From the back-ground of the old Ideal stands out in bold relief the new. It is the reverse of supernatural; if it takes pride in anything, it is in marking a return to nature. Trammels of the flesh, contamination of the body? There is nothing it tells us in itself contaminating. The body is not alien to the mind, it is the seed plot from which mind flowers out in every part. Regard the form of man, observe the quick play of the features, the expressive smile, the speaking glance, every attitude, every gesture full of meaning, the whole body irradiated as it were, with the indwelling intelligence. And so the passions too which we are wont to associate with our corporeal nature are but the rough material from which the artist soul behind them fashions its immortal types of beauty and of holiness. There is a graceless innuendo in the term nature, as of something hard, gross, material. In truth, nature is the subtlest, most ethereal presence of which we catch a gleam only at rare intervals, the reflex of a hidden light that glimmers through the facts and motions of the world. Take the nature of water for instance. Is it in the hydrogen, in the oxygen, in the single atom? Not there, yet there! somewhere hovering, imponderous, elusive. It comes nighest to the senses when the atoms act and react upon each other, in the flow of mighty rivers, in the leap of cataracts, in the turmoil of the sea. Or the nature of the tree; is it in the roots, in the trunk, in the spreading branches, the leafy crown? Perhaps in the fruit more than elsewhere the hidden being of the tree comes forth into external reality, and opens to the eye and touch. In action and fruition the deeper nature appears. Thus in the outward world, and thus in man. Our soul-life, too, is a flowing stream, whose power is not in any part but in the ceaseless, changeful motion of the whole, that forms a strong spiritual current on which our thoughts and sentiments move like swimmers toward an infinite sea. And like a tree are we, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, the fibrous roots of the lower instincts, that bind us to the earth. But the moral life is the fruit we bear; in it our true nature is revealed; in it we see the purpose of our being fulfilled. So when we speak of a return to nature, it is this higher nature to which we refer, whose origin we know not, but whose workings we feel, and know them by the token of the sweet satisfaction they afford us to be the crown and glory of our lives. The old Ideal emphasizes the Eternal that is without us; the new the Eternal that is within ourselves. The old styles us exiles from the kingdom of truth; the new summons us to be the banner-bearers of truth; the old points to a heaven beyond the earth, the new tells us that our earth too is a part of the heaven, a light-world, among endless worlds of light.