THE DIVINE SOIL 



precious stones come out of the ground; they do 

 not drop upon us from the stars, and our highest 

 thoughts are in some way a transformation or a 

 transmutation of the food we eat. The mean is the 

 divine if we make it so. The child surely learns 

 that its father and mother are the Santa Claus that 

 brought the gifts, though the discovery may bring 

 pain; and the man learns to see providence in the 

 great universal forces of nature, in the winds and 

 the rain, in the soil underfoot and in the cloud over- 

 head. What these forces in their orderly rounds 

 do not bring him, he does not expect. The farmer 

 hangs up his stocking in the way of empty bins and 

 bams, and he knows well who or what must fill 

 them. The Santa Claus of the merchant, the manu- 

 facturer, the inventor, is the forces and conditions all 

 about us in every-day operation. When the light- 

 ning strikes your building or the trees on your lawn, 

 you are at least reminded that you do not live in 

 a corner outside of Jove's dominions, you are in 

 the circuit of the great forces. If you are eligible 

 to bad fortune where you stand, you are equally 

 eligible to good fortune there. The young man 

 who went West did well, but the young man who had 

 the Western spirit and stayed at home did equally 

 well. To evoke a spark of fire out of a flint with a 

 bit of steel is the same thing as evoking beautiful 

 thoughts from homely facts. How hard it is for us 

 to see the heroic in an act of our neighbor! 

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