THE SECRET! 505 



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the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, 

 escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer 

 nature to embrace us ! The tempered light of the woods 

 is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. 

 The uncommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live 

 with them and quit our life of solemn trifles." 



But why, why, while we are immersed in beauty and 

 surrounded by such ever-present, ever-open sources of 

 purest pleasure, solaces in our sorrows, health-givers amidst 

 our intermittent sicknesses, physical and mental ; why is it 

 that we do not seek them ? 



It arises mainly because " our eyes have no clear 

 vision." "God has introduced us," Marcus Aurelius tells 

 us, " as spectators of himself and his works, and not only 

 as spectators but interpreters of them," and yet we pass 

 away without having once caught a glimpse of their 

 beauties and sanctities. " You take a journey," he pleads 

 with his Roman readers, and through them with us, "to 

 Olympia to behold the work of Phidias (the Olympian 

 Jove), and each of you thinks it a misfortune to die without, 

 a knowledge of such things ; and will you have no inclina- 

 tion to understand and be spectators of those works for 

 which there is no need to take a journey, but which are 

 ready and at hand ? " 



And why have we no clear vision ? Chiefly because our 

 eyes have never been opened to see such things ; our 

 education has been thus far neglected with most of us ; we 

 have never been introduced to Science in our youth, when 

 our faculties were clear and ductile. The responsibility for 

 this general blindness lies primarily at the door of our 

 schools, with their narrow curriculum. As one of John's 



