More exalted than any mere forms of purification, or rituals of worship, is that notion of a living Presence concealed in all phenomena. There has been and is to-day among all peoples a belief in many invisible spirits that have some sort of power over the clouds, the winds, the waters, the earth, and all its teeming growths. We call it Animism, Shamanism, and in a certain specific form, Fetishism. Belief in a countless multitude of spirits who can influence the elements about us for good or for evil, is firmly rooted in all the ancient peoples of Eastern Asia, from India to Japan. We have seen how deep a hold it had upon the earliest Shinto cult, and the later influences of Confucianism and Buddhism in Japan have tended rather to strengthen than to suppress it in the popular mind. These animistic conceptions have played a noteworthy part in connection with most, if not all, the religions of mankind. When combined with a groveling fear of the spirits, and with the practice of magic rites and incantations to propitiate them as so many evil demons, the belief has run into the lowest forms of superstition. But is there no element of truth in Animism? Why should we speak disparagingly of the old Japanese worshiper hearing the voices of unseen spirits in the moaning winds, in the sounding waterfalls, in the rolling thunder? Why should he not adore the Sun as the heavenly Benefactor, and see in waving trees and blooming flowers and drifting clouds the presence and activity of beings, perhaps sometimes a Being Supernatural? One-sided, defective puerile notions controlled, no doubt, his thinking, but the one supreme and fundamental fact was that he felt himself in the presence of the Supernatural. And that primeval concept is the one most essential truth of all religion. We have only to divest it of sundry errant, non-essential interpretations in order to come face to face with the grandest, noblest, and most affecting theism, and monotheism as well. For monotheism finds its most advanced exposition in the doctrine of the universal immanence of God,--one God, the Eternal Spirit, in all, through all, over all. How far from such a concept of universal Animism was the old Hebrew psalmist, who sang of Jehovah "laying the beams of His chambers in the waters, making the clouds His chariot, walking upon the wings of the wind, sending forth springs into the valleys, causing the grass to grow upon the mountains," and receiving tribute of praises from the "sea-monsters and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapor; stormy wind performing His word; mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all cedars; beasts and all cattle; creeping things and flying birds." To such a worshiper the world was all alive with God. And Jesus added an intensity and an affecting beauty to this whole concept of an immanent God when He said: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," and "not one sparrow falleth on the ground without your Father." I