200 THE HUMAN SIDE OF PLANTS 
radiates the inspiration to happiness and sweetness 
and goodness must be the universal spirit, the spirit 
of God. The inspiration from the beautiful flower 
must be from the spirituality of the flower, from 
the degree of the universal spirit in the flower. 
“All life,” writes Thomas Gentry, “like all love, 
is divine. There can nothing exist that does not 
contain some sort of development of soul.” 
In ancient literature are many instances of races 
worshipping and making obeisance to trees, plants, 
and their flowers. In this “plant worship” is one 
of the greatest and most important tributes to the 
spirituality of plants. The tree-worshipper and the 
flower-worshipper were but acceding to the demand 
from within, the desire of their souls to commune 
with the universal spirit, the spirit of the Creator, 
of God, as it appeared to them in the living plants. 
And this is the appeal of the beautiful flower, 
the delicate plant, the soft-shaded leaf, the sighing 
tree. Back of the beauty and the sweetness is a 
deep, underlying consciousness, a spirituality of the 
all-permeating universal spirit, of which this beauty 
and this sweetness are the means of expression. 
The appeal is of the plant-spirituality through the 
senses to the soul of men; it is a commingling, a 
blending, of members of the universal spirit. 
And here, in this membership in the universal 
