have an analogous effect. The first and last lesson of religion
is: "The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen
are eternal."

_VII.--THE SPIRIT BEHIND NATURE_

The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands
with bended head and hands folded on the breast. The happiest man is he
who learns from Nature the lesson of worship. Of that ineffable essence
we call spirit, he that thinks most will say least. We can foresee God
in the coarse, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try
to define and describe Himself, both language and thought desert us, and
we are as helpless as fools and savages. The noblest ministry of Nature
is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the
universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to bring back the
individual to it.

I conclude this essay with some traditions of man and Nature which a
certain poet sang to me.

The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. And the element
of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events,
the oldest chronologies are young and recent. A man is a god in ruins.
When men are innocent, life shall be longer and shall pass into the
immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Infancy is the perpetual
Messiah which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to
return to paradise. The problem of restoring to the world the original
and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin
that we see when we look at Nature is in our own eye. Man cannot be a
naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as
much its demand as perception. When a faithful thinker shall kindle
science with the fire of the holiest affection, then will God go forth
anew into the creation.

Nature is not fixed, but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The
immobility, or bruteness, of Nature is the absence of spirit. Every
spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond
its world a heaven. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam
had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house
heaven and earth; Caesar called his house Rome; you, perhaps, call yours
a cobbler's trade, a hundred acres of ploughed land, or a scholar's
garret. Yet, line for line, and point for point, your dominion is as
great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own
world. As