Refinement, grace, and cleanliness are aims and ends, as truly as are vigor and suppleness of mind and strength and purity of heart. Like sunshine and flowers and the songs of birds, they help to make life pleasant and beautiful. Even the fishes are not clean, but the only clean animal is here and there a man or a woman who has forsworn dirt visible and invisible. We can educate ourselves in every direction, to sleep well even, and neither physicians nor poets have told half the good there is in sleep. The bare thought of it always brings to me the memory of lulling showers, and grazing sheep, and murmuring streams, and bees at work, and the breath of flowers and cooing doves and children lying on the sward, and lazy clouds slumbering in azure skies. It is pleasant as the approach of evening, fresh and fair as the rising sun which sets all the world singing, sacred and pure as babes smiling in their dreams on the breasts of gentle mothers. If thou canst not see the divine worth in nature and in works of genius, it is because thou art what thou art. Can the worm at thy feet recognize thy superiority? The blind and the heedless see nothing, O foolish maid. What I know and love is of my very being, is, in fact, my knowing and loving self. Quality of knowledge and love determines quality of life, and when I know and love God I am divine. As trees are enrooted in earth, as fishes are immersed in water, and our bodies in air, that they may live, so the soul has its being in God that it may have life, that it may know and love. I become self-conscious only in becoming conscious of what is not myself; and when the not-myself is the Eternal, is God, my self-consciousness is divine. The marvel and the mystery of our being is that self-consciousness should exist at all, not that it should continue to exist forever. But words cannot strengthen or explain or destroy our belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the freedom of the will. The antagonism supposed to exist between scientific facts or theories and religious faith would cease to be recognized as real, were it not for the eagerness with which those who are incapable of profound and comprehensive views, catch up certain shibboleths and hurl them like firebrands upon the combustible imaginations of the unthinking.