president’s address. 
499 
to imagine a time when men had no eyes for the landscape, and 
yet, he adds, that is is a notable fact that Petrarch was the first 
man of his period to show any interest in that great vision which 
a lofty mountain opens, and which has for ithe men of today a 
delight so poignant as to be almost painful. After relating the 
incident upon which this statement is founded he goes on to re- 
mark in a paragraph which we all here will appreciate : 
“The redemption of nature from the shadow of sin which, 
to the mediaeval mind, rested upon and darkened it, has been very 
slowly accomplished ; but the poets, the naturalists, and the 
scientists have taught us much, and our hearts have taught us 
more. Nature has become not only an inexhaustible delight, a 
constant and fascinating friend, but the most vital and intimate 
of teachers ; in fact, it is from the study of nature, in one form or 
another, that much of the advance in educational efficiency has 
come ; not the improvements in method, but the freshening and 
deepening of the educational aim and spirit. Nature, through the 
discoveries of science, has restored balance to the mind, and 
sanity to the spirit of men by 'Correcting the false perspective of 
abstract thinking, by flooding the deepest questions with new 
light, by bringing into -activity a set of faculties almost disused, 
and by adding immeasurably to the resources of the human spirit. 
In the Middle Ages attention was concentrated upon the soul, and 
men learned much from the eager and passionate self-questioning ; 
but it was a very inadequate and distorted view of life which they 
reached, because one of the great sources of revelation was left 
untouched. In modern times the world of nature has been 
searched with tireless patience, great truths relating to man’s 
place in the sublime movement of the universe have come to light, 
and the distorted vision of the inward world has been corrected 
by the clear vision of the outward world. The study of nature 
has yielded a new conception of the nature of the divine will ex- 
pressed through law, of the divine design interpreted by the order 
and progress of the phenomena of the physical universe, of the 
marvellous beauty of the divine mind which Tennyson was think- 
ing of when, looking long and steadfastly into the depths of a 
slow-moving stream, he cried out in awe and wonder, AVhat an 
imagination God has.’ ” 
Men are saner, healthier, wiser, since they began to find God 
