ersal, this Duty? What is the criterion? And what, when we have
chosen, is the sanction of our choice?

"A number of honest people will promptly refer us to revealed religion.
'Take (they say) your revealed religion on faith, and there you have the
law and the prophets, and your universals set out for you, and your
principles of conduct laid down. What more do you want?'

"To this I answer, 'We are human, and we need also the testimony of
Poetry; and the priceless value of poetry for us lies in this, that it
does _not_ echo the Gospel like a parrot. If it did, it would be servile,
superfluous. It is ministerial and useful because it approaches truth by
another path. It does not say ditto to Mr. Burke--it corroborates. And
it corroborates precisely because it does not say ditto, but employs a
natural process of its own which it employed before ever Christianity was
revealed. You may decide that religion is enough for you, and that you
have no need of poetry; but if you have any intelligent need of poetry it
will be because poetry, though it end in the same conclusions, reaches
them by another and separate path.

"Now (as I understand him) Mr. Meredith connects man with the Universal,
and teaches him to arrive at it and recognise it by strongly reminding him
that he is a child of Earth. 'You are amenable,' he says in effect, 'to a
law which all the firmament obeys. But in all that firmament you are tied
to one planet, which we call Earth. If therefore you would apprehend the
law, study your mother, Earth, which also obeys it. Search out her
operations; honour your mother as legitimate children, and let your honour
be the highest you can pay--that of making yourself docile to her
teaching. So will you stand the best chance, the only likely chance, of
living in harmony with that Will which over-arches Earth and us all.'

"In this doctrine Mr. Meredith believes passionately; so let there
be no mistake about the thoroughness with which he preaches it.
Even prayer, he tells us in one of his novels, is most useful when like a
fountain it falls back and draws refreshment from earth for a new spring
heavenward:--

"'And there vitality, there, there solely in song
Besides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs,
Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it strong,
The Master said: and the studious eye that reads,
(Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the mount),