ing reverence. This "divinity that shapes our ends"
may be variously conceived. It may be an intimately realized
personal God, "Our Father which art in Heaven." It
may be such an abstract conception as the Laws of Nature or
Scientific Law, such a religion as is expounded by the
Transcendentalists, in particular by Emerson:

These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of
space, and not subject to circumstance: thus in the soul of man there
is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.... If a man is
at heart just, then, in so far is he God; the safety of God, the
immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with
justice.... For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is
differently named, love, justice, temperance, in its different applications,
just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which
it washes.... The perception of this law awakens in the mind a
sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes
our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to
command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world.
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the
stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable.[1]

[Footnote 1: Emerson: _Miscellanies_, quoted by James in
_Varieties_, pp. 32-33.]

It may be conceived as Nature itself, as it was by Spinoza,
for whom Nature was identical with God. It may be the
World-Soul which Shelley sings with such rapture:

"That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining love,
Which through the web of being, blindly wove,
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst--now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."[1]

[Footnote 1: From _Adonais_.]

In all these conceptions it still seems to be a hushed sense of
reverential relationship to the divine power that most specifically
constitutes the religious experience. The latter exhibits
certain recurrent elements, any of which may be present
in a more intense degree in some individuals than in others,
but all of which appear in some degree in most of the phenomena
of personal life that we call religious.

"THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN." In the first place ma