138 BOAKD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



or great men, perhaps apotheosized into demigods. Pan- 

 theism, the more or less conscious religion of many of the 

 most cultivated minds to-day, is the deification of nature ; 

 and we are often told that the unity of mind and faith we 

 call monotheism, the achievement of which was one of the 

 greatest labors of the human soul, could never have been 

 wrought out but for the influence of the all-encompassing 

 blue void of heaven, perhaps pierced by some Sinai or other 

 sacred mountain. Hymn books of many faiths have been 

 studied that show us how dominant natural objects and phe- 

 nomena have been in shaping the religious consciousness of 

 the world, and how inconceivably different all would have 

 been but for the symbolism involved in the score or two of 

 those most favorite. 



Y. Man is the bright consummate flower of nature. In 

 our growth from childhood or from the earliest prenatal be- 

 ginning, each of us repeats in his own individual life the en- 

 tire history of life since it began upon this globe. You and 

 I have practically been plants or protophytes, protozoan, 

 metazoan and all the rest, recapitulating each stage. The 

 human brain, through which all revelations have come, is the 

 only mouthpiece of the Divine in the world ; so that man, 

 who, on the whole, stands at the summit of nature, has not 

 only been the chief subject of interest to himself, according 

 to the well-known dictum of Pope, that the highest study of 

 mankind is man, but philosophers have assured us that we 

 cannot possibly think too highly of ourselves. Human per- 

 sonality is naturally, therefore, our organ of apperceiving 

 deity ; and even yet it is regarded in some localities as a little 

 heterodox to even raise the question whether or not God 

 may be something higher than personality, even though we 

 agree that he can be nothing lower. This is the stand-point 

 from which all the bases of anthropological studies are made ; 

 and, if the burden of the Bibles rolled out of the great heart 

 of nature, as Emerson has told us, far more has man emerged 

 from the same source, and is himself the highest of all reve- 

 lations. We may say, to parody the old apothegm of the 

 relations between the Old and New Testaments, that in 

 nature man lay concealed and in man nature stands revealed. 

 His existence and his intelligence raise all things to a higher 



