down his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians? Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy long ago by the AEgean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with their turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Sometimes the voices of our humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is lifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!" Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued and minor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexity and pain. Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in his verse _The Nodding Stars_.[29] [Footnote 29: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 68.] "Brothers, what is it ye mean, What is it ye try to say That so earnestly ye lean From the spirit to the clay. "There are weary gulfs between Here and sunny Paradise, Brothers! What is it ye mean That ye search with burning eyes, "Down for me whose fire is clogged, Clamped in sullen, earthy mould, Battened down and fogged and bogged, Where the clay is seven-fold." Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soul caught in this cosmic dualism without which corresponds to the ethical dualism within. This perception of the One behind the many in nature, of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many expressions of that thing, is the chief theme for preaching. This is what brings men to themselves. Herein, as Dr. Newman Smyth has pointed out, appears the unique marvel of personality. "It becomes conscious of itself as individual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discovering itself among the many. In the midst of uniformities of nature, moving at will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern of its ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life. On the same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a sphere of being of another order; in it, yet disentangled from it, and having its center in itself, it lives and moves and has its being, breaking no thread of nature's weaving, subject to its own law, and manifesting a dynamic of its own."[30] [Footnote 30: _The Meaning of the Personal Life_, p. 173.]