enter the whole inheritance
of sonship, and taste the fullness of joy? Reality which thought and
word cannot convey is bodied forth to us in music and in natural
beauty. Music is the deepest voice of humanity, and beauty is the
answering smile of God. When the poet-philosopher has crowded into
verse all that he can express of life's meaning,--of the subservience
of evil to good, the "deep love lying under these pictures of
time,"--he invokes at the last the very look of earth and sea and sky
as the best answer:--

"Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted, into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave;
She stood Monadnoc's head.

"Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame,
'Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am.'"

Yet is the chief exercise of our life through relation with our
fellow-lives. If the sublime joy of nature's companionship could be
made constant, at the price of isolation from our kind, the price were
a thousand-fold too great. And it is through true and sympathetic
relation with other lives that we chiefly come into conscious harmony
with the universe. It is in a right interplay with mankind that we get
closest to the heart of things.

"God is love." So I am told: how shall I interpret it in my
experience? Is it a proposition to be believed about some being
throned above my sight? If I exercise my mind in that direction, if I
weigh and balance and sift the intellectual evidence, I may toil to a
doubtful conclusion. But let me, issuing forth from my ponderings, put
myself into kindly relations with my fellow beings,--let me so much as
pat affectionately the head of the honest dog who meets me on the
street,--and a thrill like the warmth of spring touches my chilled
intellect. Let me, for a day only, make each human contact, though but
of a passing moment, a true recognition of some other soul, and I feel
myself somehow in right relation with the world. "He that loveth
knoweth God, and is born of God."

At the heart of all love is an instinct of reciprocity. It may or may
not get a return from its immediate object, but somehow it opens the
fountains of the universe. The heart that loves finds itself, it
scarce knows how, beloved.

Such, then, is the process, and such the revelation. The first step,