Huxley danced on it. Tyndall and Spencer regarded the Bible as a valuable and more or less interesting collection of myths, fables and folklore tales. Wallace sees in it a strain of prophetic truth and regards it as gold-bearing quartz of a low grade. Fiske regarded it as the word of God, Holy Writ, expressed often vaguely, mystically, and in the language of poetry and symbol, but true when rightly understood. And so John Fiske throughout his life spoke in orthodox pulpits to the great delight of Christian people, and at the same time wrote books on science and dedicated them to Thomas Huxley, Bishop of all Agnostics. To the scientist the word "supernatural" is a contradiction. Everything that is in the Universe is natural; the supernatural is the natural not yet understood. And that which is called the supernatural is often the figment of a disordered, undisciplined or undeveloped imagination. Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. The engineer sees his structure complete, ere he draws his plans. So the scientist divines the thing first and then looks for it until he finds it. Were this not so, he would not be able to recognize things hitherto unknown, when he saw them; nor could he fit fact to fact, like bones in a skeleton, and build a complete structure, if it all did not first exist as a thought. To reprove and punish children for flights of imagination, John Fiske argued, was one of the things done only by a barbaric people. Children first play at the thing, which later they are to do well. Play is preparation. The man of imagination is the man of sympathy, and only such are those who benefit and bless mankind and help us on our way. John Fiske had imagination enough to follow closely and hold fellowship with the greatest minds the world has ever known. John Fiske believed that we live in a natural universe, and that God works through Nature, and that, in fact, Nature is the spirit of God at work. Doubts never disturbed John Fiske. Things that were not true technically and literally were true to him if taken in a spiritual or poetic way. God, to him, was a personal being, creating through the Law of Evolution because He chose to. The six days of Creation were six eons or geological periods. No man has ever been more in sympathy with the discoverers in Natural History than John Fiske. No man ever knew so much about his work as John Fiske. His knowledge was colossal, his memory prodigious. And in all of the realm of science and philosophy, from microscopy and the germ theory to advanced astronomy and the birth of worlds, his glowing imagination saw the work of a beneficent Creator who stood above and beyond and outside of Natural Law, and with Infinite Wisdom and Power did His own Divine Will.