modern form of the ancient Baal-worship. It will
in some respects be a superior cult to its ancient prototype. Its
devotees will not cut themselves with knives. They will cut themselves
with sweet and bitter poignancies of laughter and tears, when the sun
shines upon wet forests in the green earth. This, too, is Baal-worship,
hardly distinguishable in essence from that cruder devotion to the
fructifying and terrifying powers of nature against which the prophets
of Israel made their war. In much that Fiona Macleod has written we feel
the spirit struggling like Samson against its bonds of green withes,
though by no means always able to break them as he did; or lying down in
an earth-bound stupor, content with the world that nature produces and
sustains. Here, among the elemental roots of things, when the heart is
satisfying itself with the passionate life of nature, the red flower
grows in the green life, and the imperative of passion becomes the final
law.

On the other hand, a child of nature may remember that he is also a
child of the spirit; and, even in the Vale Perilous, the spirit may be
an instinctive and faithful guide. Because we love the woods we need not
worship the sacred mistletoe. Because we listen to the sea we need not
reject greater and more intelligible voices of the Word of Life. And the
mention of the sea, and the memory of all that it has meant in Fiona
Macleod's writing, reminds us strangely of that old text, "Born of water
and of the Spirit." While man lives upon the sea-girt earth, the voices
of the ocean, that seem to come from the depths of its green heart, will
always call to him, reminding him of the mysterious powers and the
terrible beauties among which his life is cradled. Yet there are deeper
secrets which the spirit of man may learn--secrets that will still be
told when the day of earth is over, when the sea has ceased from her
swinging, and the earth-spirit has fled for ever. It is well that a man
should remember this, and remain a spiritual man in spite of every form
of seductive paganism.

Sharp has said in his _Green Fire_:--

"There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all,
through (not bestiality, for the brute world is clean and sane)
perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces
humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions
of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are
subject; the sole law