels of a new order? Why should we invent impossible problems, and then invent impossible explanations of them? The nature gods we know; we live in daily and hourly converse with them; we see and know that we are dependent upon them every moment of our lives. These gods--air, water, fire, earth--and the greater gods whose eyes blink to us in the midnight skies, why not credit them with the gifts that we ascribe to the imaginary gods of the supernatural? The more we search into the ways of Nature, the more wonderful and potent we find them to be. It may be that if we could penetrate to the true inwardness of matter, we should find the key to the mystery of the soul and the master key to all our problems. But we feel that we must look afar off, we must have recourse to the strange and the miraculous. How the impossible does attract us! Even the fantastic may be made the basis of a religious cult. In Florida, in a remote, secluded place we found a religious sect, embracing men and women of culture and refinement, who upheld the social and civic virtues and cultivated the industrial arts, yet who deemed it essential for their soul’s salvation to disbelieve all our popular astronomy, and hold to the idea that, instead of living on the outside of a globe, we live inside of a hollow sphere, and that the sun, moon, and stars are appendages of this sphere, and not at all what we ordinarily take them to be. The expounders of this faith are not at all disturbed by such facts as a ship at sea dropping below the horizon, or an eclipse of the moon showing the shadow of a round body falling upon it. Such appearances only confirm their theory. These Florida fanatics defy common sense and the exact demonstrations of science. Our supernaturalists superinduce another order above and around the order we call “natural,” and in a theological concept, the Incarnation, link the two together. That they are linked at any other point is not claimed. In the age of miracles they were linked at many points and on many occasions.