d to human needs. Our religious sense demands not
only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to
our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he
bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of
Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and
through,--that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of
man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of
him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at
sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of
Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances
of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the
earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate
wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright
luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of
Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze;
and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their
order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate
Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and
all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend
and in whom they rest.

And I recalled the passage:

"Frate, la nostra volonta quieta
Virtu di carita, che fa volerne
Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta.

Se disiassimo esser piu superne,
Foran discordi gli nostri disiri
Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;

Che vedrai non capere in questi giri,
S'essere in caritate e qui necesse,
E se la sua natura ben rimiri;

Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alia divina voglia,
Perch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Si che, come noi siam di soglia in soglia
Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace,
Com'allo re, che in suo voler ne invoglia.

E la sua volontade e nostra pace:
Ella e quel mare al qual tutto si muove
Cio ch' ella crea o che natura face."[3]

And then, with a leap, I was back to what we call reality--to the
clicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago and Pittsburg and
New York. In all this continent, I thought, in all the western world,
there is not a human soul whose will seeks any peace at all, least of
all the peace of God. All move, but a