SOUNDINGS 



hourly converse with them; we see and know that 

 we are dependent upon them every moment of our 

 lives. These gods — air, water, fire, earth — and 

 the greater gods whose eyes blink to us in the mid- 

 night skies, why not credit them with the gifts 

 that we ascribe to the imaginary gods of the super- 

 natural? 



The more we search into the ways of Nature, the 

 more wonderful and potent we find them to be. It 

 may be that if we could penetrate to the true in- 

 wardness of matter, we should find the key to the 

 mystery of the soul and the master key to all our 

 problems. But we feel that we must look afar off, we 

 must have recourse to the strange and the miracu- 

 lous. How the impossible does attract us ! Even the 

 fantastic may be made the basis of a religious cult. 

 In Florida, in a remote, secluded place we found a 

 religious sect, embracing men and women of culture 

 and refinement, who upheld the social and civic 

 virtues and cultivated the industrial arts, yet who 

 deemed it essential for their soul's salvation to dis- 

 believe all our popular astronomy, and hold to the 

 idea that, instead of living on the outside of a globe, 

 we live inside of a hollow sphere, and that the sun, 

 moon, and stars are appendages of this sphere, and 

 not at all what we ordinarily take them to be. The 

 expounders of this faith are not at all disturbed by 

 such facts as a ship at sea dropping below the hori- 

 zon, or an eclipse of the moon showing the shadow 



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