and the fellowship is born of likenesses and identities. Dissonance of essential being would be estrangement. The elements of all human ideas are in objects everywhere. Real knowledge is consonant with the real idea in nature. The human and his surroundings are one. If an inner and an outer unlikeness existed there could be no understanding, no research, no intimacy. A simple walk in the open fields would confuse and blur the mental powers. The lover of the out-of-doors could not wander in the meadows and thickets and gulches with such keen delight unless he found there a sanity and an order which made itself to him a source of mental burnishing, worthy also of his mettle, a challenge to his highest capacities.

Creation demands some theory of intelligence. "We have come pretty widely to discredit the idea that the presence of law in nature does away with the need of mind." (Downey.) "No dead mechanism moves the stars, or lifts the tides, or calls the flowers from their sleep." (Mabie.) "The human mind in every age has spontaneously and instinctively recognized the existence of an invisible presence and power pervading nature." (Cocker.) Doctor Cocker, in the above sentence, evidently means the divine presence and power.

In these pages thus far we do not mean that. We make a distinction with a difference. The fear of the worship of nature is born of superficial thinking. A child may walk, entranced, in a garden of flowers, without having to give any theological account of itself. A baby in long clothes may roll over in the grass and pluck a bluebell for its mouth without becoming a pantheist. Nature is not God. Cosmic mind is not God. The human mind is not God. We say God is immanent in all things; how, we do not know. What God is we do not know. The human understanding is impotent before the idea. Those who dare it are very ignorant. Does a little child, in its mother's arms, know what the mother is? It knows enough to snuggle. We know what God is to us-and that is the truth. We were born with the inward assent to a First Cause, which is the ground of unity.

We belong to an intelligent order, and the cause of it must be intelligent. We approach God by way of all that the universe is. We have become acquainted with a moral order, and we may know that God is good. We have become aware of a beneficence like that of a parent to a child-and we call God our Father. We have

seen that an orderly scheme is in harmony with the kind of intelligence which makes room for special messages in the divine administration of this world.

If the base of things is spirit, then our most familiar experience is its tendency to incarnate itself. We can then see how that the incarnation of a special message might be a cosmic necessity. We know the passion of the Christ on the cross to be a master note of creation, and positively redemptive everywhere. All this, God is to us, and more. The Great Book itself refuses detachment from nature's doings.

"Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together. Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof. Let the sun and moon praise Him, and all the stars of light. Fire and hail: snow and vapors: stormy wind fulfilling His word: mountains and all hills: fruitful trees, and all cedars: beasts, and all cattle: creeping things, and flying fowl: both young men and maidens: old men and children-let them praise the name of the Lord."

CHAPTER VIII.

PLEASURE AND PAIN.

Has Nature an Ethic?

ANY theory of reality must meet finally the question of moral values. Experience consists in more than a direct cognition of physical states and their supra-material manifestations. General knowledge never reaches its final acquisitions until it has included the consideration of what ought and what ought not to be. The ultimate rational appeal is ethical. We can establish no moral relations with nature unless it has an ethic of its own. Has nature, then, any good intent, or is it mere weather? Is it possible to translate the common natural forces with which we have to do into terms of well-meaning and beneficence on the part of the power which runs things? Weeds and flowers grow on the same hillock. Song birds and vipers live in the same thicket. Microbes and deadly diseases lurk in the richest foods. Cold freezes. Fire burns. Death approaches with any careless moment. Those of wholesome life are often struck with loathsome and fatal maladies.

What a crazy-patch nature appears to be, with its freaks and extravagances, its strifes and confusions. The hideous, the frolicsome, the gaudy, the comic, the profitless, the condemnatory—all these exist. Many forms of life answer neither the demands of utility or beauty, and others are like wild colts, broken from an enclosure, to engage in mischief and depredation. Abhorrent malformations appear-six-footed quadrupeds, animals with two heads. Siamese twins, isolated females producing offspring. Is the system rational then? Well, the mad-houses are full of human beings; so are the penitentiaries. Man is either guilty, or he is the subject of all the features here named. Is he rational then? We are inclined to say he is rational nevertheless. Rationality has its obverse side. And that principle applies to the limits of all things.

Is Life Illogical?

Can this world's life of antagonism and conflict justify itself from an intellectual standpoint? Is it able to meet the demands of the scientific understanding?

We get pretty well knocked about in this world by the time we are through with it. We writhe and twist under the jolt of things. About