THE DIVINE SOIL 



It is in a line with the whole revelation of science, 

 so far — the getting rid of the miraculous, the un- 

 knowable, the transcendental, and the enhancing 

 of the potency and the mystery of things near at 

 hand that we have always known in other forms. 

 It is at first an unpalatable truth, like the discov- 

 ery of the animal origin of man, or that conscious- 

 ness and all our fine thoughts and aspirations are 

 the result of molecular action in the brain ; or like 

 the experience of the child when it discovers that 

 its father or mother is the Santa Claus that filled 

 its stockings. Science is constantly bringing us 

 back to earth and to the ground underfoot. Our 

 dream of something far off, supernatural, van- 

 ishes. We lose the God of a far-off heaven, and find 

 a God in the common, the near, always present, 

 always active, always creating the world anew. 

 Science thus corrects our delusions and vague super- 

 stitions, and brings us back near home for the key 

 we had sought afar. We shall probably be brought, 

 sooner or later, to accept another unpalatable 

 theory, that of the physical origin of the soul, that 

 it is not of celestial birth except as the celestial 

 and terrestrial are one. This is really only taking 

 our religious teachers at their word, that God is 

 here, as constant and as active in the commonest 

 substance we know as in the highest heaven. Science 

 finds the beginning of something like conscious 

 intelligence in the first unicellular life, the first pro- 



