FIELD AND STUDY 



our sanity, our beneficence, are feeble reflections of 

 his sanity and beneficence. All is of a piece in this 

 universe. 



Sooner or later, if one would not be divided against 

 himself, he must face this terrible question of Na- 

 ture — of the Cosmos as a whole. Is it of God, or of 

 the Devil, or of both.^ The pious souls seem long to 

 have held that it is of both, that the more genial 

 aspects of Nature — birds, flowers, streams, stars, 

 sunsets, summer breezes, fair prospects — were of 

 God, and that Nature's destructive, terrifying 

 aspects and forces — storms, earthquakes, pesti- 

 lence, wars — were of the Devil. Men have rarely 

 had the courage to say that it is all of God, that it 

 is all divine; that the cyclone, the volcanoes, the 

 earthquakes, the thunderbolt, are as truly of God 

 as are the forms and forces that directly please and 

 minister to us. 



We teach our children to say glibly that God is 

 everywhere, in us and without us, above us and 

 below us, and that in Him we literally live and move 

 and have our being. Then when they ask us, Is He 

 in the cesspool, in the cyclone, in famines, in the 

 war, in all the dark and cruel aspects of Nature, 

 we are at a loss for an answer. In his "Journal" 

 Emerson asks, half quizzically, "Is God in a load of 

 brick, is he in the barber-shop, and the bar-room?" 

 When confronted with such questions we are forced 



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