tive, the imagination against
literalism, the creative spirit in man against the machine in him.

Here, then, is the difference between the naturalist's and the
religionist's attitude toward Nature. The believer judges Nature, well
aware of the gulf between himself and her, hating with inexpressible
depth of indignation and repudiating with profound contempt the
sybarite's identification of human and natural law. But also he comes
back to her, not to accept in wonder her variable outward form, but to
worship in awe before her invariable inner meaning. Sometimes, like
so many of the humanists, he rises only to a vague sense of the mystic
unity that fills up the interspaces of the world, and cries with
Wordsworth:

"... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."[24]

Sometimes he dares to personalize this ultimate and then ascends to
the supreme poetry of the religious experience and feels the cosmic
consciousness, the eternal "I" of this strange world, which fills it
with observant majesty. And then he chants,

"The heavens declare the glory of God,
The firmament showeth his handiwork."

Or he whispers,

"Whither shall I go from Thy spirit,
Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there,
If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there,
If I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth,
Even there shall Thy hand lead me
And Thy right hand shall hold me."[25]

Indeed, the devout religionist almost never thinks of nature as such.
She is always the bush which flames and is not consumed. Therefore he
walks softly all his days, conscious that God is near.

"Of old," he says, "Thou hast laid the foundations of the earth;
And the heavens are the work of Thy hands.
They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure;
Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment;
As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed;
But Thou art the same,
And Thy years shall have no end."[26]

To him nature is the glass through which he sees darkly and often with
a darkling min