"It was none less than the great Kant who said: 'The two 

 things which most overawe me are the starry heaven above 

 and the moral law within.' He said nothing of any relation- 

 ship between the two but to me ther$ seems to be such. I 

 am convinced that if only we would take our children into 

 the star-lit silence of the night, and in the presence of this 

 visible Infinite speak to them of the Infinite and the eternal 

 law of goodness, we should find them much more receptive 

 than in our Sunday schools with their sanctimonious trim- 

 mings. What the stars preach to us is truly 'heavenly,' and 

 the sweet influences of the Pleiades creates a reverence 

 which holy scripture will hardly give in such rich and pure 

 measure. 



"It is wrong to speak of a dead world of matter, if thus the 

 very stars speak to us. No, this is not a soulless universe 

 and Arcturus and Vega and the farthest nebula are filled with 

 the divine soul and try to draw us upward. And as the stars 

 preach to us, so does the earth; nature about us uplifts the 

 sore and troubled soul. The woods and the hills say to us, 

 when we come with fevered brow from the daily pursuits, as 

 Emerson puts it: 'Why so hot, little man.' Yes, it is nature 

 that tells us that man is more than a dollar-earning or dollar- 

 grasping animal, and that his life may be measured by some- 

 thing else than the capacity for making money, and wasting 

 wealth. Yes, life in the end is only true life when it is close 

 to nature; a life is only full when it can look in reverence 

 up to the stars and love nature as a, divine mother. 



"I think it would be a blessed thing to close for the sum- 

 mer not only the schools, but the churches, and turn the 

 saints and sinners to pasture, if people would only forget 

 themselves there. How it might expand those shriveled 

 souls, the souls of poor over and under-reformed humanity, 

 of pale-faced gospel-ridden churchgoers, of miserable sermon- 

 crammed sinners, simply to go into the woods and become 

 men again, and forget all about preachers and teachers and 

 saints and sinners and reformers and 'such like.' Not that we 

 do not need the prophts and preachers but that it is well to 

 get away from them for a time." 



15 



