The story of the small modern child, born and brought up in a modern town, where her father, an electrical engineer, had installed all the lights in the street and houses, and who, when at four years old was taken to the country for the first time and allowed to see the stars, said: "Did my father set them up too?" may or may not be true; but it illustrates with force the terrible vacuum in knowledge and experience of the most profound aspects of existence which a life walled in amid artificial conditions tends to produce. That which the Buddha left his kingly palace and sat beneath his Boh-tree to seek; that which Zoroaster found in his solitary sojourn on the mountain top, and Mohamed in his secret cave, which the Hebrew leader discovered in the deserts of Sinai, and the teacher of Galilee in the wilderness and on the mountain tops; that which, having perceived, they strove to give voice to in the world's bibles, and which has become symbolized in the world's temples, from the rock-hewn cave temples of India to the Holy of Holies of the Jew; from the Greeks' Parthenon on the hill-top bathed in light and air, to the Gothic cathedral with its forest of shafts--that of which all the religions and all the dogmas are but the tentative attempts of the struggling human spirit to give voice to--this reality is not easily perceived as present and always over-arching when the individual is swathed in by conditions of life, the result of man's small labours, and seemingly having no root beyond his own will; and when the tumultuous sounds and minute details forced on it at every moment almost blind and deafen the individual to the consciousness of anything beyond the fragmentary and present. This is the serious danger and almost certain loss to which the spirit of man exposes itself, when he severs himself from all contact with the living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself, and surrounds himself purely by those which have a relation to himself, and have been modified by his action. It is an inverted view of the universe, with accompanying narrowness and blindness, which, far more than any danger of physical asphyxiation and nervous muscular deterioration, constitutes the evil attendant on the ordinary life of men in great cities, or wherever immersed in purely artificial conditions. Undoubtedly there are lofty and powerful spirits who have reached a deep and calm clear-sightedness which no aspect in the world immediately about them can obscure, to whom the city and the petty sights and sounds of our little human creation are seen abidingly to be as much the outcome and mere passing development of the powers beyond and behind them as the silent plain and the mountain top-- "And what if trade sow cities, Like shells along the shore; And thatch with towns the prairies wide With railways ironed o'er?