ectual process to create a religious sentiment in
ourselves. We inherit that sentiment. It is like the sense of purity
or of beauty,--beyond demonstration, except the demonstration of
experience. We need only to supply the right conditions for its
education and application.

The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certain
institutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny of
the past. We have virtually escaped that tyranny. Now, in the
atmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it proves
deeper and fairer than ever before.

V

DAILY BREAD

When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found
that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous
phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition
of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held
that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the
ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar. Lyell took
up the question by the near and homely end. He patiently watched the
workings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer and
winter, in the fields about his own house. He learned there what these
familiar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and in
them he found the clew to the story of the past aeons. Right about his
doorstep were the magicians that had done it all.

That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe. We
are not to soar up into infinity to find God. The only air that will
support our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet.
Let us look for a divine significance in homely things.

Here is Goodness. It is right about us, in people whom we know and meet
every day, plainly visible to eyes that know how to see it. Here are all
its forms. Innocence,--the very image of it looks upon you from many a
child's face. Courage, firmness, self-control,--you may read them in the
lines of many a manly countenance. Purity,--who has not felt its
hallowing regard fall upon him from the eyes of maid and matron? Pity,
tenderness, sympathy,--these angels move about us in human forms, and he
that hath eyes to see them sees.

Fineness of character must be recognized by sympathetic observation.
There must be the watchful attentiveness, like that of the sculptor
studying his subject, the hunter tracking his prey. And there must b