THE DIVINE SOIL 



presence of the great unknown, but he sought solace 

 in the knowable of the physical world about him, 

 while Carlyle sought solace in the moral and intel- 

 lectual world, where his great mythopoetic faculty 

 could have free swing. 



We teach and we preach that God is in every- 

 thing from the lowest to the highest, and that all 

 things are possible with him, and yet practically 

 we deny that he is in the brute, and that it is pos- 

 sible man should have had his origin there. 



I long ago convinced myself that whatever is on 

 the earth and shares its life is of the earth, and, in 

 some way not open to me, came out of the earth, 

 the highest not less than the humblest creature at 

 our feet. I like to think of the old weather-worn 

 globe as the mother of us all. I like to think of 

 the ground underfoot as plastic and responsive to 

 the creative energy, vitally related to the great cos- 

 mic forces, a red corpuscle in the life current of 

 the Eternal, and that man, with all his high-fly- 

 ing dreams and aspirations, his arts, his bibles, his 

 religions, his literatures, his philosophies — heroes, 

 saints, martyrs, sages, poets, prophets — all lay 

 folded there in the fiery mist out of which the planet 

 came. I love to make Whitman's great lines my 

 own: — 



"I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an endorser of 



things to be. 

 My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs, 

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