The effect was terrific. The scientific smiled. The simple left the hall dazed and stunned. They lost all sense of time and space, they lost sight of the very stars in this swift, far fall. They had been carried up through the seven spheres to the very gate of heaven, then hurled to earth. The lecture failed--not of instruction, not of emotion, but of will, leaving the listeners powerless and undone. The lecturer may be right--for astronomy; and yet be quite wrong, for poetry. He may have uttered the last word--for science; but this end is only the beginning for religion. How much greater an astronomer this college professor than that shepherd psalmist on the far-off Syrian hills! Ranging the same astral field as our scientist, sweeping the same stellar spaces, with only a shepherd’s knowledge, the psalmist’s thought takes the same turn as the scientist’s, down to man, but on different wings,--the wings of poetry: “When I consider thy heavens, The work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars Which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” Then, swinging upward on those mighty wings, past the reach of science, out of the range of knowledge, up, up to the divinest height ever touched by human thought, the psalmist-astronomer cries impiously, exultantly, “For thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor!” This starts where the astronomer stopped. This is religion and literature. And I have these very stars over my hilltop here in Hingham! CHAPTER IV THE DUTY TO DIG CHAPTER IV THE DUTY TO DIG I A young man sat by the roadside, milking. And as he milked, one drove up in her limousine and stopped and said unto him: “Young man, why are you not at the front?” The young man milked on, for that was the thing to do. Then, with still more slackers in her voice, the woman said a second time unto him: “Young man, why are you not at the front?” “Because, ma’am, the milk is at this end,” he answered. And the chauffeur, throwing the clutch of the limousine into third speed ahead, drove off, thinking. But the young man milking had already thought. To milk is to think. If “darning is premeditated poverty,” then there is no saner occupation for human hands, none more thought-inducing, unless it be milking. Anyhow, when the Great War came on, I went over to a neighbor’s and bought a cow; I made me a new milking-stool with spread sturdy legs; and I sat down to face the situation calmly, where I might see it steadily and whole. I had tried the professorial chair; I had tried the editorial chair; I had even tried that Siege Perilous, the high-backed, soft-seated chair of plush behind the pulpit. I may never preach again; but if I do, it will be on condition that I sit on a three-legged milking stool instead of on that upholstered pillowy throne of plush.