THE RETURN TO NATURE. 



BY MISS MAUD SUMMERS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 



Abstract of a lecture delivered before the Society, 

 March 11, 1905. 



Truth and beauty are qualities of the universal ideal toward 

 which the gro'n'ing soul is ever tending. Always, man finds in 

 water, land, and sky the outwai'd expression of his own soul, 

 where alone truth and beauty dwell. In the earliest stage of 

 religion, the gods were friendly, manifesting themselves to their 

 mortal children in blossom and leaf, in the ripening wheat and the 

 golden corn. The loveliest stories of the mythopoetic fancy have 

 to do Avith the gods whose love of man showed itself in their 

 kindly relations to his interests, as a hunter, a tiller of the soil, a 

 shepherd, or a navigator. The fabled golden age was in truth a 

 reality wherein man's attitude toward nature was one of faith and 

 worship ; hence his life was serene and filled with content. He 

 had infinite trust in the fruitfulness of the earth, infinite belief in 

 the beneficence of the spirits that brought life and death, that 

 "ensphereti the dew for his sake, enriched the grass, fattened the 

 kme, and empurpled the southern slopes of fall with cordial 

 grapes. 



At just what period there was born in the race the conscious- 

 ness that nature was not only not divine, nor trustworthy, nor 

 generous, but cruel, capricious, and tyrannical, history does not 

 and cannot say ; but it was inevitable that some such period of 

 disillusion should come, and that when it did come man should 

 change from a worshiper to a doubter, from a confiding child to 

 a bitter accuser, from a joyful co-labo)"er in the work of the uni- 

 verse, to a drudge earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. 



Alas ! this has been for the most part the attitude of man from 

 immemorial times, and this same feeling of nature's tyranny and 

 of man's enmity has driven entire populations in days past to seek 



