This is my faith, my religion. Close to where I am sitting is an old stub, clothed in a mass of wood-vine, warm and vivid in the golden glow of the setting sun. The wood-vine has climbed, instinctively, to the top of the stub, and now, finding their support gone, half a dozen long tendrils are reaching out toward a tall young birch six or eight feet away. One tendril, stronger and older than the others, has reached and clasped the nearest branch. The others are following unerringly. _Yet they have no eyes to see._ No voice calls back to them to point out the way. It is the instinct of life itself that is guiding them, the same instinct, in a smaller way, that dragged man up bit by bit from out of the black chaos of the past. In a thousand other ways, if one will take the blindfold from his eyes and try to understand, he may see this mightiest of all the forces of the earth--instinct--a vibrant, breathing, struggling thing about him, a force so much more powerful than his own, so all-consuming and indestructible that it stands out as a giant mountain compared with the mole-hill of his own littleness. In my own faith, I see it as a vast and inexhaustible reservoir of life, of strength, of “upward climb,” of inspiration. I see it as the one great, all-necessary force of creation--a force more precious to man than all the mines of the earth, more precious than all the treasure of the mints, if he would forget his greatness and reach out his hands to it in the gladness of a new brotherhood. Dusk is falling. And, as I stop my work, here in the heart of a forest, I seem to see the smiles of many who will read this, and I seem to hear the low and unbelieving laughter of those who think themselves of the flesh and blood of God. And I seem to hear their voices saying: “He is wrong. Nature is beautiful--sometimes. Also, it is crude. It is rough. It is destructive. It is, half the time, a pest. While we--we--have we not performed wonders? Have we not _proved_ ourselves the chosen of God? Have we not created nations? Have we not built up great cities? Have we not accumulated vast riches? Have we not invented the Dollar? Are we not, in a hundred ways, shackling nature as a man harnesses a horse, proving ourselves its masters, and it our slave?” I hear--and then I hear another voice, and softly, distantly, it says: