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I watch them drift—the old familiar faces, 
Who fished and rode with me, by stream and wold, 
Till ghosts, not men, fill old beloved places, 
And, ah! the land is rank with churchyard mold. 
I watch them drift—the youthful aspirations, 
Shores, landmarks, beacons, drift alike. 
I watch them drift—the poets and the statesmen ; 
The very streams run upward from the sea. 
Yet overhead the boundless arch of heaven 
Still fades to night, still blazes into day. 
Ah, God! My God! Thou wilt not drift away. 
ia 
In the phrase ‘‘ a sacrament of the divine,’’ the word 
sacrament is used in its large, ancient sense, which covers 
not only ceremonial, instituted sacraments, but all the 
visible life of the world as it reveals and is a means of 
reaching the eternal. Thus Kingsley speaks more than once 
of ‘‘ that will of God revealed in things to which I try 
humbly though confusedly to submit all my conclusions.”’ 
And in the first of his ‘‘ Village Sermons ’’—it is on ‘‘ God’s 
world, the great green book which God has given to 
labouring men ’’—he says, ‘‘ ‘ As a garment shalt Thou 
change them,’—ay, there was David’s secret! He saw that 
this earth and skies are God’s garment—the garment by 
which we see God.’’ That is a great idea which is helped 
by the scientific temper, and accordingly he says that the 
keynote of all he had taught in addresses at Sion College to 
the Clergy, at Woolwich to the Military Cadets, and at 
Chester, was this: ‘‘ Science is on the march. Listen to 
her divine words, for what is she but the voice of God, 
Deus revelatus? Mark her footsteps ; and if you cannot 
keep pace with her, still follow her.”’ 
The scientific temper helps the sacramental idea, 
because it forbids mere fancifulness. ‘The unscientific poet 
is apt to sink to allegory, in which things are made arbitrary 
signs of quite other things thought of. The scientific poet 
sticks to realities, that is sacraments, and only cares for the 
real witness of one part of life for another ; yet ultimately 
of visible for eternal life, and so Kingsley says in another 
letter (quoting S. Augustine), ‘‘ My doctrine has been for 
years, if I may speak of myself, that omnia exeunt im 
mysterium, that below all natural phenomena we come toa 
transcendental—in plain English a miraculous ground.” 
When we say ‘‘ Pansies for thoughts ”’ it is a pretty 
fancy ; when S. Paul uses the symbol of the seed for the 
body growing through the mortal to the immortal he ts 
speaking sacramentally. There is one poem of Kingsley’s, 
