mes it is repressed by an irreligious
asceticism or narrowed and stunted by a literal and external faith.
But when the religious man is left free, it is appropriate to his
genius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure crowded with
sound, color, fragrance, form, in which he takes exquisite delight.
There is, in short, a serene and poetic naturalism, loosely called
"nature-worship," which is keenly felt by both saints and sinners.
All it needs for its consecration and perfection is to help men to
see that this naturalism is vital and precious because, as a matter
of fact, it is something more than naturalism, and more than pleasure
objectified.

Recall, for instance, the splendors of the external world and that
best season of our climate, the long, slow-breathing autumn. What
high pleasure we take in those hushed days of mid-November in the
soft brown turf of the uplands, the fragrant smell of mellow earth and
burning leaves, the purple haze that dims and magnifies the quiescent
hills. Who is not strangely moved by that profound and brooding peace
into which Nature then gathers up the multitudinous strivings, the
myriad activities of her life? Who does not love to lie, in those
slow-waning days upon the sands which hold within their golden cup the
murmuring and dreaming sea? The very amplitude of the natural world,
its far-flung grace and loveliness, spread out in rolling moor and
winding stream and stately forest marching up the mountain-side,
subdues and elevates the spirit of a man.

Now, so it has always been and so men have always longed to be the
worshipers of beauty. Therefore they have believed in a conscious and
eternal Spirit behind it. Because again we know that personality is
the only thing we have of absolute worth. A man cannot, therefore,
worship beauty, wholly relinquish himself to its high delights, if he
conceives of this majestic grace as impersonal and inanimate. For that
which we worship must be greater than we. Behind it, therefore, just
because it seems to us so beautiful, must be something that calls to
the hidden deeps of the soul, something intimately akin to our own
spirits. So man worships not nature, but the God of nature; senses an
Eternal Presence behind all gracious form. For that interprets beauty
and consecrates the spell of beauty over us. This gives a final
meaning to what the soul perceives is an utter loveliness. This gives
to beauty an eternal and cosmic significance comme