50 THE LIGHT OF DAT 



Goethe, as lately quoted by Matthew Arnold, said 

 those who have science and art have religion ; and 

 added, let those who have not science and art have 

 religion, that is, let them have the popular faith ; 

 let them have this escape, because the others are 

 closed to them. Without any hold upon the ideal, 

 or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, 

 the people turn from the tedium and the grossness 

 and prosiness of daily life, to look for the divine, 

 the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the miracu- 

 lous, and in that which baffles reason. The disci- 

 ples of Jesus thought of the kingdom of heaven as 

 some external condition of splendor and pomp and 

 power which was to be ushered in by hosts of trum- 

 peting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, 

 riding upon the clouds, and not for one moment 

 as the still small voice within them. To find the 

 divine and the helpful in the mean and familiar, 

 to find religion without the aid of any supernatural 

 machinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in 

 and through the life that now is — in short, to see 

 the rude, prosy earth as a star in the heavens, like 

 the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the 

 hardest to learn. 



But we must learn it sooner or later. There 

 surely comes a time when the mind perceives that 

 this world is the work of God also and not of devils, 

 and that in the order of nature we may behold the 

 ways of the Eternal ; in fact, that God is here and 

 now in the humblest and most familiar fact, as sleep- 

 less and active as ever he was in old Judea. This 



