ness of the Divinity that overwhelms us. Suppose a man,
simple-hearted and imaginative, who, in a distant country, has read of
America, and has fashioned her in his thoughts as a heroic female
figure,--a kind of goddess. He has taken as literal reality such poetic
descriptions as those in Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and Emerson's
"Boston Hymn,"--

"Lo! I uncover the land
Which I hid of old time in the West,
As a sculptor uncovers the statue
When he has wrought his best."

And he comes to you and says, "Show me America!" And you show him a
little of this country, its mountains and lakes and rivers, its shops and
farms and people. He is interested and gratified. Yet this is not what
he expected; and he says, "But show me America,--that radiant, heroic
form, that goddess to charm the eyes and the heart." And you tell him:
"But America is too great to be taken in so, at a glance. You have just
begun to see it. You have seen New England's hill-farms, but you have
not seen the prairies of the West. You have seen the Penobscot and
Kennebec, the Connecticut and Hudson; but you have yet to see the
Mississippi and Niagara. I have taken you to Katahdin and Monadnock and
Mount Washington, but you have yet to behold the Alleghanies and the
Rockies and Tacoma. Our people you have just begun to see: our armies of
free toilers, our happy households, our strong men and lovely
women,--these you are only beginning to know." And he says, perhaps: "But
all this is so diffuse, so various, so difficult to comprehend! I had
fancied _America_ as some one beautiful, some one to love. How can one
love such a scattered, immense, diversified thing as this you describe to
me?" Well, you tell him: "You may not understand it yet awhile; but this
country which you say is not a thing to love was in peril of its life a
few years ago, and it was so loved that men by hundreds of thousands left
home, and risked life and all for it, and their mothers and wives and
sisters sent them forth. That is how America can be loved!"

In some such fashion as this do we grope after a God whom we can
comprehend at a glance; and, lo! his presence fills the universe. "Say
not, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down, or who shall descend
into hell to bring him up? for he is nigh thee, before thy eyes and in
thy heart."

The chief revelation we need is the education of our own perceptive
powers. Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a