aching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us,
for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the
ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical
religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion
which recognizes humility and poverty and suffering as divine.

"To which of these religions do you specially adhere?" inquired
Wilhelm.

"To all the three," replied the sages; "for in their union they produce
what may properly be called the true Religion. Out of those three
Reverences springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself."

An admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, no doubt, than the old symbols
which Carlyle had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but less vague,
in turn, than that doctrine of reverence for the Oversoul, which was
soon to be taught at Concord.

As one meditates upon the idealism of the first colonists in America,
one is tempted to ask what their "reverences" were. Toward what
tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes instinctively turn?

For New England, at least, the answer is relatively simple. One form
of it is contained in John Adams's well-known prescription for
Virginia, as recorded in his _Diary_ for July 21, 1786. "Major
Langbourne dined with us again. He was lamenting the difference of
character between Virginia and New England. I offered to give him a
receipt for making a New England in Virginia. He desired it; and I
recommended to him town-meetings, training-days, town-schools, and
ministers."

The "ministers," it will be noticed, come last on the Adams list. But
the order of precedence is unimportant.

Here are four symbols, or, if you like, "reverences." Might not the
Virginia planters, loyal to their own specific symbol of the
"gentleman,"--no unworthy ideal, surely; one that had been glorified in
European literature ever since Castiligione wrote his _Courtier_, and
one that had been transplanted from England to Virginia as soon as Sir
Walter Raleigh's men set foot on the soil which took its name from the
Virgin Queen,--might not the Virginia gentlemen have pondered to their
profit over the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts commoner? No
doubt; and yet how much picturesqueness and nobility--and tragedy,
too--we should have missed, if our history had not been full of these
varying symbols, clashing ideals, different Reverences!

One Reverence, at least, was common to the Englishman of V