ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



mixers and builders, the plowers and the planters, 

 the levelers and the engineer. Hence, I say: "Good 

 Devil, be thou my friend; you give me power, you 

 sharpen my wits, you make a man of me." 



This is the tangible, physical Devil; the intangi- 

 ble, moral Devil is not so easily dealt with. It is not 

 so easy to turn the spirit of crime, intemperance, 

 cruelty, war, superstition, greed, and so on to our 

 advantage. Yet there also is power going to waste 

 or misdirected. There is a light under the feet of 

 these things also. Trade, out of which has come 

 greed, has opened up and humanized the world; 

 war has often grafted a superior stock upon an in 

 ferior. 



"It was for Beauty that the world was made." 

 Emerson quotes this verse from Ben Jonson and 

 says that it is better than any single line of Tenny- 

 son's "In Memoriam." Only the poet is allowed to 

 make such extravagant statements. We cannot in 

 soberness and truth say that the world was made 

 for any particular end. It is out of a certain har- 

 mony of the elements that we arose and our sense 

 of beauty was developed, but the world exists for 

 as many ends as we have power to conceive. Order, 

 harmony, rhythm, compensation, equilibrium, cir- 

 cles, spheres, are fundamental in nature. Music, 

 which is beauty to the ear, hath power over inert 

 matter. In the Mammoth Cave the very rocks will 

 sing if you speak to them in the right key. How 



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