O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who hast set thy glory above the heavens.... 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? For thou hast made him a little lower than the gods, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea. “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.” Simple-minded poet, son of herdsman, hunter, or fisherman, you think man is great because he domesticates sheep and oxen, and is successful in his hunting and fishing--so great that even the maker of the heavens regards him as important! What would you say if you could witness the conquests of nature that have followed upon modern science and invention? You might ride in a car that is propelled, heated, and lighted by a river a hundred miles away; you might speak in your natural voice at Jerusalem and be heard in Egypt; with a turn of a hand you could start moving a mass that a thousand of your Palestinian oxen could not budge. How is it that this enormous increase in our dominion over nature adds so little to our appreciation of man? Nay, that it makes us less appreciative than this rustic? The answer will be found in some phase of the process of securing this dominion, or in some use made of it. Outside of industrialism, in fact, the obvious trend of history is towards a higher and higher estimate of human nature. The growth of civil and political liberty; the spread of popular education; emancipation from many superstitious fears; the increase of humanitarianism--what a truly glorious period in human evolution do these witness. And yet, in spite of them all, a depressed view of ourselves hangs heavy in the atmosphere. We have canvassed all the more obvious partial causes of it, only to be pointed in every instance towards our everyday occupations as the more important source.