separating or purifying them, and behold the hell of contending and destructive forces out of which the earth came, and again behold the grinding and eroding forces, the storms and earthquakes and eruptions and disintegrations that have made it the green inhabitable world that now sustains us! No, the universal processes do not need disinfecting; the laws of the winds, the rains, the sunlight do not need rectifying. “I do not want the constellations any nearer,” says Whitman. I do not want the natural Providence any more attentive. The celestial laws are here underfoot and our treading upon them does not obliterate or vulgarize them. Chemistry is incorruptible and immortal, it is the handmaid of God; the yeast works in the elements of our bread of life while we sleep; the stars send their influences, the earth renews itself, the brooding heaven gathers us under its wings, and all is well with us if we have the heroic hearts to see it. In the curve of the moon’s or of the planets’ disks, all broken or irregular lines of the surface are lost to the eye--the wholeness of the sphere form subordinates and obliterates them all: so all the failures and cross-purposes and disharmonies in nature and life do not suffice to break or mar the vast general beneficence; the flowing universal good is obvious above all. So long as we think of the Eternal in terms of our experience--of the knowledge of concrete things and beings which life discloses to us--we are involved in contradictions. The ancients visualized their gods and goddesses--Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Juno, and all the others. Shall we do this for the Eternal and endow it with personality? Into what absurdities this leads us! The unspeakable, the unseeable, the unthinkable, the inscrutable, and yet the most obvious fact that life yields to us! Nearer and more vital than our own bodies, than our own parents, and yet eluding our grasp; vehemently denied, passionately accepted, scoffed, praised, feared, worshiped, giving rise to deism, atheism, pantheism, to idolatry, to persecution, to martyrdom, the great Reality in which we live and move and have our being, and yet for that very reason, because it is a part of us, or rather we are a part of it, are we unable to define it or seize it as a reality apart from ourselves. Our denial proves it; just as we use gravity to overcome gravity, so we use God to deny God. Just as pure light is of no color, but split up makes all the colors that we see, so God divided and reflected makes all the half-gods we worship in life. Green and blue and red and orange are not in the objects that reflect them, but are an experience of the eye. We might with our tongues deny the air, but our spoken words prove it. We cannot lift ourselves over the fence by our own waistbands; no more can we by searching find God, because He is not an object that has place and form and limitations. He is the fact of the fact, the life of the