THE DIVINE SOIL 



the same shock to our sensibilities and our pride 

 of origin. 



One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in 

 this life, and one that many persons never leam, 

 is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the 

 conunon, the near at hand — to see that heaven 

 lies about us here in this world. Carlyle's gospel 

 of dirt, when examined closely, differs in no respect 

 from a gospel of star dust. Why, we have invented 

 the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its 

 unseen spirits and powers good and bad, to account 

 for things, because we found the universal every- 

 day nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar. We 

 have had to cap the natural with the supernatural 

 to satisfy our love for the marvelous and the inex- 

 plicable. As soon as a thing is brought within our 

 ken and the region of our experience, it seems to 

 lose caste and be cheapened. I am at a loss how to 

 account for this mythopoetic tendency of ours, but 

 what a part it has played in the history of mankind, 

 and what a part it still plays — turning the light 

 of day into a mysterious illusive and haunted twi- 

 light on every hand! It would seem as if it must 

 have served some good purpose in the development 

 of the race, but just what is not so easy to point out 

 as the evil it has wrought, the mistakes and self- 

 delusions it has given rise to. One may probably 

 say that in its healthy and legitimate action it has 

 given rise to poetry and to art and to the many 

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